Sun

It's official : Solaris 10 has been released. You can download Solaris10 for free, given that you only need an evaluation license. Time to install this on my Enterprise 3000 server at home, and this time I will be using my Linux laptop as a Jumpstart server, so other partitions will survive the upgrade.

Do you want some other Open Source programs installed on your Solaris ? Well you could install packages from Blastwave.org, but you could also use NetBSD's pkgsrc, which already provides 5,300 packages ready to build on Solaris. Install pkgsrc, 'make install' your desired package, and enjoy !

Some weeks ago, Sun released testbuild 72 of their Sun Solaris Express program, basically a testversion of Solaris 10. I hoped to be able to upgrade my previous build (b69), but the upgrade program bailed out with an error saying that it needed 6 GB diskspace to upgrade the machine, more than was available on the disk. So I had no other choice than reinstalling Solaris 10, and as the installation program is really braindead, I had to repartition my disk again. The installation program simply isn't able to keep the existing disklayout.

C'mon Sun, I know that 99% of Solaris installs happen by Jumpstart, but this could really better, no ? I tried to install my Linux laptop as a Solaris Jumpstart server, but encountered too many problems with the setup_install_server script.

Well, they are *test*builds after all, aren't they ?

[root@caradhras] # metadb -a -f -c2 c0t0d0s7 c0t1d0s7

Assertion failed: partno vtoc.nparts, file ../common/meta_nameinfo.c, line 628
metadb: Abort
Abort (core dumped)

There seems to be some issues with Disksuite in Solaris 10 Express, which are solved in testbuild s10_70, but not yet incorporate into the latest download version (s10_69). What's worse, is that ZFS isn't included yet (or will never be) in the Solaris 10 Express downloads.

Sun has a great overview on their sunsolve site about their currently available and supported servers. Speaking of which, I have seen a great bargain on a secondhand Enterprise 5500 server, which would look great in my living room ;)

I have finally found some time to install my new Sun Enterprise 3000 server, now hostnamed Caradhras. It has been installed with Solaris 10 (s10_63), and a 5 GB sized partition has been dedicated to Debian. The config of the dualboot between Solaris and Debian wasn't very easy. I finally choose the following path :

1. Install Solaris (root partition on slice 0), and dedicate 2 partitions for Linux.
2. Let Solaris install its bootblock and update the nvram.
3. Install Linux/Debian and let it install Silo over the Solaris bootblock in slice 0
4. When in command line, run ''silo -t'' to install the Silo bootblock on the same partition as your Linux root.
5. Finally, boot from the Solaris cdrom and install the Solaris bootblock again on slice 0 :

installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0

That way, the machine boots into its bootprompt, and with ''boot disk:g'' (if you installed Linux on /dev/sda7) you can boot into Silo.

Sun has put up a page with more information about Linux/Solaris dualboot setups.

Blastwave has a nice introduction about Solaris zones. I would very like to see a comparison between zones, good old chroots and something like Linux Virtual Server, or User-Mode-Linux, each compared with their benefits and disavantages.

I attended a Solaris10 demo at Sun's headquarters in Brussels, and I must say that I was fairly impressed. I already knew that the new Solaris10 stuff was interesting, but ZFS and DTrace are really cool stuff.

So I decided to download the Solaris10 beta, available through the Solaris Express program, and see how it would react if I threw it in a VMware session. To install Solaris10 beta, you need the last VMware 4.5 workstation version, as it has experimental Solaris10 support. A lower version will bail out with a strange monitor error after the installation of the first CD (been there, done that). VMware has an interesting page about Solaris10 with installation tips to follow closely.

So now I have a Solaris10 running nicely inside VMware. Finally time to play around with DTrace. Nice to see that Sun has also included some GNU utilities like openSSH, but there are still many missing (where's my Vim ?).

I've read a few articles about Sun's new powertool called DTrace, and I must admit that I'm eager to get my hands on a Solaris10 to test this out. Some Linux developers have the same desire to see this implemented on Linux. Karim Yaghmour claims that DProbes and LTT gives you anything DTrace has, but RedHat developer Daniel Berrange has posted a comparison of DTrace and DProbes/LTT which gives DTrace the advantage.

Ace's hardware has an article about the new stuff in Solaris 10. Some interesting stuff, but at first sight, not much exciting features. Or maybe it's because the details are too sketchy yet. Dtrace, though, looks like truss on steroids.

I have released Padre 0.3.1. It contains a small fix where the patchlevel is also shown in the resulting dependency tree.