Diving into the Sun
I’ve been playing with Solaris on VMWare for several weeks now–specifically with ZFS–as a proof of concept for my Solaris ZFS NAS I spoke of earlier. I’ve been impressed so far (more on that some other time).
This weekend I decided to kill several birds with one stone:
1. Create a real (meaning on metal) Solaris NAS on an existing box. Since I might need to buy hardware to build this thing down the road, I want to kick the tires before I spend a few hundred dollars on ebay.
2. Finally rid myself of Windows–since the only box I could install Solaris on was my XP Machine. I’ve gotten to the point where I am not tied to any one app or any one platform so I can ditch XP.
3. Install Solaris on a real machine so it can take full advantage of the hardware and I can play with some of the cooler stuff (like zones) that probably wouldn’t run very well in VM
I used gparted to slice off about 10GB for Solaris on the system’s drive. XP is still there (for now 
)
I was unable to install Solaris Express CE from DVD or Solaris 10 from DVD. I was finally able to install Solaris from 5 CDs. I didn’t really get a chance to figure out why that was. I’m guessing Solaris didn’t like my DVD drive.
The next obstacle was my dell installed Broadcom ethernet controller. Solaris did not like it one bit. I tired swapping it out for a D-Link I had laying around, but it liked that even less. Finally, after about 3 or 4 hours I was able to track down a bcm4401 driver by Masayuki Murayama which I had to compile. Historically, Broadcom (especially the 4401 variety) have gien me trouble on a lot of OS’s, even Windows, so I’m not surprised it was an obstacle.
Once it was up, it was singing. I let it update itself overnight.
I decided to try setting up zones. One zone will be for the SAMBA/NFS Server (NAS). The other will be for a small web server.
So far the config couldn’t be simpler. I’ve been following the tutorial here, and so far so good.
