Creating a bootable OpenSolaris LiveUSB might prove useful in some situations, for example when installing OpenSolaris on machines without a CD/DVD drive. First, download the OpenSolaris LiveCD image.
Next, install SUNWdistro-const:

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWdistro-const

Generate a USB image from the contents of the LiveCD image:

$ pfexec usbgen osol-0906-x86.iso osol-0906-x86-usb.img /var/tmp/solaris

Dump the USB image into the USB [...]

Today one of my OpenSolaris boxes could not get to the GRUB menu. Instead, I was dropped at the GRUB prompt. I tried running:

bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS

But this was failing with a “inconsistent file system structure” error. I searched the Internet and found ZFS rpool Upgrade and GRUB. What I did is booting from [...]

Since I installed OpenSolaris on the HP Proliant DL180 G5, I’m constantly having problems with init 5 not being able to switch power off on shut down. Today, while searching a bit to see if anyone else had this problem, I came up with the following thread: Shutting down PC. The comment by perksta is [...]

Once I got the OpenSolaris installation kicked I faced another problem. The computer has 3 x 1.5TB and 1 x 2TB disks installed. This is suboptimal when configuring a RAID volume but I thought that I could cheat here. The cheat consists of slicing the 2TB disk in a 1.5TB slice and using the remaining [...]

After all my failures trying to get this HP computer to work, I decided that perhaps OpenSolaris was the solution. And it turned out I was right. OpenSolaris x86 LiveCD uses a 64-bit kernel by default. The tricky part was to get the driver loaded before starting the OpenSolaris installation. And to my fortune, I [...]

And now it is the time to try Solaris 10 on this HP machine. The first thing to take into account is that the HP SmartArray P212 controller requires a closed-source binary from HP that is not distributed in the Solaris media. The cpqary3 driver can be downloaded from the HP Web site, although it [...]

Setting up an anonymous FTP server under Solaris, when using the built-in in.ftpd daemon, is a little bit different than setting it up under GNU/Linux using WUftpd.
First, let’s create the ftp user and ftp group. Then, let’s create the home directory for the ftp user:

mkdir -p /export/home/ftp
groupadd -g 99 ftp
useradd -u 99 -g 99 -s [...]

If you are in charge of administering Solaris machines, you might want to take a look at PCA – Patch Check Advanced.
From its Web page:
pca is a perl script which generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads and installs patches. By default, if run without any option or [...]

I have been fighting for quite some time to get Solaris 10 installed and working properly under VMwae Fusion 1.1 on an Intel Core 2 Duo Mac. I think this is an interaction problem between VMware Fusion and Solaris 10. Even if you tell VMware Fusion that you want to install Solaris in 32-bit mode, [...]