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Installation Notes

 

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Team Activities to Date:

August 27 – September 9

The hardware received by the Project Caligula members was documented. Refer to the hardware list
The server was booted to determine the basic operation of various components.

September 10 – September 23

The Solaris 7 operating system was obtained
Disk caddy obtained
Attempt made to install the operating system. A problem was encountered when attempting to boot from CDROM. This must be done from the system prompt (> ok ) by typing BOOT CDROM…The Sun Installation manuals state that, to get to the system prompt, the "STOP-A" key must be depressed. This is fine if you have a Sun Microsystems keyboard, with its unique adapter (incompatible with PS/2 keyboards). As basic I/O on this particular machine is achieved via a terminal device on serial port A, alternative methods had to be investigated.
Additional discussion was held regarding the possibility that an operating system install could not even be done without the default keyboard and video device.
Further research indicated that when a Sun SPARC-based machine is booting up, it checks to see if there is a keyboard present. If no keyboard is present, the system will default to its first serial port for I/O. A system with no video adapter or proprietary keyboard is referred to as a "headless system". It was also discovered that "CTL-BREAK" issued from a port connection is equivalent to the Sun keyboard command "STOP-A"
Successful experimentation with the above procedures revealed that the project could proceed without obtaining a Sun keyboard, video adapter and monitor.

September 24 – October 7

An initial "bare-bones" installation was performed. Problems were encountered upon the initial reboot. The following message was repeatedly displayed: "Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet"… Further investigation revealed that the machine was attempting to boot from the network connection. This indicated that the machine’s previous owners had likely altered the NVRAM settings. The settings would have to be changed to force the machine to boot from the boot slice on the hard disk. (Similar to "boot device" BIOS settings in the PC world).
The project team set the NVRAM parameters to their factory defaults with the following command sequence:
  1. Obtain a system prompt ">ok"
  2. Check the settings using the printenv command
  3. type setenv boot-device disk
  4. type setenv diag-switch? false
This did not resolve the problem. A closer look at the default settings revealed that even in default, the machine is expected to run some diagnostic processes from the network – BOOT-DIAG defaults to NETWORK. This was changed:
  1. Obtain a system prompt ">ok"
  2. type setenv boot-diag disk

The team conjectures that, for security reasons, some diagnostic checks are run from a remote location, so that local changes are more readily flagged. Further investigation is warranted.

October 8 – October 21

Installation of OS with Final IP address and Domain name

Friday, October 13

The entire distribution of Solaris 7 was installed onto the server in the John Ware building. This is the last expected installation before the machine will be moved into it’s domain in the Senator Burns building.

Wednesday, October 18

The server was moved into the Server Room on the 4th floor of the Senator Burns building.

Network Connectivity Issues

The static IP address of the server was assigned during OS installation. Problems were encountered when trying to make it a member of the domain. The server's IP address was pinged within the subnet successfully. The server could not be pinged from outside of the subnet. The routing table on the machine was listed with the following command and the contents of the table were displayed:

$ netstat –r

Routing Table:
Destination Gateway Flags Ref Use Interface
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
142.110.xxx.xxx caligula U 3 54 le0
224.0.0.0 caligula U 3 0 le0
localhost localhost UH 0 226 lo0

 

No entry was present for the default gateway. Because no naming services were requested during the OS installation, no prompt was made for  entry of the default gateway. An entry was inserted using the following command:

$ route add default xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

where x is the default gateway of that domain.

 

The netstat –r command displayed the contents of the table with the default gateway listed shown below.
Routing Table:
Destination Gateway Flags Ref Use Interface
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
142.110.xxx.xxx caligula U 3 54 le0
224.0.0.0 caligula U 3 0 le0
default 142.110.xxx.xxx UG 0 298
localhost localhost UH 0 226 lo0

 

In order to provide a default gateway upon boot, the IP address of the gateway should have been saved as...

/etc/defaultrouter...

Additional words of warning regarding the tty terminal device

Should the serial communication between the terminal device and the server be interrupted for any reason, the system will percieve this as a CTL-BRK sequence, halting the OS... Consideration must be given to either:
  1. Bringing the system up without the tty terminal connected, or
  2. Ensuring the tty device is powered through a UPS (considering the role of this device, it is good pratice to ensure UPS support is available, anyway)

Friday, October 20

Webmin was installed on the server. This tool was installed in order to view the different characteristics of the server’s hardware and configuration. The tool can be used for administration but there are utilities in the package that do have software bugs. The website for Webmin is http://www.webmin.com/.

Perl must be present before installing Webmin. Perl is included as a package in Solaris 8, however it is not included in Solaris 7. Perl can be obtained from http://sunfreeware.com/.

Updated: October 29, 2000