Beryl's Blog

I was prepared to jump through more than a few hoops. While adding drives and file systems has become progressively easier since I first started using Linux in 1995 this kind of thing can still be more than a bit trying... and so I prepared for the worst.

Turned out the procedure to add an external USB drive was so easy that I rechecked things 3 times in order to make sure I didn't miss an important step.

Typing rmformat at the prompt provided all the information needed to complete the setup:

beryl@workstation:~$ rmformat
Looking for devices...
     1. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c8t0d0p0
        Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@1/sd@0,0
        Connected Device: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22NS50  TN00
        Device Type: CD Reader
	Bus: IDE
	Size: 6.0 MB
	Label: 
	Access permissions: Medium is not write protected.
     2. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c9t0d0p0
        Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci17aa,1010@1a,7/storage@3/disk@0,0
        Connected Device: WD       10EAVS External  1.75
        Device Type: Removable
	Bus: USB
	Size: 953.9 GB
	Label: 
	Access permissions: Medium is not write protected.

Then adding the drive and putting it to work backing up the internal drive was as easy:

beryl@workstation:~$ pfexec zpool create usbpool01 c9t0d0p0

You can check the result by entering zpool list at the command line.

beryl@workstation:~$ zpool list
NAME        SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool       464G  69.2G   395G    14%  ONLINE  -
usbpool01   928G  37.9G   890G     4%  ONLINE  -

There you have it. Maybe 60 seconds total to add a drive and whip out a file system on it.

Such a deal!

The vast majority of the information that got me to this point came from: Constantin's Blooog. If you're just getting your feet wet with OpenSolaris Constantin's Blooog is a great resource.

We are, however, still trying to figure out what a "Blooog" is...

Beryl

Way back during the tail end of both the Vietnam and the Cold War I served on the USS Thomas A. Edison, SSBN 610 - a nuclear powered fleet ballistic missile submarine.

The one thing about the Edison that continues to impress me to this day was her simplicity. The Edison was nuclear powered. She could carry up to 16 Polaris missiles, each and every one of them armed with a nuclear warhead. She carried a crew of roughly 130. She could stay beneath the surface of the ocean and remain completely undetectable until the food supply supply ran out. Rest assured, she was the cutting edge. But everything that made her, from the toilets (essentially behind size funnels sitting on top of a ball valve) to her S5W Pressurized Water Nuclear Reactor was an exercise in simplicity. Some of her, her nuclear power plant immediately comes to mind, was so elegantly simple that the simplicity itself reached, perhaps, a level which might be best described as art.

The power of simplicity...

Do I need comments?

No, though I will probably get around to adding comments one of these days.

Do I need trackbacks?

I've gotten along just fine without them so far.

What about pings?

Ever road a submarine down to test depth? Once the boat leaves port you are on her and you are going to stay aboard her until the powers that be decide to let you off the beast. Make no mistake about it, there's no getting off a boat before she goes down. It doesn't matter how afraid you are, once they point her down the only thing you can do is to bend over, kiss your tush goodbye, then sit back and enjoy the ride.

It seems to me that much the same holds true within the electronic haze of cyberspace. Your mileage may very however my experience is the search engines will find my sites without any prompting from me, and if I've put something on them worth reading they'll do quite well in the search results.

More importantly, perhaps, I've always preferred the less traveled road.

Chronicle gets the job done, and it does it quite nicely.

The chronicle blog compiler converts simple, easy to manage text files into static HTML pages with the minimum necessities for supporting basic blog functionality.

The chronicle blog compiler is a pleasure to use...

http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle/

beryl

Sun's engineers built Perl for OpenSolaris with Sun's C complier (cc). Since gcc is the first C compiler in the path on a default OpenSolaris install attempts at building Perl Modules fail - cc (Sun's compiler) and gcc (the GNU Compiler) don not play together nicely. Fortunately the fix is an easy one.

If you are a C, C++ and or fortran programmer installing SunStudio may be the best way to go. All you have to do is join the SDN to get a free SunStudio license:

http://developers.sun.com/devtools/index.html.

The easiest way to install SunStudio is by using the GUI Package Manager, however, the fastest way is via the command line:

beryl@workstation:~$ pfexec pkg install sunstudio12u1

If you are not planning to do some coding for Solaris and/or OpenSolaris then SunStudio Express will do the trick quite nicely:

beryl@workstation:~$ pfexec pkg install sunstudioexpress

Next you'll need to edit ~/.profile. Why? In order to make the transition from Linux to Unix as painless as possible Sun's engineers installed a number of GNU utilities on OpenSolaris and setup the default system paths so that the GNU tools come up first. To build Perl modules you need cc rather than gcc and making this happen is as easy as appending /opt/sunstudio12.1/bin/: to the path settings in your ~/.profile. Here's what the ~/.profile on my machine looked like after I completed this modification:

#
# Simple profile places /usr/gnu/bin at front,
# adds /usr/X11/bin, /usr/sbin and /sbin to the end.
#
# Use less(1) as the default pager for the man(1) command.
#
export PATH=/opt/sunstudio12.1/bin/:/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
export MANPATH=/usr/gnu/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/X11/share/man
export PAGER="/usr/bin/less -ins"
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/jdk/latest

#
# Define default prompt to @:<"($|#) ">
# and print '#' for user "root" and '$' for normal users.
#
PS1='${LOGNAME}@$(/usr/bin/hostname):$(
    [[ "${LOGNAME}" == "root" ]] && printf "%s" "${PWD/${HOME}/~}# " ||
    printf "%s" "${PWD/${HOME}/~}\$ ")'

And there you have it. Reboot your system and Perl modules should start sliding right in.

Beryl