Virtualbox

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. ...

So part one finished up with a Virtualbox VM , two blank disk and the OEL CD image in the virtual CD drive. Fair warning I have taken some liberty with technical preciseness of handsfree, but it’s pretty close. If some knows how I can second commands to the guest from the host command line let me know, virt-install maybe. So this is straight forward and I have covered some of these techniques in other posts like Kickstart for Solaris Admins or my even older Grub menu reinstall. Startup the VB guest it should boot off your attached CD/DVD image. and the welcome screen press TAB key

Rather than wait until I have the whole thing polished I thought I’d do a multipart entry on building Oracle VM Manager VM and installing the software. Now the previous version 3.0.3 had a VirtualBox template available. The current version 3.1.1 doesn’t, at least not that I can find, so this is a kinda of roll your own template. Tools used for this job: Virtual Box 4.1.8 Oracle VM Manager ISO 3.1.1 OEL R6U1 ISO

Linux kickstart for Solaris Admin’sSo sometimes Solaris Admins need to turn their hand at another OS for various reasons, especial in this day and age of mass production of virtual environments. Solaris Admins will be well versed with jumpstart a tried and truly tested system of automated builds for over a decade now. While recently this system has been thrown out with the bath water for AI in Solaris 11 and while the jury is still out on that one that’s a conversation for another time. ...

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. ...

Inspired by the recent events of some ex NP MP’s siding with the ALP, I too have been inspired to move from my Opensolaris (RIP) desktop to Ubuntu.