I decided to try this because I was so eager to see ZFS root in action, so I did
Tried to find a way to perform a text install. No luck, gnome was always there
I googled a bit and found I nice way to get rid of all the gui crap
Code:
pkg install SUNWmercurial
hg clone https://kenai.com/hg/isc~source isc
pfexec isc/opt/samples/minimization.ksh
That took care of the problem
After configuring the system with a static IP it was time to add my second disk to the rpool. Format and fdisk did not do the job despite all the guides a read. When issuing
Code:
zpool attach -f rpool c8d0s0 c9d0s0
it would return a strange I/O error. I was so frustrated and thought that my disk had an issue until I read somewhere that the disk partition has to be copied as well therefore
Code:
prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c8d0s0 | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c9d0s0
zpool attach -f rpool c8d0s0 c9d0s0
did the job
After that it was time to create some ZFS shares. I decided to use SUN cifs server instead of samba. Apparently there is a known bug and the system needs a reboot in order for sharing to work
Apache Php and mysql where installed with no problem since there is an AMP package that takes care of those issues. Also gcc came in because we need to be able to build some packages from source like apcusbd daemon.
Next the DNS server was a bit confusing but it went well considering. But DNS was not enough since I run DHCP as well. I decided to use SUNs implementation instead of ISC. That is a total nightmare to configure so I asked for some help from the forums and I got the response I needed very fast.
So, everything seems to be working fine except cacti which refuses to create graphs
Overall my impression is not bad except that there are quite a lot of bugs. Also the kernel is very "heavy" compared with the one we know! Don't ever try to remove a share if it is being used... you will get a kernel panic
To conclude:
OpenSolaris is not yet mature to be a full server deployment.
If you are a Java developer it is the best choice for your laptop.
Otherwise there are a lot of open source alternatives that spare you the headache...
Be prepared to learn a lot about the svc* manifest sadistic way of using services.
Discover a new UNIX file hierarchy
FreeBSD is still the one and only OS worth living with
Will test it some more and eventually migrate to FreeBSD again.
George