Quick Solaris 10 hints

This first one came from my friend Coy Hile, hile@cse.psu.edu, how to get rid of the NFSv4 domain question when you are jump starting a Solaris 10 install.

“Okay, it *appears* that if you nuke ${ROOTDIR}/etc/.UNCONFIGURED (if it exists) and touch ${ROOTDIR}/etc/.NFS4inst_state.domain, you won't get that annoying question.”

The second hint is what I have been using Solaris 9 but also works in 10. It speeds things up at least for the last part, the companion disk.

lofiadm –a {path to Solaris 10 iso’s}/sol-10-ccd-GA-sparc-iso.iso
mount –F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

I know there are ways to do others as well, but they are slightly more complicated and I never bothered to learn it, or requires changes on other servers, if you want to submit your quick hints on doing the others.

To help pass the boredom while Solaris 10 is installing you can right click on the desktop and under applications is a terminal program once you get that on screen you can run iostat –xz 2 and watch the data move from the cd-rom to the hard disk. I know only true geeks will find that interesting… okay I’m a geek!

There are loads of freeware preinstalled with Solaris 10, you just have to add the directory to your path.

Bash:
export PATH=/usr/sfw/bin:$PATH

sh:
setenv PATH /usr/sfw/bin:$PATH

csh:
set path = ( /usr/sfw/bin $path)

Here is a quick little script I created to emulate the watch command in Linux

while /bin/true ; do
clear;
echo "Watching command $1, repeats every 2 seconds";
$1;
sleep 2;
done