How to Net Boot Solaris 10

[@stevereaver]

I was a Solaris admin in the 90 and 2000's at a large Telco. We never used the desktop. Install it, get ssh running then remote into it.

[@clabretro]

Very cool! I've heard all this Sun stuff was really popular in Telco (and maybe still is). Yeah once I get these couple servers situated it'll definitely be only SSH to interact with them.

[@W1ldTangent]

I always wanted a Sun box to play around with, I've been fascinated by Solaris for a long time. My mother's workplace where I now work used to have a massive Xerox electronic printing press in the basement, and it was all controlled from a state of the art (at the time) Sun workstation of some sort. This was back in the 90s. The eBay prices have so far kept me from my goal of owning one myself.

[@JakeCovey]

F to pay respect to the fallen harddrive.

[@clabretro]

F

[@JesseTheStig]

My friend was able to get me physical cd copies of Solaris 8, 9 and 10 from his work and my sun servers all have CD drives so I'm going to try installing that way. Your video will hopefully give me the motivation to try it out! Again, loving the Sun content!

[@clabretro]

awesome! definitely would've tried the physical media if I had it.

[@billymania11]

Greetings from Denver. I'm enjoying your Sun journey.

[@RoyHess666]

Wait that thing already supported IPv6? Impressive for that time.

[@christopherjackson2157]

Ipv6 is surprisingly old. Mid 1990s iirc. I think the oldest implementation I've personally come across was 1998.

[@Raketenclub]

i watched that until te end as i have a sun ultra 5, a u10 and a u45 here and wanted to learn how to install solaris.... so i learned you don't own a working hard drive. great. ... grml.

[@HALFLIFETRUTHER]

Thank goodness I found this vid I think I might try this with my Sun Ultra 25 that I've had laying

[@clabretro]

nice!

[@s8wc3]

Those old Caviar blacks always made a right racket even when new, lol

[@clabretro]

Haha that's fair. Wasn't ever a quiet drive.

[@kendawg_mcawesome]

I'm gonna stick up for the black disc drive. I like it. It's a little unrefined, but it's visually distinct so it's easy to spot, it matched the dark shadows created by those holes. I don't personally like things that are very silvery, but the design of that unit is kinda nice. If it were grey/silver on the disc drive though, I think it would look a lot more dated. The black in complement to the shadows of the honeycomb circles helps visually break up what would otherwise be quite bland, like shoes that match you belt but not the rest of your outfit. So yeah, I'm gonna stick up for the little drive, I think he looks rather fetching, no need to bully him :')

[@carstenlehmann2360]

One remark... if you insert two drives and want to use ZFS, you have to use the Text based installation wizard. In the graphical install, it is not included to change the disk layout with ZFS. And ZFS ist the best file system you can chose.

[@clabretro]

Oh yeah, I've been meaning to do a full ZFS multi-disk setup with one of these Sun Fires.

[@markpriceful]

Can you just throw a small SATA SSD in there? looks like you put a lot of work into getting the network install environment figured out though - nice job! Looking forward to seeing this come together

[@clabretro]

Yeah, I didn't have any around though. I think if I have this thing on more often I'll get a cheap SSD in there. It's been really nice to have a net boot setup on a VM for both x86 Solaris and SPARC!

[@TheAtariSan]

Small Warning, those ML2032 Battery are not the same than CR2032, they are made to be rechargeable by the host, just like they did on the Dreamcast. It will get quite hot and might explode if you run it for too long. I suggest you hunt a legit Panasonic ML2032 just to be safe in case it do provide power to the battery to recharge it.

[@clabretro]

This is a very good point! I think the previous owner had the wrong battery in there... I pulled out an ML2032 so didn't think twice and put a new ML2032 back in there, but I just read through the Sun documentation and it should be a CR2032. I might have some around but either way I'll get a CR2032 in there!

[@HALFLIFETRUTHER]

A lot of issues you're having with the HDDs is probably because they're too large. I have a Sun Ultra 25 that was misbehaving with certain HDDs but I used an old SSD with 128 gigs and it solved almost all of my problems. I could only get it to identify my 3tb SAS drives once in Linux. Just a thought!

