I recently came up with this method for generating reasonable random 8-character passwords:
$ dd if=/dev/random bs=6 count=1 2>/dev/null | openssl base64 LCia46S4If 8 characters is not long enough, increase the number after bs= to 75% of the number of characters you would like in the password.
My personal SPARC machine is pathetic by today's standards - An Ultra II with a pair of 300 MHz processors, 768 MB RAM, and a very slow CDROM drive. This is pretty much the slowest machine that is supported by Solaris 10. That, and today I decided it was time to get a fresh installation of Solaris Express (build 46) on it.
I first tried the live upgrade route. However, that didn't work out too well because I had previously used bfu to get some newer OpenSolaris bits on the machine. I really did not want to repeat the download process for all the CD ISO's (already had downloaded the DVD ISO). Now, if you think that downloading and burning is slow - you should see the speed of the installation on this CDROM drive. It was probably OK in the days when Solaris fit on one CD, but not today with 5(?) CD's to complete the installation.
The disk layout of the machine was as follows:
After reaching out to Sun to work on getting my work integrated into OpenSolaris, I found that Sun was already working on this feature. Subsequently, they indicated that the code made it into some internal source code tree. As such, I am holding off on future development until I can get at that code.
However, if you are wanting to try it out, I have posted the code for others to play with. If you have a working OpenSolaris build environment, you should be able to drop in my modified zoneadm.c, run dmake all, then use the resulting zoneadm command. Alternatively, the sparc version of the zoneadm binary is also available.
Enjoy!
T: OpenSolaris Zones ZFS
I noticed today that in the latest OpenSolaris code that "zoneadm clone" exists. Unfortunately, cloning a zone only offered the copy mechanism that was essentially "find | cpio". A bit of hacking later and we have this:
# time ksh -x /var/tmp/clone
+ newzone=fast
+ template=template
+ zoneadm=/ws/usr/src/cmd/zoneadm/zoneadm
+ PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
+ zonecfg -z fast create -t template
+ zonecfg -z fast set zonepath=/zones/fast
+ /ws/usr/src/cmd/zoneadm/zoneadm -z fast clone -m zfsclone template
Cloning zonepath /zones/template...
real 0m0.922s
user 0m0.128s
sys 0m0.171s
This comes is achieved using zfs to create a snapshot of the template zone, then clone the snapshot to create the zonepath of the new zone. A bit of cleanup is needed, but goodness is on the way.
T: OpenSolaris Zones ZFS
I've been using filebench a bit at work and decided that I would like to try a few things out at home. My home machine is not quite as beefy as the V40z's that I have been testing on at work. Getting filebench to compile in the first place is a bit of work. Probably works really well on someone else's system, but mine is obviously different. That's another story though. After compiling filebench, I ran it for the first time and saw this:
$ /opt/filebench/bin/filebench Segmentation fault (core dumped)Bummer. Well, let's see where that is at:
$ gdb /opt/filebench/bin/filebench core GNU gdb 6.4-debian . . . (gdb) where #0 0x37dd84aa in memset () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 #1 0x0807b01e in ?? () #2 0x080522da in ipc_init () at ipc.c:264 #3 0x08058bc1 in main (argc=1, argv=0x3f8fdcf4) at parser_gram.y:1140OK, so let's go with the assumption that the bug is in the code listed as alpha on the web site, and not libc. So we go up the stack a couple levels.
(gdb) up 2 #2 0x080522da in ipc_init () at ipc.c:264 264 memset(filebench_shm, 0, c2 - c1); (gdb) print filebench_shm $1 = (filebench_shm_t *) 0xffffffffHmmm... 0x with a bunch of f's looks like -1. Perhaps some system call on Solaris (presumably where filebench started) returns NULL on error and on Linux it returns -1. Let's go looking for that system call.
