Phil found a bit of a bug in VMWare Solaris 10 guests. It seems the VMXNet driver is has some kind of error with large I/O, which we hope is what’s stopping the Jumpstart from working. VMWare have acknowledged it and every release they say its fixed, well it ain’t in Server 1.0.2

I’ve installed Solaris 10u3 on my laptop, I was quite surprised how well it detected everything – now weird screen issues when running Gnome, no issues with the Synaptic touchpad, no network problems with my Realtek NIC, although I doubt my USB-to-RS232 cable will work. It’s currently copying files from the CD using setup_install_server, don’t you just hate the crappy DVD drives they put in laptops – like 10KB/sec read speed!

I got my USB missle launcher working. The C driver is a bit flaky, but the Python one is fine. You can only fire one rocket at a time it seems, unless that’s because the batteries aren’t charged yet. I might take the Python module apart to get rid of the GUI and write a web frontend instead.

I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.1.2 because of the vulnerability, although previously it was 2.1.0 anyway, not the dodgey 2.1.1

Urgh, I feel rotten again – just as I’d gotten over my cold I think I’m getting another one. I’ve got a really bad headache, sniffy and came home from work and went to bed for three hours as I was freezing cold. And being able to sleep with a 1U server in your room is no mean feat!

Update: just watched Wicker Man 2006, which has got to be the worst movie ever, it was even set in America instead of Scotland, although there was a homage to Edward Woodward from the original.

Not done much this weekend, had a touch of the squirts 🙁

I’ve pretty much given up with trying to get Jumpstart working on the Netra, I might look for a CD-ROM drive on eBay, or maybe borrow a SPARC from work to try, I think it’s either a hardware issue (PROM?) or an NFS incompatibility.

I watched Edison, which was OK, about police corruption, I also watched Red Eye, which was very good – about a woman on a plane blackmailed to help kill a politician.

I’ve spent about five hours tonight fighting to get the Netra to Jumpstart from a Solaris x86 VMWare install and just keep getting the same result as I did from Linux – it gets IP/hostname/boot image, but then doesn’t seem to fire up the installer, it does the odd NFS transaction, but otherwise just sits there on the LOM saying “38e00”

I’m actually quite getting to like the svcadm stuff, it’s nice to type a command to enable/disable a service and it’s set permanently, no editing rc.d scripts or xinetd.conf etc. And svcs has a nicer output than netstat for network service status.