[@clabretro]

oh yeah definitely could be an aspect

[@gnerakles]

I've owned three of that exact WD black model, even fully functional they're crazy loud. Although I dont know if they sounded THAT bad lmao

[@clabretro]

Haha you're not the first to mention that

[@dogeguide2066]

lube up the bearings of the hard drive

[@Jerrec]

Hitachi Deathstars :-)

[@aRndBelgianGuy]

Yey !

[@audiocrush]

Hi there, Which settings for your proxmox vm hardware did you use to get solaris to install? Somehow it fails to install for me with all kinds of different combinations.

[@clabretro]

Hey, I do remember having trouble getting it to work as well, but it was so long ago I don't remember what I did. You'll definitely need an x86 ISO of Solaris, I'm using an x86 version of Solaris 10. I don't see anything else out of the ordinary in my VM setup other than I specifically set the OS Type as "Solaris Kernel." Other than that it looks pretty normal - SeaBIOS, i440fx, VirtIO SCSI.

[@audiocrush]

@@clabretroHi there, thanks for your feedback. I ended up attaching the virtual disk using IDE. For some weird reason it didn't like the scsi controllers. Maybe Solaris 10 u8 is a buggy version?

[@declanmcardle]

@13:26 I don't know what happened that disk, but did you try a Solaris LABEL on it as well as re-trying to format/partition it etc. ?

[@declanmcardle]

OK, the clickey - clackey drive is, as you say, a fallen hero.

[@clabretro]

Yeah, I tried that from Linux but no luck, drive was toast.

[@Dave102693]

I've been thinking about installing Solaris on a old intel pc to use as a server. Is it worth it?

[@clabretro]

I'm new to Solaris so I'd recommend it as something to play around with, but personally I'd just stick to a modern Linux distro, there will be a lot more information online to help out with issues or questions you have.

[@Dave102693]

@@clabretro I figured that would be the answer. What distro is the best to use as a novice?

[@XenonG]

@@Dave102693 Just pick one and dive in, it'll also depend on your hardware components. I recommend Ubuntu or Debian, personally I started with Ubuntu direct on hardware then a few other distros in VMs, before going onto Gentoo. Then I had a spare system I setup as a server with Debian, used it initially just for IRC but gradually added sandboxed DNS (chroot dnsmasq) and DHCP. The differences aren't important, the right tools for the right jobs. So just pick one, and go.

[@clabretro]

I second that -- Ubuntu or anything Debian-based is a great start simply because there is so much help information and support online out there for them. Throw a distro on there and check it out! You can always just try another (and I guarantee you will once you start!)

[@Tsaukpaetra]

6:51 Wait, did that say "Rechargeable"? I didn't know they made rechargeable 2032s...

[@clabretro]

Yeah the ML2032 is rechargeable and the CR2032. This machine accepts CR2032s but I think it's okay to have ML2032s in there as well.

[@renatofp]

Hi! Rememer me and my Journey to revive a blade 100? So I used a Dremel and installed a new battery. Nvram is now working But I don't have the root password. It runs Solaris 7. Can I setup a netboot server using i386? Or I need to emulate sparc using QEMU and setup netboot server as you did? Another option is to use the Sunfire t2000. This machine works, But I don't have a graphics card... I can install Solaris and setup a netboot server, but I need to use the serial or buy a graphics card. So, the easiest way is install a VM and setup a i386 boot server, if it's possible, that's why I'm asking! After watching your channel I called some old friends and pull strings and received some mafhines. But The T2000 I pay about $80. Now I have: T2000 Blade 100 Blade 1500 Blade 2500(one processor)

[@clabretro]

Nice! Yeah I was able to get an x86 ISO of Solaris 10 running in Proxmox, that's what I use as my JumpStart server. It will happily serve up SPARC ISOs to the Sun machines over the network.

[@renatofp]

@@clabretro thanks.. Ill try

[@boardernut]

That x2200 server is basically a PC, like every other x86 server, pretty boring. You should have tried a T server with sparc cpus for more pain.