Solaris 10: now to put zones on the damn thing.

[reddragdiva]

hauntedunix's suggestion worked: mount the /var zpool as legacy. All hail!

The trick now is that the system won't install zones properly. The zone creates okay, verifies as installable, when I go to install it installs 3 packages and of course won't boot. This is because, desperate for space on Friday, I cleared all that faff out of /var/sadm/pkg ... which is where zone packages are installed from. D'oh!

So today I tried jumpstarting it. And IT appear to have set up the network so stuff won't tftpboot. ARGH. Tomorrow we make an appointment to go down to the server room and ... put the 10u8 SPARC DVD in the drive.

It's been a learning experience.

Oh, and the Solaris 10u8 i386 VirtualBox image that Sun heartily encourages everyone to download and try is a dysfunctional piece of complete dogshit that seems to have been put together with the express aim of warning people off Solaris.

Comments

[ideological_cuddle]

You haven't touched Solaris in a while, have you? What you did is kind of like blowing away /var/lib/dpkg on a Debian/Ubuntu box, or nuking the RPM database on RH.

One recommendation about zones which I suspect I'll get jumped on and told I'm an idiot for: unless you're sure you'll never need to add packages that go in /usr and friends, do it with "create -b" to avoid making a sparse zones. Sparse zones are cool in theory but my experience has been that you can easily wind up jumping through lots of hoops to deal with the fact that /usr and friends are now read-only and almost no third-party stuff takes that into account.

Disk space in a modern Solaris system is not exactly at a premium so the couple of gigs for a full duplicate of the OS is not a big drama.

[reddragdiva]

I certainly haven't installed it from nothing in years. A box that's set up, I'll happily beat the crap out of that with moderate confidence ...

I like the idea of sparse zones - global zone strictly for sysadmin, work in local zones. Symlinking /usr/local to somewhere on /export works pretty well for said obnoxious software. (Software that logs to /usr/local is ARGH YOU STUPID PIECE OF CRAP and entirely to be expected.)

[ideological_cuddle]

Full zones are just as good as sparse ones when it comes to containing workloads, they just mean you don't wind up in a sticky situation when some bozotic app turns out to need to do something to /usr.

The only advantages I'm seeing with sparse zones is deployment time and disk space. Mostly those two things matter less than flexibility. Deployment only takes 10 minutes for a full zone anyway.

Do yourself a favour and build yourself a Sol10U8 VM somewhere to play with. It'll be worth the effort. IIRC you need to do the install in text mode (or "text in an xterm" mode) rather than using the GUI if you want to install on ZFS root, the assumption is that Serious Cat has Serious Jumpstart Infrastructure so the interactive installer is unimportant.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, I've downloaded the 10u8 i386 iso to install in a VirtualBox from scratch, rather than the stupidly dysfunctional pre-made box.

[gothgeekgirl]

Different uses have different requirements. Since I run externally facing dns servers (among other things), I rather like having a read only /usr/local that can't be twiddled into read/write.