I always like to get this freebie when it comes out. I already had the CD’s of 2008.5 and 2008.11. Now I have 2009.6! I booted it up inside a VirtualBox and I am impressed so far. The stability of the Solaris kernel combined with the userland that you come to expect from Sun. I still feel that the tools around it need a bit of work. Then, one has to remember this isn’t Ubuntu.
Either way, if you haven’t asked for your free CD and are interested in trying out this quite nice OS to develop on, go grab the CD from the Open Solaris CD Order Form. It costs nothing, even the P&P is free.
I think the first thing to say is this post is not a slating of Joyent. They are an amazing company and I have never had a problem beyond little things like back end network routing and the like.
So, about two weeks ago, I raised a ticket:
We would like to shut down the accelerator mentioned above as it is surplus to our requirements.
So. The ticket referenced an accelerator with an ‘i’ in it. We got a nice reply that confirmed the request:
I’ve just set xxxxi to be closed on the 17th.
So that’s all good. I verify against my spreadsheets and ensure that it’s all correct. It is, so I think nothing of it. Until this morning! This morning xxxxl (obviously the x’s are censoring the exact numbers/letters) was turned off! Obviously, as we have a large amount of accelerators with Joyent, I picked up the Batphone and gave them a call.
The reply was:
xxxxi was shut down as requested in ticket xxxxx
But xxxxi was up. xxxxl was down. Nope they’d shut the wrong one down. I can imagine what happened. The ticket system is disjointed with the system that manages the accelerators. Somebody typo’d the entry of which one to shut down.
I guess I’ll find out more when it’s not 3am in the morning. Easier to discuss this stuff when people have had a good night’s sleep! Now to try and explain it all to the big boss man!
This is something that’s been bugging me for ages. I could not easily make pkgsrc bootstrap and compile packages under OpenSolaris. Today I cracked it:
- Grab the latest stable tarball and gtar xzf it somewhere sensible (under /usr is good).
-
pfexec pkg install SUNWgcc sunstudioexpress SUNWgmake
-
pfexec pkg install SUNWxwinc
-
pfexec pkg install SUNWcvs SUNWgnome-common-devel
-
su
-
cd /usr/pkgsrc/bootstrap
-
export PATH=/usr/ccs/bin:$PATH
-
./bootstrap
- <patience>
- Edit your .bash_profile to make sure /usr/pkg is in your path
And you’re done! Working a charm for me here.
Cool, I’ve got my VM up and running with OpenSolaris 2008.05 @ snv_95 in ESXi 3.5 U2 on my nice new server.
Now – to add more disks. I wanted to add 3 new hard disks to use RAID-Z. Obviously I would be using 3 physically seperate disks, but make vmdk’s on each of them. I wanted to do this without rebooting at all, and manged it. Here’s how:
- Create new DataStores in the VMware Infrastructure Manager.
- Add 3 new virtual hard disks to the VM, making sure they are all the same size but on 3 different data stores.
- Apply the changes
- SSH into the VM (or use the console… SSH is better)
-
pfexec devfsadm -c disk
-
pfexec zpool create <name here> raidz c4t1d0p0 c4t2d0p0 c4t3d0p0
Obviously device nodes might be different, those were what they were for me. Was very nice to be able to do this with zero downtime on the server itself.
Step 5 forces Solaris to reload the /dev structure in relation to disks. Means all the new /dev/rdsk and /dev/dsk nodes are created without the normal reboot. Step 6, obviously, is the creation of the zpool. Once you have that – go ahead and store lots of stuff!
