Tork Wrench » solaris

Workaround for Solaris 10 slow boot on VMware ESX 4.0

Graham — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:32:32 +0000

When building a Solaris x64 guest on VMware , the boot sequence when booting from the Solaris DVD seems to take forever. About 5 minutes in fact. Which is really annoying if you are trying to automate installing Solaris and you need to restart 50 times a day. The part I am talking about is after you select to boot Solaris from the grub menu – there is a sequence of dots that comes up until the next Solaris kernel seems to load. Incidentally the guest’s CPU goes to 100% during this sequence, which could be an issue if you are running on a loaded system.

Luckily there is a workaround. Go into the ‘edit settings’ screen for the Solaris guest and click the options tab. Change the Guest Operating System Version to Solaris 10 32 Bit, instead of 64 bit. Then the boot goes more like this:

I made a screen cast of the slow boot as well, but it literally is the same thing as above, except it just goes on for 5 minutes. It could be the most boring video on the internet. The fast boot video above is probably the second most boring video on the internet! It’s just a hard problem to explain in words.

This setting doesn’t mean that you’ll be running a 32 bit OS or anything either – as far as I can tell it doesn’t do anything besides fix the slow boot problem!

CWUPI0033E on Solaris 10 when installing WAS

Graham — Thu, 13 May 2010 02:57:58 +0000

Here’s a weird one for you. We were trying to install 6.1.0.3 on a Solaris 10 system to do some tests. The Portal install would fail after about 10 minutes. In the /tmp/wpinstalllog.txt file, it was clear that the problem was due to a failure in the internal WebSphere Application Server install. (When you install Portal, the Portal installer will kick off it’s own silent install of WAS).

The first thing to do when debugging a WAS install problem is to look at the logs in ~/waslogs . These indicated the following problem:

CWUPI0033E:
There is insufficient free disk space on the system:

/opt/WebSphere/AppServer:
Required: 1403 MB
Available: 0 MB

/var/tmp/:
Required: 1403 MB
Available: 0 MB

/opt/.ibm/.nif:
Required: 2 MB
Available: 0 MB

Please ensure that there is enough free disk space
on all required filesystems and restart the installation.

If /var/tmp/ , /opt/WebSphere/AppServer
and /opt/.ibm/.nif are on the same partition,
then the amount of space required is the sum of the space
required on /var/tmp/ , /opt/WebSphere/AppServer and
/opt/.ibm/.nif.

My system had heaps of space on it! Surely the installer wouldn’t even run if there was 0 MB free! The method that the installer used to determine how much disk space was free was failing. But how does the installer figure out how much disk space is free? After lots of poking and prodding around I stumbled on dtrace. I had heard of it before, but never had the opportunity to use it. Dtrace is a mechanism to instrument and probe the tiniest little interactions on a Solaris/BSD/OSX machine. Being so powerful, it has a steep learning curve. This collection of handy dtrace oneliners was really helpful.

I kicked off the WAS install portion of the Portal install and ran this dtrace command in another window.

dtrace -n 'syscall::open*:entry { printf("%s %s",execname,copyinstr(arg0)); }' -o trace.log

It captured each file interaction that occurred when running the install. Luckily the WAS install failed after about 30 seconds, so there wasn’t too much data to wade through.

Here is the dtrace log (trace.log from the command above). Something called gushellsupport.sh is calling df (standard unix disk free command). This must be how the installer determines how much disk space is free. The column on the left is the pid of the install process (which is java) . The library files on the far right are what is being called by each executable; the next column over to the left.

0 44056 open64:entry gushellsupport.s /var/tmp/ismp003/gushellsupport.sh
0 43668 open:entry df /var/ld/ld.config
0 43668 open:entry df /lib/libcmd.so.1
0 43668 open:entry df /lib/libc.so.1
0 43668 open:entry df /usr/dt/lib/nls/msg/C/SUNW_OST_OSCMD.cat
0 43668 open:entry df /usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/SUNW_OST_OSCMD.mo
0 43668 open:entry df /var/ld/ld.config
0 43668 open:entry df /lib/libcmd.so.1
0 43668 open:entry df /lib/libc.so.1
0 43668 open:entry df /etc/mnttab
0 43668 open:entry df /usr/dt/lib/nls/msg/C/SUNW_OST_OSCMD.cat
0 43668 open:entry df /usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/SUNW_OST_OSCMD.mo

This script, gushellsupport.sh, is owned by InstallShield so I can’t publish the contents of it. But it has a diskcheck function in it that relies on ‘/usr/xpg4/bin/df’ which I didn’t have installed. Solaris has many different versions of the same tools that are left behind for backwards compatibility. When installing this system initially, I used the “Core System Support” option in the Solaris install to build a lean, quick machine. Unfortunately it didn’t come with this legacy version of df.

df belongs in a package called SUNWxcu4. To install it, mount your Solaris CD and go to the directory Solaris_10/Product/ . In there, copy the subdirectory ‘SUNWxcu4′ to /var/spool/pkg and run

pkgadd SUNWxcu4

If you rerun the install again it’ll work since gushellsupport.sh is calling the correct version of df. Talk about obscure huh?

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to the Solaris boot prompt?

Graham — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:12:03 +0000

Whenever I have to install Solaris (on SPARC), I never remember how to get it to boot from a cd. Sparc machines have their own bios system, which comes up as a this minimal, black on white serif-ey command prompt. You can type commands like:

boot cdrom

… and it’ll boot from the cd rom.

But how to get to the boot menu? Sun machines come with a special keyboard which has a extra row beyond the num pad. There’s a key there labeled STOP, and the ‘Sun Way’ of getting to the boot shell / bios prompt is to hit STOP + A at the same time. I’ve never got one of these keyboards around (we’re using a massive KVM thingy) so I’m forever googling to figure out how to send STOP – A to my Sparc box without having to get to the

So here’s what you do. In normal Solaris, just type :

init 0

And it’ll drop you to the boot prompt. From there go boot cdrom and you’re done.

As an aside I always thought it was funny that in the Solaris install program, they have all these different name resolution schemes you can set, and DNS (the one you basically always want) is the third selection down. Guys, come on, no one uses NIS+ anymore, give it a break! Probably not *that* funny, maybe just a little bit funny.