Solaris

What does zoneadm list -cv show?

Zones make up a sort of Solaris Virtualisation environment similar to VMware. Are you familiar with that?

The global zone is the base OS and a non-global zone is equivalent to a guest OS on VMware.

A zone lives in a container, so zones and containers can usually be considered as the same thing (unless your configuration is unusual).

If you are accessing the console then, by default, you are logging into the global zone. If so, please post the output of:

Code:

 
zoneadm list -cv

That will tell us what you're looking at.

However, this type of virtualisation usually hosts multiple systems so trying to change the graphics adapter (on all zones) is unusual.

Please post why you are trying to do this. What is the app?

Depending on your response this could be getting tricky but there are some heavy-weight members on this forum who will contribute if they read this thread.

Certainly, the fact that your driver install error includes mention of zone is significant. The error about /a/etc/minor_perm access is common where zones are involved.

Please post as much of the story as possible so this community can help you.

Also, let me invite all Solaris expert members to "pile in". (Thanks Bartus11 - you beat me to this post).

********* S U C C E S S !!! ************
Eureka! Finally at long last I've got my system running off the PGX32 board! In retrospect, it was quite simple - just a matter of knowing which magic spells to cast. This is what did it:

1. I used the drivers in the file pgxOWv30_s9.tar on the techsource.com web site.
2. Instead of using their install_all script, I typed in the pkgadd commnd myself, adding the -G switch, ie.(from a root console login)
# pkgadd -G -d ./ TSIpgxx.u TSIpgx.u TSIpgxw
3. Reboot with a boot -- -r, then STOP-a to get an OK prompt.
4. From the OK prompt, do
OK setenv pcib-probe-list 1,3
OK reset

And hey presto, the system rebooted with the console coming up on my big monitor connected to the external PGX32 card!

Note that these drivers are clearly listed as being for "Solaris 8 and 9 only", but they work for 10 also (and just to be clear, this is Solaris for Sparc). They also talk about OBP 3.17, but I've got 3.25 and again, they work fine anyway. One thing that was not necessary was messing around with /etc/dt/config/Xservers. I created one of these according to some instructions I found and it really screwed up the system. There is no need to even have that file present to make this all work.

I think the first key to this puzzle was going to techsource for the drivers and the final one was using the -G switch in pkgadd. That caused the drivers to install cleanly without any errors. So many many many thanks to everyone who took the time to follow this thread and offer suggestions, and especially to hicksd8, who is now my hero.


---------- Post updated at 01:46 AM ---------- Previous update was at 12:51 AM ----------

For completeness,

Code:

bash-3.00$  zoneadm list -cv 
 ID NAME             STATUS         PATH 
  0 global           running        / 
  - bristol-jes      installed      /data/zones/bristol-jes

Brilliant! What a result. Well done!

You're obviously an IT professional, and ten out of ten for tenacity, but you may be distracted right now with all the effort so I'll say it anyway (not wishing to upset you), backup the whole thing asap.

You don't want to go through that again!!!

All the best.

"backup the whole thing asap"

Ha - you read my mind. That was the very next thing I was going to tackle. What I'd like to do is backup my entire boot drive such that I can restore it to a new disk in the event of a catastophic failure. I'm sure the drive in there now (a 9 GB 5 1/4" Seagate) is the original one that came with the machine. I probably shouldn't even say anything, but it's not clear how much more life is left in it. It's nearly full anyway so it would be nice to replace it with a larger one.

I have three possible avenues for backups: a mounted nfs file server on my lan, a working USB card on the Sun, and enough free space on my 40 GB secondary drive to do a backup there.

I don't know if this should be a new thread but if you have any suggestions, I'd very much appreciate hearing them.

(And I actually am an IT professional, or at least I was until I retired. I started using Sun workstations way back in the pre-Sparc Sun 4 days working for a large company in R&D. But we always had sysadmins to handle stuff like backups and installing new cards, so that part is all new to me).

Well I could write loads about this but I'm not going to. With your experience (you used to reading man pages) I only need to give you the clues. (That's what I've been doing up 'til now and it's all you needed).

Backup is a matter of choice but, given the options you list, I would go for the NFS remote mount. I assume, given the age of the machine, that your filesystems are ufs.

I would use ufsdump with switches 0f (meaning 0 for full backup and f to determine filename/pathname). This will create a file for the filesystem dump on the remote system. You can then run this file to tape (or copy it to a further system with a tape drive) and take it offsite.

To recover, in brief,

1. Fit new drive in system.
2. Boot from cdrom
3. Use 'format' to set up filesystem slices and swap
4. Use 'newfs' to write filesystems on the new disk slices.
5. Mount the new (empty) filesystem (under /a)
6. Use 'ifconfig' to manually plumb, set ip address, and mark as 'up' the network interface.
7. Mount the remote nfs system containing the ufsdump (under /mnt).
8. ufsrestore the filesystem(s)

If there is more than one filesystem on your system you can back them all up this way. You can still restore individual files if needed.

Tip: Get the vtocs (virtual table of contents; partitioning sizes in DOS terms) by running 'prtvtoc' on your system and recording the output. This is invaluable in a recovery situation.

Any other questions just ask.

Hope that helps.

PS: To be absolutely purist, you should use 'fssnap' to create a snapshot of your filesystem (this will output a device name for the snapshot), then mount that device read-only, and then ufsdump that read-only filesystem. If the system is not quiesent, then you're still covered. What you will be backing up would be a stationary snapshot and not a moving filesystem. See man pages and Google that.

Perfect! That's exactly what I needed to know. Thanks. I actually also have an external SCSI QIC-150 tape drive and a bunch of tapes, but I'm still wrestling with getting the system to see the SCSI card (it's an Adaptec AVA-2902E/I). But that's another story :-) OK, that story is that probe-scsi-all returns nothing.

First though I have to address a cooling issue. It looks like this PGX32 exercise was just too much for the machine's tired old CPU fan and it has now gone to that great tower case in the sky. So we're down until I can replace that. No biggie.