Solaris

Oh, how I regret having chosen Solaris...

Really, when I had my last Solaris system ten years ago I was just happy. Like a tank: Slow, clumsy, ugly but rock-solid. Then there were 10 ten years of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Simple install, fast, nice, good package managing, just running along.

But now I had to find a new OS which supports our archiving software: Either some Linuxtoy or Solaris. Hey great I thought! Solaris rocks. Told my boss I need some new hardware because the fantastic Solaris OS does not work with any sideshow controller, no no, it needs the superdupermegafantastic hardware! So we bought two new Areca 1260 controllers, new disks and everything. Result:

It's saturday evening, 9pm and I have installed Solaris for around the 20th time now. I had to deal with:

- driver installation routine broken, needs manual fixing
- ZFS root filesystem crashes during the boot process (I think while loading the areca driver) and reboots over and over
- installation routine interrupts to shell in the middle of the installation, depending on the amount of odd numbers in the current time or temperature in the room
- boot block does not get installed
- panics because if the /-filesystem being to big.

Ok folks, have I gone moron-mode or what's this about?

All I want to do is to install the OS on a ZFS filesystem. But seems it can't be done? At least not by me!

why not buy sun hardware?

btw. the hba is reported working on solaris 10
BigAdmin - HCL: Areca Technology Corp. ARC-1260

maybe the problem is the other hardware...

The articles at:
Solaris Things: ZFS Root on Solaris Part 2
and
6.
talk about using a ZFS filesystem for root but indicate it is not as straight forword as sticking with UFS, enabling UFS logging and using SolsticeDisksuite or whatever its name is this year to mirror!

I am puzzled by the root filesystem is too big comment, how big is it?
Are you installing on a SPARC or Intel based system?

It's either controller or backplane.

Last thing I did was reinstall UFS on a single disk. This time it came to the login prompt, ten seconds later: fault message from the driver, boom.

The first article predates ZFS boot integration in the installer. Current Solaris 10 installation is as straightforward whether ZFS or UFS is used.

---------- Post updated at 10:09 ---------- Previous update was at 09:31 ----------

What Solaris release are you installing ?
Can you post the full kernel panic message ?

did you boot in failsafe session and looked for log messages ?

Is this SPARC or x86 based Solaris

Latest Solaris 10, just downloaded five days ago.

No I can't, as there is no Error message. (with ZFS) It's plain:

Message "Sun Solaris 5.10 ...", some messages like "Areca SUNWarcmsr driver loaded", screen goes block, beep, BIOS boot screen.

With UFS, can't remember. Will make another attempt tomorrow.

@solaris_user: If you can tell me how to boot in failsafe and load the Areca-driver?

BTW, why not use the remaining space on those two drives as log-devices? Would it be wise?