There are *a lot* of really cheap Sun boxes on Ebay these days. We picked one up for our lab. Here are a few tips for newbies trying to bring up Solaris on a Sun Sparc box that might be useful. First off, go to sun.com and download the CD images of Solaris. If you […]
Bringing up Solaris
Solaris Companion CD
There is a free set of utilities for Solaris available here that provides many of the GNU tools and other free software for Solaris. If you don’t have a console you will need to make sure that the host you telnet in from is resolvable from your Solaris box (add the host to /etc/hosts or […]
Patching Solaris
Patches for Solaris are available here: Sun Recommended and Security Patches Even for old boxes, the patches are kept up to date and available. We have an old Enterprise 2 box that we run 2.5.1 on in our lab. For more info on this, see our Solaris articles. To show what patches are currently installed, […]
Updating the Flash PROM on Sun Ultra 2 Systems
We have a dualie 300 Mhz Sun Ultra 2 that couldn’t run 64 bit apps because the system firmware was so old. It turns out that not only does Sun have good documentation for this procedure, but that our system was even easier to upgrade than the documentation stated. Here are the details of our […]
Software RAID w/ Solaris
The Solaris Management Console (smc) comes with the Solaris 9 distribution, and allows you to configure your software RAID, among other things. We are running the console remotely, so to run smc on our workstation we have to run: # /usr/X11R6/bin/xhost +10.50.100.50 On the Sun box: # export DISPLAY=srv-1:0.0 # smc Of course, your IP […]
Bringing Up a Base GCC Compiler on Solaris 9
In this article we talked about the Solaris companion CD. The location for the Solaris 9 companion CD is here. Now, if you want to *just* compile software with GCC, the best place to go is sunfreeware. Grab the closest mirror. We found that this mirror works well in the US. To get enough software […]
Manually Mounting a CDROM on Solaris
We had trouble with a CD automatically mounting, so we had to dig in a bit to mount the CD manually. First we ascertained that the cd was on the same controller as the internal HDD, so listing the devices on controller 0. # ls /dev/dsk/c0* /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /dev/dsk/c0t10d0s6 /dev/dsk/c0t12d0s4 /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s2 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 /dev/dsk/c0t10d0s7 /dev/dsk/c0t12d0s5 /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s3 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 […]
Configuring IP address Manually on Solaris
We have an Ultra2 box that is hooked up to a serial console that screws up the format when trying to edit files. It is much easier to use an xterm session over the network, rather than rely on the configuration of our serial console/terminal. Anyway, since we were trying to edit files that set […]
Getting the Solaris Management Console to Run Remotely
We have a fresh install of Solaris 9 that we are administering. Agatha is a wuss, and wants to use the Solaris Management Console. To do this, we set up X forwarding via SSH. First, we need to change the default sshd config: # vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config Find this line and change it: X11Forwarding yes If […]
Adding Hard Disks to Older SPARC systems
On some older SPARC systems, like ours, if you add disks to the system, it won’t automatically detect the drives. For instance, we have added drives via a StorEdge external drive box. If we look at the output of dmesg: # dmesg | grep sd Dec 20 08:01:33 srv-50 scsi: [ID 193665 kern.info] sd0 at […]
Setting up an NFS Server on Solaris
Solaris 9 comes with an NFS server. The first step is to edit the /etc/dfs/dfstab file. We just added this entry: share -F nfs -o rw=srv-1 -d “share” /share Start the server: # /etc/init.d/nfs.server start On the client side: root@srv-1 u-1 # mount -t nfs srv-50:/share /share2 root@srv-1 u-1 # ls /share2 lost+found tmp root@srv-1 […]
Disabling Power Management on Solaris
We have a Sun box that displays “Saving system state… Please wait…” overnight. Well, this is the power management kicking in. Not happy with servers, so we need to disable this. The behavior of the power management service is set in /etc/power.conf. We can disable the automatic shutdown by editing this file. Change: autoshutdown 30 […]
Enabling SSH on a Minimal Solaris 10 Install
If you need to manage a Solaris 10 box with a minimal install, and SSH is not available, you can install it off of the 2nd CD. Rather than figure out the path to your CDROM (see this article), it was easier in our case to just tar up the needed packages and FTP them […]
