Solaris

Recently installed a custom PC with Solaris 10 u4, kernelpatch 127112-10.

I was going to use this box as a NAT router using ipf. ipf however caused the box to panic multiple times. This in turn lead to a couple other issues that I would like some input of.

- None of the panic's i've experienced forced the box to reboot. It got stuck in some strange state without monitor signal. The only workaround was reset/powercycle. Strangely enough, after ipf related panics the machine was responding to ping.

- After panic's, my / filesystem didn't pass fsck even though my / fs was logging. Running fsck got really messy, a lot of errors - at one time I even experienced a UFS related panic after reboot/fsck.

- The boot-archive problems after panics. Never really got recovery of the boot-archive to work. I followed the instructions after booting safe mode: mount the boot-disk (one side of the disksuite-mirror), updated the boot-archive. Still complained after reboot.

- On recent reboots, fsck complained that there were problems with the /-filesystem, but it still mounted / and continued on with the boot - UFS panic when trying to logon.

- After the last panic and boot-archive update, I was unable to boot at all. Complained about trying to read blocks outside boot-area or similar. Never tried to recover from here, at this stage I decided to reinstall the box since even if managing to fix the bootaarchive, the state of the / fs seems to be very dodgy.

- When booting in safe-mode to fix fsck problems with root, md-devices are not started and / was mounted ro from one side of the mirror (regardless of booting safemode from HD or DVD). Is there a best practice or decent workaround for doing fsck on the md-device for root at this stage?

Have any of you experienced similar oddities, esp. the filesystem errors after panic even though using UFS logging? What can be the cause of such problems? I shouldn't rule out HW/SATA controller problems (even though I doubt it) or similar, anything else?

The problem of not rebooting after panic, can that also be HW related? Some special measures to take on x86 platforms (custom pc hw) to force reboot on panic?

Anyone been running IPF as a NAT router without problems? I used the freeware ipf on Solaris 9/sparc previously and that was very stable apart from when using VPN passthrough which always panic:ed the box after a while. Saw the exact same behaviour in Solaris ipf now but this one also panics without without VPN (I applied the latest ipf-patch)

Not used to Solaris on x86, any pointers welcome!

Thanks