OpenSolaris can do CIFS and save my day

The OpenSolaris OpenSolaris CIFS service is really cool and has just saved me from loosing all my digital pictures. I have a laptop with XP that holds all my digital pictures (tens of thousands) and it has started to give up. XP tends to do that over time. So, I realised that I have a desktop with OpenSolaris installed since way back. It has lots of disk so I just did a 'pkg image-update' and there I was with a machine capable of acting as the family workgroup data server via CIFS. Really cool. Google for OpenSolaris CIFS workgroup to learn more. Just a couple of commands and off you go...

Install only in global zone

If you have several zones on your machine then you might not want to install all packages into all zones. User tools like StarOffice are mostly only needed in the global zone.

pkgadd -G

will do the trick.

Two ways a pkg can be installed in the global zone only.

a) SUNW_PKG_ALLZONES=false
SUNW_PKG_THISZONE=true

b) SUNW_PKG_ALLZONES=false
SUNW_PKG_THISZONE=false
# pkgadd was run with -G


Trolling though the installed pkginfo files will give you (a), but
not (b). What you're probably looking for is
/var/sadm/install/gz-only-packages. That's a private interface though.





For Blastwave packages one can set the environment variable ADMINFLAG=' -G'
(Looks however that this is also passed to pkgrm which bails out. Have to check this...)
Looks like PKGADDFLAGS=-G is another way. Will check....

On command

Ever wanted quick access to manpages?

User Commands

Systems Administartion Commads

System Calls

Thank's goes to Doug and the docs.sun.com team.

Shoot myself in the foot

I managed to shoot myself in the foot playing with OpenSolaris 2008.05 Image Packaging System. So now I started over. No data loss but embarrassing...

Anyway, that let me set up my system even better adding the knowledge I've gained during the last couple of weeks.

As this is early birds, there are some special steps to consider.
Boot up from the LiveCD and install with ZFS on one disk. It takes 15 minutes on a decent machine.
After the reboot log in as the user you created at install (not root), open a terminal and do like this.

$ pfexec pkg refresh --full
$ pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg@0.5.11-0.86
$ pfexec pkg refresh --full
$ pfexec pkg image-update

The image update takes 1-2 hours depending on network speed so be patient.

Don't forget to update GRUB (Needed just only the first time you update after a fresh install)

$ pfexec mount -F zfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1 /mnt
$ pfexec /mnt/boot/solaris/bin/update_grub -R /mnt
$ pfexec init 6

Now you have the most modern UNIX on your machine and you can start adding development tools or whatever you need.

$ pfexec pkg install openoffice

Songbird

Songbird works really nice on OpenSolaris (as well as on my laptop with snv_76)

Red or White?

Wine is something I have to look into.

Thin myth busted

Intel just don't get it. The myth that Sun Rays doesn't perform is busted.

IPS

Managed to make a fool of myself today mixing up blastwave.org with blastwave.network.com in a question on the opensolaris.org indiana forum. I'm although not convinced that blastwave.org is fully operational as IPS package repository for an updated OpenSolaris 2008.05 installation i.e. one upgraded to snv_91.