Life on the OutSide

Friday, February 06, 2015

Oracle Solaris 11 Derived Manifest and modifying the boot system

This is a follow on from last last blog entry "Oracle Solaris 11 Derived Manifest with Automated Installation", where I mentioned that I could not examine the disk partitions of the new system since the aiuser does not have permission to run fdisk.

Quote: "The derived manifest script can run commands to read system attributes. AI runs the script as role `aiuser`. The `aiuser` role has all the privileges of a non-privileged user plus the following additional privileges: solaris.network.autoconf.read, solaris.smf.read.*

The `aiuser` role is non-privileged except that it can read more information from the system than other non-privileged users. The `aiuser` role cannot change the system."

There is more to read »

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Oracle Solaris 11 Derived Manifest with Automated Installation

I have been looking at Derived Manifest recently so that I can have one manifest to control the installation of Oracle Solaris 11.2 FCS on our dual boot desktops.

Ref:

Installing Using an Install Server (Solaris 11.2)
Setting Up an AI Server (Solaris 11.2)
Creating a Derived Manifest Script (Solaris 11.2)

There is more to read »

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

PXE booting for Oracle Solaris using Windows DHCP server

A quick blog entry about getting Solaris PXE boot working with Microsoft Windows DHCP server. I was always told it was easy but I never managed to get it to working even though a lot of people I talked to had it working.

The problem was that our network was not correctly configured for PXEbooting. Problem was our network need PortFast enable (Good Ref: Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and PortFast).

With that enabled it was a matter of just setting the right parameters in the Scope Options of the DHCP server. (Good ref: PXE booting with WDS – DHCP Scope vs IP Helpers)

Option 060: Client identifier. Set to PXEClient
Option 066: Boot Server Host Name: Solaris_auto_installer
Option 067: Bootfile Name: 0143162EC46C31.bios
Option 043: Vendor Specific Info: 01 04 00 00 00 00 FF (Ref: Differential Analysis - WDS & DHCP Separation )

With the above set your x86 systems will be able to find the AI Server.

Monday, September 01, 2014

Goodbye UW IMAP! Hello Dovecot! Oracle Solaris 11 setup guide for Dovecot

After many years of being faithful to UW IMAP it was time to move on. The move was required since UW IMAP was no longer being supported and I was having problems using it with latest version of Horde Webmail, so I decided to install Dovecot on our Oracle Solaris 11 systems.

I was surprised how easy the installation went to get Dovecot working on Solaris 11, which was pleasing.

References:

Welcome to the Dovecot Wiki

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/

IMAP server with dovecot

http://karellen.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/imap-server-with-dovecot.html

Solaris 10 に Dovecot 2.1 をインストールする方法

http://blog.torigoya.net/2012/07/01/solaris10-dovecot

There is more to read »

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Install Firefox 30 (latest version) onto Oracle Solaris 11

As you know Oracle Solaris 11 (11.1, 11.2) comes with Firefox 17 ESR and Mozilla 17 ESR, which is very good news. I have had no problems with this version until now when I upgrade our Oracle Database 12c to 12.1.0.2 and found out that I could no longer access the Enterprise Manager Database Express via the browser since you require Firefox 24+.

Thankfully someone has compiled there our later version and placed them in mozilla contrib locations http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases.

There is more to read »

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Setting up SSL for Solaris 11 LDAP (ldapclient to use LDAPS)

Following on from my last blog about "Setting up SSL for Solaris 11 LDAP client (changing AD password from Solaris)" I thought I would finish it off by changing my name service from LDAP to LDAPS. Hopefully your system is already talking to Active Directory over LDAP for all your authentication ("Solaris 11 Authentication Login with Active Directory").

Step 1: Setting up SSL for Solaris 11 LDAP client (changing AD password from Solaris)

There is more to read »

Friday, May 16, 2014

Setting up SSL for Solaris 11 LDAP client (changing AD password from Solaris)

I have been using LDAP for years for our authentication and using LDAP Active Directory for about 3 years, but this was always using ldap so I thought I would start looking at SSL.

This blog entry will look at the initial setup and how you can talk to the AD server over SSL. The information here is nothing new and is all covered in the references but hope this shorter version helps.