(gdb) list 259 #endif /* USE_PROCESS_MODEL */ 260 261 c1 = (caddr_t)filebench_shm;Nope, not there. Maybe a bit further up.262 c2 = (caddr_t)&filebench_shm->marker; 263 264 memset(filebench_shm, 0, c2 - c1); 265 filebench_shm->epoch = gethrtime(); 266 filebench_shm->debug_level = 2; 267 filebench_shm->string_ptr = &filebench_shm->strings[0]; 268 filebench_shm->shm_ptr = (char *)filebench_shm->shm_addr;
(gdb) list 250
245 #endif
246
247 if ((filebench_shm = (filebench_shm_t *)mmap(0, sizeof(filebench_shm_t),
248 PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
249 MAP_SHARED, shmfd, 0)) == NULL) {
250 filebench_log(LOG_FATAL, "Cannot mmap shm");
251 exit(1);
252 }
253
254 #else
It looks like mmap may be the culprit. I first asked man, but this is Linux, not Solaris. No man page for mmap! Next try google. Google comes up with this page that looks a lot like a man page. Why isn't that found on my system? Another thing for another day. Anyway, it says:
RETURN VALUEOk, so it is returning -1 because it doesn't like something. Let's see what it is trying to mmap:On success, mmap returns a pointer to the mapped area. On error, the value MAP_FAILED (that is, (void *) -1) is returned, and errno is set appropriately. On success, munmap returns 0, on failure -1, and errno is set (probably to EINVAL).
(gdb) print sizeof(filebench_shm_t) $2 = 907368000 (gdb) print sizeof(filebench_shm_t) / 1024 / 1024That 'splains it. It looks like it is trying to set up a shared memory segment that is 865 MB. My poor little system only has 512. FWIW, I have created a patch that addresses this one problem but I haven't had a chance to test it on Solaris yet. Unfortunately, with the patch, it just tells me that the mmap failed. It doesn't address the fact that it is trying to allocate a shared memory segment larger than the size of RAM on my system.$3 = 865 (gdb)
Update 1:
I have posted several patches to the bug tracking system at sourceforge.net. This particular one is 1432638. It turns out that mmap on Solaris also returns MAP_FAILED so the patch is simpler than I originally expected.
I was feeling the need to take a look at Nexenta and decided that I wasn't terribly interested in waiting for a download, then waiting for a gunzip. Why not do them both at the same time?
$ wget -O /dev/stdout http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/genunix.org/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz | gunzip > elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso => `/dev/stdout' --20:21:47-- http://www.gnusolaris.org/gsmirror/genunix.org/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz Resolving www.gnusolaris.org... 216.129.112.21 Connecting to www.gnusolaris.org|216.129.112.21|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: http://www.genunix.org/distributions/gnusolaris/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz [following] --20:21:48-- http://www.genunix.org/distributions/gnusolaris/elatte_installcd_alpha2_i386.iso.gz Resolving www.genunix.org... 204.152.191.100 Connecting to www.genunix.org|204.152.191.100|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 567,433,011 (541M) [text/plain] 13% [====> ] 77,025,880 359.25K/s ETA 22:27Just 22 minutes to go. I guess at this rate I could have piped it through cdrecord with "speed=2".
Some of my most tedious times as a Solaris administrator have been when I needed to create a patch_order file for a custom patch cluster. For a long time I have intended to just write a script...
But now, I don't have to do that any longer! Today I discovered that smpatch(1M) now has an order subcommand. This makes it really quite simple for me to create a patch_order file for a very long list of patches. In this example, I create the patch_order file for the patches in the Solaris 10 Update 1 UpgradePatches directory:
# cd /mnt/Solaris_10/UpgradePatches # ls > /tmp/patches # smpatch order -d `pwd` -x idlist=/tmp/patches > /tmp/patch_orderNow, if you want to go the full length and create a patch cluster for it:
# mkdir /tmp/10U1_UpgradePatches # cd /tmp/10U1_UpgradePatches # mv /tmp/patch_order . # ln -s /mnt/Solaris_10/UpgradePatches/* . # cp /somewhere/10_Recommended/install_cluster .Modify the SUPPLEMENT_NAME="..." line in install_cluster to be more descriptive for this patch cluster. Be sure to not use characters like /, \, |, etc.
# cd /tmp # zip -rq 10U1_UpgradePatches.zip 10U1_UpgradePatchesAt this point, you can copy the 10U1_UpgradePatches around to your various machines and use it just like you would a 10_Recommended bundle. Enjoy!