2007-06-23T13:54:04 Nexenta network setup: I'm yet another linux hacker who wants ZFS, and I'd rather run a solaris box than deal with a less-reliable zfs+linux setup.
Nexenta (or is it 'gnusolaris') is the obvious choice, since they claim to have gnu tools on a solaris kernel. Install is good enough, but you need like 512MB of ram just to boot. That ruled out several old boxes I had lying around.
The big surprise with nexenta is that it doesn't have the gnu tools! aptitude works, which is super, but ps/ls/whatever are the crummy bsd-style.
I fought with format and fdisk enough to make a half-disk partition, leaving the rest for my first zfs test. The curses menus for the installer are totally horrible, but once you stop hitting tab and downarrow when you think they would work, you can make it through. Unfortunately, I still have no idea what my zfs partition's volume name is.
I also lost a few evenings getting the network up. Here's what I wish I knew:
ifconfig doesn't 'up' a device just when you set the ip. The states seem to be 'plumbed', address-set, and 'up'. Here's how I was able to get my net up:
dmesg # look for the network device name # maybe plumb is automatic? ifconfig ni0 netmask 255.0.0.0 10.1.0.27 ifconfig ni0 up route add default 10.1.0.1 ping 10.1.0.1
But for network at boot time, I needed SMF's startup program (/lib/svc/method/net-physical) to work. It was complaining around line 226 which is where the contents of /etc/hostname.ni0 are used with ifconfig. I forgot to save that error output, but here's the svcs report (mostly for search bait):
% svcs -x svc:/network/physical:default svc:/network/physical:default (physical network interfaces) State: maintenance since Sat Jun 23 10:45:12 2007 Reason: Start method exited with $SMF_EXIT_ERR_CONFIG. See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-KS See: ifconfig(1M) See: /etc/svc/volatile/network-physical:default.log Impact: 10 dependent services are not running. (Use -v for list.)
While this page http://blogs.sun.com/wwwillem/entry/adding_a_network_card_solaris says to put the hostname in the /etc/hostname.ni0 file, I switched the contents to the address ("10.1.0.27") and then the service started working.
SMF (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2006/04/13/using-solaris-smf.html) looks really nice, but the error reporting from its shell scripts is as bad as any other shell errors. It seems like the various steps within the shell scripts could become SMF services themselves, and then we'd get a really nice report of what succeeded and where the failure was.
P.S. restructured text is a bad choice for blog entering because its hyperlink syntax is too hard to remember. And newsbruiser is a bad choice for blog software because it only comes with CGI mode, and because once you've entered some posts in restructured text, it's hard to change to html for new ones.
