Solaris 11

If you haven’t used Vagrant then go check it out. It’s certainly come a long way since the early days and expanded beyond just VirtualBox. Targeted early at developers its certainly a tool that has different uses to different folk, as a system admin I find it handy to test and build SOE’s, deployment scripts and an assortment of sandbox stuff. There are countless base box’s available on line if your are not inclined/interested in building your own. There is however not a lot of Solaris base boxes about , mostly I’d guess due to distribution restrictions, or lack of demand. I’ve experimented with veewee and bento but packer the new kid on the block seems to fit the bill. Since there is no shortage of info on building Linux base boxes I decided if I was going to kick the tires on packer then I’d make it useful and build a Solaris 11 base box. ...

A recent post Solaris Packages for Puppet 3.0.0-rc7, Facter 1.6.0 and Hiera 1.0.0 on a puppet mailing list caught my eye. While gems has a nifty little package management system of it’s own, it is possible be that your machines do not have direct access to the interent so having a local IPS repo is handy. I’ll demonstrate how to add these packages to you own repository. This assumes you have already setup your own local repo. ...

Solaris 11 repo setup but you want to have your own repo serving up own home grown packages, separate from your main Solaris 11 image repository. Actually I’d like an extra two repo’s I want a dev repo that to test my packaging abilities and a “release” one when I’m ready to publish. Mostly becuase there doesn’t seem to be a straight forward way to remove packages from a repo and my packaging skills are work in progress. ...

Installing Ruby 1.9.3 and libyaml on Solaris 11Recent blog entries would indicate I’ve upgrade to Solaris 11 proper or Solaris 11/11 as it goes by. The upgrade was mostly driven by the fact I need to compile some software and figured I may as well have the most recent version rather than on the express edition. I’m looking into Vagrant at the moment as it might fit in with some of the automation bits I’m playing with. I’m not getting into Vagrant here just yet as there are a couple of steps I need to do to first to prep my Solaris 11 environment.For the “First cloud OS” Solaris 11 is distinctly lacking some items that you could almost say are essentials in todays cloud, Ruby. And I here the cries from the Oracle faithful we ship Ruby, Hmm Version 1.8 nearly 5 years old and only months away from EOL. I did attempt to install Vagrant with version 1.8 and gem just failed to meet the prerequisites by 0.0.1 if I recall. None the less I had committed to building a more recent version of Ruby that I’ll need for some other stuff in progress.So what do you need to build ruby 1.9.3-p125 on Solaris 11,a compiler obviously and I’m using the gcc 4.5.2 include in the Solaris 11 repo, and libyaml, otherwise we end by with this annoying message. ...

Solaris 11/11 has been out for some time I’ve been slow to move. Mostly the Solaris 11 express I run know works well and fits my needs so I have not need to upgrade. However I’m working on some side project and some software is going to need complied, that and I figured I need to keep my hand in so best move up to the current release. So should be pretty straight forward: ...

This exercise for me is to replace my current single disk rpool, the second disk was removed for another project, on to two slightly smaller disks. Doing so restores my root mirror but as the disks are slightly smaller some work is required. For reference my current root pool name is rpool, the current disk in this pool is c5t1d0, the first replacement disk is install at c5t0d0 and is empty. ...

First Video as part of a presentation MSOSUG in April 2011 showing how to create a Solaris 11 zone

Second Video as part of a presentation MSOSUG in April 2011 showing how to create a Solaris 10 branded container in Solaris 11

So I’ve been tracking the Solaris 11 Express Support repo updates for a while. I had issue today where I couldn’t make a network connection to my virtual box guests. They would ping but no ssh and no http connection. The later being important as my VB guest is running a local mirror repo. while I could connect to the guest from other machines on the network I could connect to them from the the machine hosting the guests. ...