Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

A nice picture of all the six cores on my OpenSolaris desktop being 100% occupied.

From Screenshots01

This is my new desktop and I stress tested the system over the weekend. Installed it with OpenSolaris 2009.06 version. Still need to patch it and install some software on that…

I had a few issues mounting a 1TB NTFS disk on OpenSolaris last week. After getting a few hints from one of the OpenSolaris support forums, I could get the issue fixed. All it needs is the FSWfsmisc and FSWpart to be installed on the box. The output of rmformat is very helpful to test the raw disk types, etc. The binaries installed as part of these FSW* packages like xlsmounts are very helpful.

One interesting observation is that the NTFS filesystem is mounted a little different on the local host.

root@agent007:~# xlsmounts
PHYSICAL DEVICE                 LOGICAL DEVICE      FS    PID         ADDR Mounted on
/dev/rdsk/c14t0d0p0            /dev/rdsk/c14t0d0p0    ntfs   5950  127.0.0.1:/ /mnt/test
root@agent007:~#

Need another weekend to drill down a bit into that…

Installed Solaris 2009.06 on my personal desktop over the weekend. The installation is nice and smooth. One caution for users who use multi-boot environments: you must backup the menu.lst before you install. Just in case you need to manually edit. Read here.

The base OS doesn’t come with many utilities that you would like to have (e.g. OpenOffice) and you need to install them with Package Manager. I think the package manager interface improved a lot over a period of time. As of now, I started download of another 200MB of utilities. Work in progress.

For those of you who want to try Open Solaris 2009.06 version, I can make live CDs for you. This saves you from the pain of downloading 700MB of image. Please leave a comment on the blog with your email id and/or phone number, with the number of CDs you want. You can pickup the CDs in the Ameerpet/Maitrivanam area in the evenings or during the weekends.

Note: You have to pay the media cost, Rs. 10/- per CD. I am not in a position to mass distribute for free. Also, note that these are home burned CDs.

Downloaded and created the live CD of Open Solaris 2009.06. On a AMD Dual core desktop with 2GB RAM and nVidia graphics card, the live CD booted with no hassles at all. The time took for commandline boot prompt is about 70 seconds and the GUI screen prompted in about 130 seconds.

All this is done in the middle of other work, so didn’t get enough chance to install/explore this version of Open Solaris. May be during one of these weekends…

Downloaded and installed 2008.11. This time, I used VMWare to install the image on my laptop. The laptop has 2GB RAM and OpenSolaris is given 512 MB RAM.

Experimented with different networking options like Host only, Bridged, etc. based on the network environment in which I am running this installation. Everything is working clean and fine. The full screen mode (of VMware server console) is the real workable mode for this installation. The VM boots real fast.

BTW, if you want to pick up a copy of the live CD OpenSolaris-2008-11 (and avoid 700MB download), please let me know by email. You can pickup a copy in the Ameerpet/Maitrivanam area, by paying for the media (Rs 10 per CD.)

Need: Use Solaris zones to test large number of connectivity hops. Installed OpenSolaris on a DELL Vostro laptop, but bitten by this bug. Had to revoke.

VMWare ESXi doesn’t detect the harddrive on this model. So  couldn’t install Solaris on top of ESX too. Now I need to think of other ways of having a solaris zones install.

This article enlists a few Unix good habits.

Sunay posted a new whitepaper on crossbow documents page. This is a good read. It discusses the key data structures, data flows and the overall architecture in a very concise way.

Look who is backing ZFS now. Apple announces ZFS on Mac OS X Leopard. Cool backing for a cool technology!