Solaris tricks

Page containing various magical things that I've learned about opensolaris in my quest to get it working as I want it.

Writing a Sun disk label to a hard drive

The solaris installer will crash and burn if the disks you're installing to don't have a valid sun disk label. To ensure you have one, get to a command prompt from the solaris installer (right click the desktop in the graphical installer and select program->terminal).

# format -e

Pick the disk you want to label, it will ask you if you want to label it. Say 'y'. This should fix things. Select any additional disks with the 'disk' command, then 'quit'.

Sometimes this isn't enough, though! For some reason there are two types of labels, SMI and EFI, and other operating systems sometimes use EFI which Solaris pretends to understand but doesn't. So before quitting, type "label" again, whether or not it made a label automatically, and choose the SMI label. Default through any follow-up questions.

Setting a Static IP

This is way more cumbersome than you'd expect:

• Edit /etc/nodename and /etc/hostname.<mymaininterfacename> (probably hme0) and put the hostname in the file
• Delete /etc/dhcp.<mymaininterfacename> if it exists
• Edit /etc/hosts and /etc/inet/ipnodes and put in the IP address and the hostname
• Edit /etc/defaultdomain and add your FQDN
• If you're not using a normal subnet, edit /etc/inet/netmasks and add your own custom one
• Reboot (I have no idea how to restart the appropriate services)
• Fume at the ridiculousness of solaris

Making Alt-Tab (and other mod1 related bindings) work

I use x2x to send keyboard input to my opensolaris box. It's an Ultra 80 with a Sun Type 4 keyboard. However, the machine I x2x from is a PC with an IBM Type-M keyboard. By default, any shortcuts using the alt key don't work. However, if on the PC you run the following command:

 xmodmap -e "keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L"

It should fix the issues with shortcuts using alt. This works better than using xmodmap on the sun machine. I'm not sure why but I'm not gonna argue.

Using the xterm-color terminfo file

The xterm that comes with solaris, like so many of the bundled applications, sucks. I've installed a better version from pkgsrc. To get solaris to find the terminfo file for xterm-color I've added the following to my ~/.zshrclocal (a file I use for per-machine shell configuration/overrides):

 export TERMINFO=/usr/pkg/share/lib/terminfo

 if [ $TERM = xterm ]; then
   export TERM=xterm-color
 fi

Making man(1) not suck so much

Install misc/less from pkgsrc

 alias more=less
 export PAGER=less
 export MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/pkg/man

Getting a locate command on the system

Install sysutils/findutils. Edit root's crontab (sudo crontab -e root or whatever)

 1 3 * * * /usr/pkg/bin/gupdatedb

Then:

 alias locate=glocate

Either wait for 3am to roll around or run that gupdatedb command as root. It runs as the daemon user by default for security purposes (it won't index your 0600 chmodded pr0n).