Micks Distractions

Sun has always said that any appli­ca­tion writ­ten for Solaris 6 will be for­wards com­pat­i­ble with any other ver­sion. It’s a big claim, but as long as the appli­ca­tion adheres to the API it’s pos­si­ble.
Occa­sion­ally you bump into things that don’t adhere to the API, (quite a lot of appli­ca­tions really). This is usu­ally caused by devel­op­ers think­ing that they should do things “this way”, because Sun does it oh so wrong all the time. Con­se­quently, you end up with legacy appli­ca­tions that can’t run on Solaris 10.

Enter Solaris 8 brandz zones. Being able to run legacy appli­ca­tions in a Solaris 8 brandz gen­er­ally gets you around most of the issues in the remain­ing apps that do stu­pid things. How­ever, there’s a cou­ple of quirks with a zone that can intro­duce odd behav­iour in an application.

Progress for exam­ple.…… Read On.
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This is a lit­tle rant from sev­eral angles.

Sun’s Java Web Con­sole is a nice lit­tle toy. Great for those peo­ple who pre­fer the less extreme learn­ing curve of a CLI, and great for man­ager types who like pictures.

I’ve used it sev­eral times before, but thought I’d try it in on x86 Solaris10u6 box I have here. Bloody Sun. You think a released ver­sion implies that it’s sta­ble, and work­ing.
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I’ve been play­ing around with Solaris jump­start recently. I haven’t used it since the early days. It seems that a lot of the old prob­lems still exist. So, I’ve listed most of the com­mon prob­lems and their solu­tion here. This also cov­ers Sun’s JET, (Jump­start Enter­prise Toolkit).
This is a Work In Progress — so I’ll be updat­ing this from time time as I come across issues.
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This howto cov­ers one way of run­ning famil­iar Linux from your CF, SD, or MMC card.

OK, it doesn’t actu­ally boot from SD, but uses a snazzy Linux trick called pivot_root. Which switches over one root with another. This, IMHO, is prob­a­bly the best way of doing it apart from actu­ally directly boot­ing from SD. Although, I’ve only tried this on a 38xx based iPAQ it should work for all hand­helds based on famil­iar. Heck, it should work for any­thing really.

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If you have an iPAQ installed with famil­iar Linux and want it to con­nect to the net using your Nokia mobile via GPRS; then this is how you do it.
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I had the sit­u­a­tion at work where I wanted to run Clearcase under a Solaris 10 zone. With a bit of coerc­ing it’s pos­si­ble to do, and doesn’t impact much of the global zone at all. If you don’t know what Clearcase is, then this still may be handy infor­ma­tion to know. Undoubt­edly, there are other appli­ca­tions that rely on load­able mod­ules.
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My aging 1GHz PC was creak­ing under ths strain of run­ning too many vir­tual PCs. So I decided to upgrade to a much bet­ter, faster PC. I even­tu­ally set­tled on an AMD64 based PC, (200G HD, 3G DDR2 RAM). Basi­cally a nice cool, (lit­er­ally as well), box. The only trou­ble is that I couldn’t get my vmware to run. Aaaaaaaaaaargh. This is a short howto on what I had to do to get it to run.
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