References:

Changing Active Directory passwords via LDAP using PHP

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~smp/resources/ad-passwds

Enabling SSL in the Active Directory Connector

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E20295_01/html/821-0422/aarjc.html

Steps to setup SSL for Solaris LDAP client (certutil and openssl)

https://blogs.oracle.com/baban/entry/steps_to_setup_ssl_using

Authenticating UNIX/Linux to Windows 2008R2. Part 2 : Solaris 10

http://osdude.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/authenticating-unixlinux-to-windows-2008r2-part-2-solaris-10/

There is more to read »

Friday, December 06, 2013

Windows 7 client Printer Queue fails when printing to CUPS Server via IPP

A short entry, since if you have setup a cups server and you have set up the Windows 7 clients to print to it via IPP you may find the windows printer spooler some times plays up. We had this for a while with our setup and I could not find a answer. It looks like Microsoft really tries hard for it software to only work with Windows.

I bet there is code inside windows which says if talking to non-windows system add bugs!!

Anyway if you get any of the following in your cups logs:

Print-Job client-error-bad-request
windows-ext client-error-bad-request
Print-Job client-error-bad-request
Returning IPP client-error-bad-request for windows-ext
Missing printer-uri, job-uri, or ppd-name attribute

You see the following from windows:

Print job fails.
Event is logged in the Operation Log that shows that the print job was successful. However, the size of the print job is displayed as 0 bytes.
tmp files appearing in printer spool

You need a hot fix which has been out since November 14, 2012.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2769359
KB2769359 : Print job fails when the printer driver isolation feature is set to isolated or shared mode in Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2

Hope this helps

Friday, October 18, 2013

Solaris 11: Setup Printer server using Cups and Windows 7 x64

Now that Solaris 11.1 now comes with cups v1.4.5 I thought I would replace our old Solaris 10 lpd server with a cups set up. The printer server is used by many clients, MacOS, Windows and Solaris. Note: Solaris SRU 11.1.8.4.0 fixed a few problems with Cups.

Steps:

Create Solaris zone (printsrv)
Setup cups server and printers
Setup Windows 7 clients

There is more to read »

Friday, September 13, 2013

Setup Samba in a zone with Oracle Solaris 11.1 and join a Windows Active Directory Server (ADS)

I have been running Samba on Solaris 11 zone for a while now and I thought I would finally write the instructions up. First, why am I using samba and not the CIFS server which comes with Solaris now. Well, one reason.... CIFS does not work in a zone and Samba does. I have our NFS file-server in a zone so I needs SMB access to those files.

Before we can start you need change the "Maximum number of supplementary groups (groups that a user can be in, additionally to the primary group)".
I have just spotted that this has changed or at least documented in Solaris 11.1, but is still required in /etc/system ref: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29022/chapter2-4.html#gjmtw & http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7634-Less-known-Solaris-11.1-features-A-user-in-1024-groups-and-a-workaround-for-a-25-year-old-problem.html

# echo "set ngroups_max=512" >> /etc/system

Reboot the server.

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Thursday, May 02, 2013

Setting up Oracle Solaris 11 with DHCP and LDAP

Someone asked me how to setup a LDAP client on Solaris if you are using DHCP. I thought it would be a simple answer since Solaris comes with Automatic Network mode. The Automatic mode does a very good job and you can configure a lot of settings, but LDAP support is very limited.

Configuring LDAP When in Automatic Mode (Ref: from Managing Network Configuration When in Automatic Mode)
"Automatic network configuration mode provides limited support for LDAP. Only LDAP anonymous mode works when in automatic mode. If you want to use an LDAP proxy or LDAP self modes and some form of security credentials you must first enable the DefaultFixed profile and manually configure your network. For instructions, see Chapter 12, Setting Up LDAP Clients (Tasks), in Oracle Solaris Administration: Naming and Directory Services."

So, here is a little step by step guide:

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Tuesday, March 19, 2013

UKOUG Solaris SIG

The Solaris Special Interest Group (SIG) has been active since 2005 in a different guise, as London OpenSolaris User Group (LOSUG). The group was formed with the help of Sun Microsystems to enhance the popularity of their next release of their operating system OpenSolaris.

New locations:

Since the opensolaris.org website is about to go offline I am in the process of keeping a copy of the old slides and photos, so they want be lost....

All Presentations can be located here until they are transfered to UKOUG Solaris SIG main site: