Thermetics

Update: Some of the bugs in this post have been fixed, rendering a lot of the steps unnecessary. If you are running the latest version of Nexenta (3.0.1), you should only need to perform the last steps, where you dpkg-reconfigure sunwcsd and reimport the sysevent.xml file. See the new post for more details.

There is a nasty bug in Nexenta 3.0 that causes zones to function improperly. Services such as SSH are broken, packages may not install properly, etc. This is caused by a missing sysidtool, and a missing sysevent service. Two fix this problem, a few steps are required. First, in the global zone, you must edit /usr/bin/createzone and make the following changes:

1. Replace elatte-unstable with hardy-unstable. This should be found around line 41, in the default_config() subroutine.
2. Update the @source_files array as follows:

my @source_files = qw(
        /lib/svc/method/nexenta-sysidtool-system
        /var/svc/manifest/system/nexenta-sysidtool.xml
        /lib/svc/method/nexenta-sysidtool-net
        );

You are simply changing “elatte” to “nexenta” here.

Now, go through the normal zone creation process. If you don’t know how to do that, see here for a decent tutorial. The zone creation process should go off without a hitch, and sysidtool should install properly. Without our fixes, you would probably see an error that looks something like this.

There are still two more steps to be done. We must log in to the zone, but regular zlogin will not work until we fix another small bug. Boot the zone with “zoneadm -z yourZone boot”, then log in with “zlogin -S yourZone” instead of the normal zlogin. This will bring us to maintenance mode. Run pwconv:

zoneadm -z yourZone boot
zlogin -S yourZone

[In yourZone]
pwconv
exit

After this, regular zlogin should work. Now, we need to get the sysevent service working. Many services depend on this service. Without it, all of them will fail to start. To fix this, edit (from within the zone) the /lib/svc/method/svc-syseventd.

After the line . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh put
add [ `zonename` = global ] || sleep 3600 & exit 0

When finished, your zone’s /lib/svc/method/svc-syseventd file should look something like this. The bolded line is the one you added.

# CDDL Header
# ...

. /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh
[ `zonename` = global ] || sleep 3600 & exit 0

case "$1" in
'start')
	/usr/lib/sysevent/syseventd >/dev/msglog 2>&1
	rc=$?
	if [ $rc -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "WARNING: /usr/lib/sysevent/syseventd failed: exit status $rc"
		exit $SMF_EXIT_ERR_FATAL
	fi
	;;

#
# devfsadmd and syseventconfd are started on-demand
# by syseventd. syseventd should be stopped before devfsadm and syseventconfd.
#
'stop')
	zone=`smf_zonename`
	/usr/bin/pkill -x -u 0 -P 1 -z $zone rcm_daemon
	/usr/bin/pkill -x -u 0 -P 1 -z $zone syseventd
	/usr/bin/pkill -x -u 0 -P 1 -z $zone devfsadm
	/usr/bin/pkill -x -u 0 -P 1 -z $zone syseventconfd

	#
	# Since pkill is not atomic (may miss forking processes), also
	# kill entire service contract.
	#
	smf_kill_contract $2 TERM 1
	[ $? -ne 0 ] && exit 1
	;;	

*)
	echo "Usage: $0 { start | stop }"
	exit 1
	;;

esac
exit 0

Finally, you will need to enter two more commands as the super-user:

dpkg-reconfigure sunwcsd
svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/system/sysevent.xml

Exit the zone and reboot it. Log in again, and everything should be magically working!

This information was compiled from several Nexenta bug reports (203, 173, LP #347937) after I ran into problems getting SSH working in my new zone. Apparently, the problems are bigger than SSH. I can’t take credit for discovering these fixes.

One of the main issues I’ve always had with Solaris is finding packages to install. Back when I used Solaris XDE 9/07, this was much worse than it is today. In OpenSolaris, there is a new technology known as the Image Packaging System (IPS). This finally brings centralized software management capability to Solaris. It’s something many Linux distributions already do, and is basically an expected feature these days.

The default OpenSolaris package repository has a fairly large number of packages, but it seems to be lacking in some areas. The amount of packages in the default repository are growing, but it’s missing things such as MPlayer and other programs. Luckily, there are other IPS repositories that help alleviate this! The following commands can be executed in a terminal to add new repositories to the package manager:

pkg set-authority -O http://blastwave.network.com:10000/ Blastwave

pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000/ Companion

Now, whenever you use the

pkg search -r

command, you should be able to search from these repositories and install from them.

Path Variables:

Packages from Blastwave will install to the directory /opt/csw and entirely isolate themselves from the rest of the system. It has its own bin directory, etc directory, etc. Make sure you add /opt/csw/bin to your PATH to get these programs to work properly:

export PATH=/opt/csw/bin:$PATH

You may want to put that in your .bash_profile or .bashrc file in your home directory so it gets loaded all the time.

Other Places for Packages:

Despite the addition of two more repositories, there will be times when the package image we want just doesn’t exist (Wine? Hello, where are you?). Luckily for us, OpenSolaris has pkgadd and friends for “backwards compatibility.” The pkgadd, pkgrm, and other related commands are used to install programs from .pkg files. It used to be the way Solaris handled software installation. There are some other websites that contain various software packages for installation:

http://www.sunfreepacks.com/

A small, but very nice collection of programs, including an up-to-date version of Wine for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (make sure to download the proper version!)

If you’re coming from a Linux or Windows system, the first thing you will notice about Solaris systems is that the disk device labeling scheme is rather omgwtf?! when you first see it. Every disk is labeled something like c0t1d0p2. AND, not to mention, there are two places where these huge lists of strange disk IDs appear: /dev/dsk and /dev/rdsk. This can be confusing to someone who doesn’t know their way around a Solaris system.

Fresh and Raw
The first thing to get straight is the difference between disk (/dev/dsk) and raw disk (/dev/rdsk). Devices in the /dev/dsk directory are things that you can mount, unmount, format, and otherwise manipulate with commands. Of course, not all of these devices are used at any given time, which is where a certain program comes in, described below.

The /dev/rdsk directory contains the “raw disks,” the operating system’s abstraction of the raw data. This is used with certain programs that need to access the raw data directly, as we will see below.

Controller What?
The next item on the agenda is to figure out the somewhat funky naming scheme of disk devices in Solaris. On Linux systems, it’s relatively simple. It’s usually something like hda1 or sdb2. The “a” or “b” in the name refers to a physical hard drive, with each number referring to a partition on that hard drive. The “s” and the “h” just seem to be used interchangeably. Maybe it was changed in a kernel upgrade or something.

Solaris uses a significantly different naming scheme. As stated before, the names are things like c0t1d0p2. This website offers a good technical/historical explanation of what the names mean in full. I suggest reading it. Although if you’re using OpenSolaris, you should ignore the part about the “s.” Assuming you only have one hard drive, the main thing of importance to you is the partition number: the number following the “p” in the name. Here’s a summary of what that website says about the names, organized by letter:

C: This refers to the disk’s controller, the internal thing that’s controlling read and write access to the disk. Some disks will appear on different ones depending on what they are. For example, my two internal HDDs appear on c3, while my external USB HDD appears on c1.

T: This is the target. It’s related to the controller. On my system, my two internal hard drives are different targets on the c1 controller: c3t0 and c3t1.

D: This refers to the actual disk. Disk number. Since my targets each refer to an individual hard disk, I have c3t0d0 and c3t1d0.

P: This is the partition number and is what you should be most interested in if you’re running a multi-boot system on a single partitioned hard disk. p0 refers to the entire disk. This is a very important concept. p1 – p4 refers to the primary partitions, with p5 and higher referring to logical partitions.

How I Find Mah Disks?
This is where we introduce the wonderful program of prtpart. It was developed by the BeleniX distribution of OpenSolaris as a partition table viewer. To install this you will need to download the following files:
FSWpart.tar.gz

FSWfsmisc.tar.gz

The first file contains the package file for prtpart while the other contains a package for support for a bunch of miscellaneous file systems that extend the capabilities of prtpart. Install them cding to the directory that you downloaded them to and then put in:

gunzip -c FSWpart.tar.gz | tar xvf -
pkgadd -d . FSWpart
gunzip -c FSWfsmisc.tar.gz | tar xvf -
pkgadd -d . FSWfsmisc

Now you should be ready to use the prtpart program. It must be run with root permissions, so use it with pfexec or start a root shell and execute it. Just executing prtpart without any arguments will produce output like:

Available disk devices:

/dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0
/dev/rdsk/c3t1d0p0

Use /usr/bin/prtpart  to get partition details
Use /usr/bin/prtpart -help for usage help

This lists all the disk devices the OS currently knows about. Notice that it lists the rdsk devices. If you then execute “prtpart -ldevs”, it will give you the /dev/dsk devices corresponding to that raw disk. Example:

$ pfexec prtpart /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0 -ldevs

Fdisk information for device /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0

** NOTE **
/dev/dsk/c3t0d0p0      - Physical device referring to entire physical disk
/dev/dsk/c3t0d0p1 - p4 - Physical devices referring to the 4 primary partitions
/dev/dsk/c3t0d0p5 ...  - Virtual devices referring to logical partitions

Virtual device names can be used to access EXT2 and NTFS on logical partitions

/dev/dsk/c3t0d0p1	IFS: NTFS
/dev/dsk/c3t0d0p2	Linux native
/dev/dsk/c3t0d0p3	Linux native

If you’re just trying to find your hard drives, this is one way you can use to find them.