Building a home server with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and a second hand Dell laptop
The software: OpenSolaris 2008.05
The hardware: Dell Latitude D600, Intel Mobile 1.6GHz, 768MB of RAM, 30GB HDD, Ati Radeon 900 32MB.
OpenSolaris 2008.05 installation
After installing an additional 256MB RAM module, upgrading the BIOS to the latest firmware (you never know) and running all night long the memtest utility included in the Ubuntu distro, Dogbert, my new low-cost second hand laptop was ready for OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris installation has gone under a mayor review, a huge change compared to previous releases. First, the installation follows the Ubuntu concept of test-see-and-if-you-like-install it. Solaris 2008.05 is a live CD. You boot and get a fully functional Gnome environment (even the wireless is working out-of-the-box) where you can have a look, test if all your hardware is compatible or run the graphic installer.
The installer is extremely easy, only a few basic questions and is done. OpenSolaris for dummies. Lovely!
The bad point: this is not very convenient for a server. There is no text-intaller (yet), even if you can boot on text mode the live CD I was not able to trigger the installation without a GUI (maybe there is a workaround but I could not find anything). And you can not choose what do you want to install. You get everything including Gnome. My approach for servers is to install only the core and then add the minimum required tools later as needed. No complaints about it, OpenSolaris seems to be more for final users than for any other thing (you have Solaris 10 for servers). Yes, I can use debian for my home server, but the point here is to play with new Solaris technologies.
Two important remarks:
- ZFS is the default file system, bye bye UFS. Cool!
- There is no root user! root is a role, not a user, so you can never login in the system directly with the root account (not even in the console). You need a normal user account and then you can “su” to the root role.
Solaris admins do not need a mouse
Okay, you have finished the OpenSolaris installation, you reboot your system and you get a super-nice Gnome desktop with all the extras: Firefox, wireless access… cool! But this is not what you want. You are a tough guy, you want your black text console now! It is quite easy. Just disable the gdm service and Gnome and the X will be over.
# svcadm disable gdm
If you want to go further and also remove all the packages to save some disk space, you can uninstall the related packages as explained in this blog.
A bit of networking
The first component you need to setup is the network. OpenSolaris introduces the “automagic” tool to configure the network. It manages your wireless and wired connections dinamically using profiles. Easy networks for everybody, Ubuntu style. This is perfect for a desktop system but for a server what you want is a old-fashion static wired connection. So first disable the auto-magic service:
# svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:nwam
Configure your network in the old Solaris fashion way and then enable the traditional network service:
# svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:default
Files you need to modify to set-up your network in Solaris
/etc/inet/hosts -> IP address of your host (see file comments)/etc/defaulrouter -> IP address of your gateway, only that, nothing else.
/etc/netmasks -> Subnet mask (see file comments)
Put the hostname of your machine in a file called /etc/hostname. where interface is the name you get with ifconfig (e.g. bge0)
Installing new packages
Finally, IPS is here, the new package system for Solaris. Now install new software in Solaris is as simple as in Linux:
# pkg install SUNWrrdtool
And it’s done. The server connects to the OpenSolaris repository, gets the package, resolves the dependencies and installs it. Feel free to fill up your server with all the software you can get 
June 11th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
“Removing Gnome on OpenSolaris” is here now:
http://vitaliy.info/?p=73
June 11th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Link updated. Thank you!