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So I guess next version/update of Solaris will be released in August of 2011? Solaris 10 8/11 (update 10). Such a long wait, I was hoping to see it earlier. Wanted to play with zfs new features, especially dedupliication. Oh well, will have to wait since I cant move to either open solaris oe solaris express…

So I upgraded my solaris server to latest kernel patch and of course it had sendmail as part of that kernel. My emails stopped flowing around. Was looking how to fix it as my home server is my default mail gateway for my email. So anyway in my sendmail config I had the following lines:

O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA
O DaemonPortOptions=Port=587, Name=MSA, M=E

so I changed them to all 0′s:
O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=0.0.0.0, Name=MTA
O DaemonPortOptions=Port=587, Name=MSA, M=E

then I removed the Addr field
# SMTP daemon options
O DaemonPortOptions=Name=MTA
O DaemonPortOptions=Port=587, Name=MSA, M=E

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Procedure to mount ISO images under Linux
1) You must login as a root user
2) Create the directory i.e. mount point:
# mkdir -p /mnt/temp_disk1
3) Use mount command to mount iso file called disk1.iso with loop option:
# mount -o loop disk1.iso /mnt/temp_disk1

Now you should be able to access all the files on that ISO image. Please note, you have to provide full path to iso image, not just iso image alone.

Sometime ago installed my RedHat 5 with xen. Then I needed to create a virtual server running RedHat 4 in it, all needed to be 64 bit because Opsware required 64 bit RHEL AS4, so had to come up with an inexpensive solution. Got Intel Quad from Dell for $400 with 8gb ram, inexpensive desktop, installed RedHat 5 on it, then created xen virtual server in it running RedHat AS 4 for Opsware, of course opsware is not supported under XEN as a virtual server and it would not run under RedHat 5, so I had to hack it a bit to get it working, actually to get it installed is quite simple. Anyway so I had my RedHat AS4 vm running then I did notice that my desktop running all of that rebooted the other day, but my opsware virtual server did not start. With XEN I am not that familiar so I had issues starting it with command line, so I was ending up bringing xdisplay back to my pc remotely just to start it up. Well what it turned out that I don’t have to do this anymore. I was playing around with starting it up and why, I can do it automatically.

Anyway solution to start it up was very simple, on my RedHat 5 hyperviser I had to go to /etc/xen directory, there is directory called auto, and there is a config file for my virtual server called opsware (name of that virtual server) so to get it automatically started I needed to create a symbolic link inside that auto directory that pointed to that opsware config file.

Simple and easy, not when my desktop reboots my xen vm starts automatically.

Just installed Red Hat AS4 and I am unable to login with root account. Passwd is all set but I am getting popup message saying “Root logins are not allowed”, simple solution is to press CTRL+ALT+F1 and switch to console login and you will be on your way Nice and simple.

So Sun, ups, I think I should say Oracle released Solaris 10 U7. Here are the few things what I did find whats new:

•System Resources Enhancement
- Support Added for Using ZFS Clones When Cloning a Zone
- zoneadm attach -b Option. You can back out certain patches from update on attach
•System Administration Enhancements
- SMF Services for IPsec. IPsec is now managed by SMF services
•Security Enhancement
- NAT-Traversal for IPsec Key Management Developers
- Stronger Algorithms for IPsec. Three larger Diffie-Hellman integer-modulus groups (2048-bit, 3072-bit, and 4096-bit) as well as SHA2 including sha256, sha384, and sha512? SHA-2 using HMAC.
- SunSSH With OpenSSL PKCS#11 Engine Support
•Device Management Enhancements
- x86: T-State Support for Intel Based Processors
•System Performance Enhancements
- Large Segment Offload Support for Intel PCI Express 10Gb NIC Driver
- Solaris Power Aware Dispatcher and Deep C-State Support
•Developer Tools Enhancements
- SunVTS 7.0 Patch Set 5
- x86: CPU Performance Counter Updates for Intel Processors
- SUNWpatchutils Tool
•Driver Enhancements
- hermon Driver
- iSCSI Target – upgraded and several performance, scalability, interoperability, and reliability improvements.It´s not the COMSTAR target.
- x86: NetXen 10-GigE Device Driver
- Intel ICH10 and Hartwell NIC Support in E1000g Driver
- xge Driver Can Enable Multiple Receive Rings and MSI-X
•Other Enhancements
- New Locale Support for Kazakhstan and Ukraine
- SPARC: Fp-scrubber Daemon

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This utility is so cool, how many times I did try to figure out netmasks, broadcasts etc, this utility actualy performs simple manipulation of IP addresses:

ipcalc – provides a simple way to calculate IP information for a host.  The various options specify what information ipcalc should display on standard out. Multiple options may be specified.  An IP address to operate on must  always be specified.  Most operations also require a netmask or a CIDR prefix as well.

# ipcalc -nbm 192.168.1.254/29
NETMASK=255.255.255.248
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
NETWORK=192.168.1.248
#

I knew something was cooking, when IBM announcement was made SUN’s stock jumped like a rocket, then when deal was off, at least from talk perspective stock did retreat, but please don’t tell me people did not know somehow that something else is cooking, how come stock did not go down to previous levels or lower as it usually does after such situation? Well inside traders knew something that others (such as myself) had no idea, I could only speculate something was out in the air as stock only did drop to over $6. So now another announcement is made and look at this. Stock went back to over $9. Interesting, I hate those inside traders, those people who makes millions or even billions by just having access to the right information that others don’t.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp

This certainly could be quite interesting in development and see how will it play. Maybe Oracle can keep most of SUN’s items as comparing to IBM it was obvious that there would be to much in common and redundant and they would not carry forward with all technologies. Wonder what will happen to MySQL since Oracle has its own DB, maybe they will keep it? I certainly hope so as I really do enjoy mysql myself, its easy and small, and I certainly hope Oracle will not destroy it by packing to much crap on top of it as they did it to Oracle (Remember Oracle when it was like 8 or even 9i? How small it was and how fast it was? Look at it now at 10g and 11, how massive, how much disk space and memory it does require to just run it or start it. At my current job when we do not have enough swap space allocated to global zone we cannot even start some Oracle instances because on a start it does require swap space… why? swap should not even be used. Anyway so I hope Oracle will not just destroy it… But its exciting news I think…

I have solaris 10 and I have test user, I have then direcotry created as events, when I do rm -r events I get the following error:
rm: cannot determine if this is an ancestor of the current working directory events
rm -rf does not even show me anything but directory is not being removed

One of the solutions that I’ve found in my case was to change user to root even though the owner of the diretories or files is test, of try the following comand:
find . -depth -exec rmdir {} \;

I had server that rebooted and then was hanging at the GRUB line and was not booting, so I did decide to reinstall grub which seems like it did help. Here is the procedure that I did to get it boot again:

Reinstalling the Boot Loader
In many cases, the GRUB boot loader can mistakenly be deleted, corrupted, or replaced by other operating systems.
The following steps detail the process on how GRUB is reinstalled on the master boot record:
* Boot the system from an installation boot medium (CDROM or DVD)
* Type linux rescue at the installation boot prompt to enter the rescue environment.
* Type chroot /mnt/sysimage to mount the root partition.
* Type /sbin/grub-install /dev/sda to reinstall the GRUB boot loader, where /dev/sda is the boot partition.
* Review the /boot/grub/grub.conf file, as additional entries may be needed for GRUB to control additional operating systems.
* Reboot the system.

Done, system working again.