OpenIndiana vs Solaris 11 zones

[Stereodude]

Of course, I'd really like to replace the entire 23 servers with a single 1U Supermicro 6017TR-TF (for instance), but it will probably have to wait.

And what happens when you have a hardware failure in your single 1U 6017TR-TF compared to having a hardware failure in one of the 23 servers they have now? I imagine the screaming and yelling over having everything down as opposed to ~1/23rd of the functions might be something you'd want to consider before putting all your eggs in one basket.

 

[CougTek]

I calculated that 256 threads in a Supermicro filled with E5-2680, a "scant" 1TB DDR3 1600MHz RAM total and 7.6TB of SSD storage would only cost ~56000$. It also fits in a 4U space instead of a 5U space like the Oracle server.

 

[CougTek]

And what happens when you have a hardware failure in your single 1U 6017TR-TF compared to having a hardware failure in one of the 23 servers they have now?

I'd buy two but only use one. We curently only have two dual-core servers on spare so it's not like we have a lot of redundancy either.

 

[Chewy509]

So you think 2006 version of Solairs 10 doesn't support the use of VNIC in zones?

Sol10 does support VNICs, but lack the virtual switching, routing and link throttling that possible with crossbow.

BTW, the T4-4 gets you a unified 2TB of memory space... something that the blade setup lacks. (Mind you I would take the blade setup over a T4-4 anyday).

 

[CougTek]

But what in the world needs a unified 2TB of memory...except an MS Access database?

 

[Chewy509]

Cool, glad you found it. BTW Solaris 11.1 was announced yesterday.

Solaris 11.1 is now available for download, or direct in place upgrade for those already on Solaris 11.

 

[CougTek]

It's good to know. But these days, as my company has no money to spend, I'm a lot more interested in OpenIndiana than I am with Solaris. Yearly +1000$ support contract licence per socket isn't very popular with the administration folks.

I'm halfway thru the optimization of their production setup. I've encountered a few difficulties, but nothing I haven't been able to overcome so far. Most of the notes I've found online are made for Solaris 11 and there are differences between the syntax of OpenIndiana and Solaris. Netadm, for instance, doesn't exist on the open source OS. Ipadm create-ip on Solaris is replaced by the older format ipadm create-if on OpenIndiana, etc. At least pretty much everything regarding the zones' management is identical.

 

[Chewy509]

I know the full Solaris support contracts are $$$$, so have no issues with going with OpenIndiana. IIRC OI uses the same run time environment that OpenSolaris 2009.06 used, and hasn't yet updated to the Solaris 11 runtime environment. I don't know when or even if that will happen, but if you get stuck on something look for hints in the OoenSolaris 2009.06 documentation.

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19120-01/open.solaris/820-7679/index.html

 

[CougTek]

Odd problem I now have.

I try to copy a file from the global zone into a container. A file with a similar name was in the container before I tried to copy the new file. When I try :

root@globalzone:~# cp /etc/acertainfile.conf /export/home/zonename/root/etc/

I get :

cp `/opt/acertainfile.conf`and `/export/home/zonename/root/opt/` are the same file

But the file doesn't exist anymore in the container! When I do a ls -l in the targeted directory, it isn't there. I've also tried a cp -f without success. I did a chmod +x on the directory in the container, even if I don't think I had to, but it didn't work either. I'm log as root in both the global zone and the container.

I don't know what to do.

 

[Handruin]

Can you copy as a different name and then rename the copied file after it has been copied?

 

[Chewy509]

What's the view from inside the zone? (Is the container inheriting the global filesystem or does it have it's own distinct/unique copy)?

 

[CougTek]

Can you copy as a different name and then rename the copied file after it has been copied?

I haven't tried. Will do tomorrow.

What's the view from inside the zone? (Is the container inheriting the global filesystem or does it have it's own distinct/unique copy)?

Inside the zone, the file isn't there. I think the file system is inherited because I didn't do anything special to give a FS of its own.

 

[Chewy509]

Not too sure. Have you tried restarting the zone to flush any open/zombie file handles?

