It’s been a while since I last updated, which I think is because I started a full time job (as a Sys Admin at Rutgers) and I’m finishing up my last two classes of my undergraduate career (yes, it’s take long than I wanted). I think it’s also because I use twitter, which is a nice way of putting down random comnent instead of a full blow post that tends to get long winded to fill out space. I put a feed of my twitter thing on the left. Feel free to follow me if you want.
Anyway, I’ve managed to purchase a Sun Blade 2000 (specs are in the Systems tab), which has become my main desktopy workstation (I think I’m a sucker for the glowing Sun logo on the front). (Yeah, I know I could get a better x86 machine, but I don’t want to)
Erlang has once again has come up and peaked my interest. I got the Joe Armstrong book a few weeks ago and managed to compile erlang for Solaris/SPARC today (I’ve had it working on my iBook for a while now, but the previously mentioned Blade 2000 is a much nice machine to program on (read: it’s got a big screen)). If you need it for Solaris 10/SPARC, send me a message.
If you even considered doing a network Solaris install, you know the docs tell you to use Solaris’ DHCP daemon. For lack of better words, it’s kind of crappy (it might be powerfull but it’s way to complex if you are just doing a simple setup). I’ve found a couple sites with information on how to use ISC’s DHCP server:
Setting Up ISC DHCP Server to Load the Solaris OS and Red Hat Linux Systems
This one time, at bandcamp : jumpstart-dhcp
Damnit, memory on the Ultra 10 is going bad:
Continue reading ‘“triggering page retire”’
Thanks to smed on #ruslug (freenode), I have a new Sparcstation 5. It’s the 110 Mhz variant, complete with 64 MB of RAM and a 2.1 GB hard disk. What really suprised me about this machine is that it has the AFX card that no one seems to have ever seen (the AFX port only existed on the SS5 and it’s rare to find a AFX card). I previously had another SS5 and a Ultra 2, so I had a fair amount of SBUS cards to fill the other two slots.
I know I have a 4 GB disk somewhere around, going to try to find that and install an OS on the machine.
Update: I tried Solaris 7 and it was dog slow getting it installed. I fell back to good old SunOS 4.1.4 to see if the machine is working (the machine originally would have had 4.1.3_U1B).
So I finally install SunOS 4.1.4 (the last of the BSD flavored SunOSes). It wasn’t too bad, in fact the only difficulties that I had to deal with was the fact that format (SunOS/Solaris’ disk partitioner thing) on 4.1.4 deals with cylinders and blocks (versus megabytes, or hell, even kilobytes). After much pain, I realized that format has some “default” layout for some disks (namely the ones shipped with Sun boxen), which allowed me to make a sane disk layout without having to remember how the hell the cylinders and blocks worked out.
I was able to do a full install on the 400 MB disk. The full install includes SunView awesomeness, which I’m not able to experience (I don’t have a monitor on this system and am doing everything via serial console).
The last task is to get Y2K patches. Yes. Y2K. You heard me right the first time. If you know where I can get the patches for SunOS 4.1.4 (sun4m), please contact me. Everyone seems to mention them and say they are one some random ftp site, which no longer has them.
Update: I was able to find a site with an old SunSolve CD posted up (it’s contents is searchable). There I was able to get a list of patches then go to the real SunSolve and download them. My date is finally correct!
By the way, if anyone actually wants the 4.1.4 CD, send me a message, and I’ll post up the image. Someone else was kind enough to give me the image, might as well do the world a favor (if you can call it that).
Update: I’m stupid, Sun has the latest patch report for 4.1.4 on their patch site. Just didn’t look hard enough. Oh, and they still have all the patches.
If the image above didn’t hint at it, I’m actually going to learn Java this time around (versus the four other times). I’m following along with Java Intro Programming (with Passion!) Boot Camp thing (run by Sang Shin) since I probably wouldn’t have the concentration to do it by myself (that is, without something to follow along and homework). I started late (at the end of the second week) but I’m caught up now, hopefully it will all go well.
On a similar note, my workstation is a bit slow (an Ultra 10 is quite a dog now) to run NetBeans, anyone know where I can get a cheap workstation?
I’ve successfully installed IE for Solaris on Solaris 9, but the installed and the actual binary checks for the OS version, so running it on Solaris 10 is a little more involved than I’d like to do (I’ve totally lost interest once I got it install on Solaris 9). It seems more or less like the one for Windows (and it even comes with Outlook Express).
I’ll write a more interesting post in a little while.
I finally got Internet Explorer for Solaris installed after a suggestion from Mike about using LD_PRELOAD and just rewritting uname(2) (probably learn DTrace anyway for kicks).
There is only one week of winter break left and I have done nothing noteworthy. Maybe that will end this week? Probably not. Also, my sleep schedule has also gone to shit.
(If you are going to be around New Brunswick during the week and want to hang out, send me a message.)
In other news, I still haven’t figured out how to install IE for Solaris on Solaris 10 yet. I’ll probably learn DTrace and figure out how to do it myself, since I can’t seem to find the artice which explained how to use DTrace to fake the OS version given to the Oracle installer. I could try wine (as someone suggested), but the point of the whole challenge was to get the Solaris version install so to compare it to the Windows version.
I tried installing Internet Explorer for Solaris while home for Christmas. The installer, apparently, checks the OS release and doesn’t seem to understand “5.10″ (or something along those lines). I remember someone using DTrace to intercept the syscall to uname(3) in the Oracle installer (when trying to install it on OpenSolaris) and changed the release value, does anyone have that page bookmarked by any chance (I’ve googled for it, and can’t find it).
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