 

[CougTek]

Yes I did. Now I have trouble just renaming a directory within the /opt directory of the global zone. I deleted the original file and then copied it from another computer, along with its entire directory. When I put the directory in /opt, it becomes write-protected and I no longer can rename it, or at least I haven't found out how. I tried changing the owner to the user instead of root, doing a chmod +x on it, no success.

I hope someday I'll become good at this, but for now its arduous.

 

[Chewy509]

in zonecfg for the selected zone, when you run "info" what "inherit-pkg-dir:" are listed? (and similar for all other zones on the same box). It sounds like something is locking /opt ?

And when as root, the change of permissions and ownership is not working?

Also, just want to clarify, what version of Solaris is the host? (Please say it's Solaris 10 10/08 or OpenIndiana)... (Solaris 10 10/08 fixed an issue when the 'zonepath' was on top of ZFS, and weird crap like you are seeing, and IIRC OS nv151 has this fix as well). (OS nv151 is what OpenIndiana is based on).

 

[CougTek]

zonecfg -z zonename info

I don't have any line starting by "inherit-pkg-dir"

My zones are in "/export/home/zonename" because that's what I set in the zonepath parameter when I created the zone. If another place was better, please tell me.

I use the latest version of OpenIndiana (1.51 a5 IIRC).

I haven't been able, as root, to make a directory in /opt writable. How should I do that? Normally, if I change the ownership (chown) and chmod +w ddn't help either.

 

[Chewy509]

That's certainly unusual. I would post a message to the OpenIndiana mail list and see if you get a response there. It certainly appears that your not inheriting any underlying filesystems?

Basically to set writable all you would have to do is:
$su
# chown root:root <folder>
# chmod 777 <folder>

done?
777 = rwxrwxrwx for permissions.
755 = rwxr-xr-x for permissions.

 

[CougTek]

That's certainly unusual. I would post a message to the OpenIndiana mail list and see if you get a response there. It certainly appears that your not inheriting any underlying filesystems?

Basically to set writable all you would have to do is:
$su
# chown root:root <folder>
# chmod 777 <folder>

done?
777 = rwxrwxrwx for permissions.
755 = rwxr-xr-x for permissions.

The above worked to make the folder writable. Thank you very much. I still wasn't able to copy it directly to the zone, but I've had an idea and it worked. I mounted the directory in the zone and then I've been able to transfer the files I wanted. So in the end, the job's done.

 

[CougTek]

Question : How to I link a DHCP address to a certain network/NIC in /etc/hosts? For instance, let's say I have two NIC connected to two different networks in my zone, one with a fixed address and the other one with DHCP. How am I supposed to write this /etc/hosts?

127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.100.25 name_in_LAN
dhcp address xx name_in_WAN

???

I know how to deal with fixed addresses, but not DHCP. Anything special in /etc/inet/ipnodes and /etc/resolv.conf I shold know of regarding DHCP config?

 

[Mercutio]

You don't. The hosts file isn't set up to deal with variable addresses. What you want to do is make an address reservation on a DNS server someplace.

 

[sdbardwick]

I think Merc means a "DHCP server someplace." (But y'all already knew that...)

 

[Chewy509]

You don't. The hosts file isn't set up to deal with variable addresses. What you want to do is make an address reservation on a DNS server someplace.

Exactly. You tell the DHCP server to update the sites DNS records, and in your nsswitch.conf configuration on each host, you should have something like:

hosts: files dns mdns
ipnodes: files dns mdns

which tells the localhost to look at /etc/hosts, then query dns, etc.

to configure on the client, it's basically

* Define new dns settings (resolv.conf)
svccfg -s dns/client "setprop config/nameserver = net_address: 10.0.1.1"
svccfg -s dns/client "setprop config/domain = astring: raghon.no"
svccfg -s dns/client "setprop config/search = astring: raghon.no"
svcadm enable dns/client

* Configure name-service switch (nsswitch.conf)
svccfg -s name-service/switch "setprop config/host = astring: \"files dns\""
svcadm restart name-service/switch

(The DHCP server will have all the DNS configuration in there, so there should be no need to worry about that, so any client using DHCP for getting it's IP should have it's DNS server set automatically).

DHCP Manual: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19082-01/819-3000/dhcptm-1/index.html

 

[Mercutio]

Yes. Yes I did.