Solaris basics: checking which package a file belongs to Comments Off on Solaris basics: checking which package a file belongs to

We’ve all been there – there’s a missing binary or library on a Solaris host, someone’s accidentally deleted it, and we need to re-install the package. Or the other common scenario – two boxes that have been built by hand, one has binary A and the other doesn’t – which package adds it?

Along with the usual Solaris package management commands of pkgadd and pkgrm, there’s a lesser known utility called pkgchk. pkgchk allows us to check which package a file belongs to.

pkgchk will work with binaries:

-bash-3.00$ /usr/sbin/pkgchk -l -p /usr/bin/less
NOTE: Couldn't lock the package database.
Pathname: /usr/bin/less
Type: regular file
Expected mode: 0555
Expected owner: root
Expected group: bin
Expected file size (bytes): 117760
Expected sum(1) of contents: 20724
Expected last modification: Jan 23 01:48:30 2005
Referenced by the following packages:
        SUNWless       
Current status: installed

And we can also invoke pkgchk for libraries as well:

-bash-3.00$ /usr/sbin/pkgchk -l -p /lib/libresolv.so.1
NOTE: Couldn't lock the package database.
Pathname: /lib/libresolv.so.1
Type: regular file
Expected mode: 0755
Expected owner: root
Expected group: bin
Expected file size (bytes): 48368
Expected sum(1) of contents: 5063
Expected last modification: Jan 23 01:44:54 2005
Referenced by the following packages:
        SUNWcslr       
Current status: installed

For a quick overview of some of the other options, just invoke pkgchk with the -? command line:

 -bash-3.00$ /usr/sbin/pkgchk -?
usage:
        pkgchk [-l|vqacnxf] [-R rootdir] [-p path[, ...] | -P path[, ...]]
                [-i file] [options]
        pkgchk -d device [-f][-l|v] [-p path[, ...] | -P path[, ...]]
                [-V ...] [-M] [-i file] [-Y category[, ...] | pkginst [...]]
        where options may include ONE of the following:
                -m pkgmap [-e envfile]
                pkginst [...]
                -Y category[, ...]

As you can see from the output, pkgchk is also very handy to see if the binaries or libraries that were part of a Solaris package file have been overwritten. As each file in a package has it’s checksum, file size, ownership, and permissions stored as part of the package manifest, this gets added to the Solaris package database when the package is installed – giving a quick and easy method to sanity check your installation.

Solaris basics: configuring the DHCP client Comments Off on Solaris basics: configuring the DHCP client

Having covered how to manually configure ethernet interfaces in Solaris, I’ll now go over configuring the DHCP client. Solaris comes bundled with both a DHCP client and server, but here we just want to configure the client to go out and configure a Solaris ethernet interface.

Instead of a hostname.<interface> file, you need to create two empty files – dhcp.<interface> and hostname.<interface>, in the /etc/directory

bash-3.2$ touch /etc/dhcp.e1000g0
bash-3.2$ touch /etc/hostname.e1000g0

Reboot for the changes to take effect.

NOTE: you can have either DHCP or a static IP address – so double check which files are in place under /etc and what their contents are.

DHCP can be checked with the following commands:

bash-3.2$ /usr/sbin/ifconfig e1000g0 dhcp status

And you can release the DHCP lease with:

bash-3.2$ /usr/sbin/ifconfig e1000g0 dhcp release

DHCP from within VMWare will allocate a default router and DNS settings automatically to your Solaris VM. To enable this to work properly, both /etc/defaultrouter and /etc/resolv.conf must be present, but empty.

If these files already exist, just delete them:

bash-3.2$ rm /etc/defaultrouter
bash-3.2$ rm /etc/resolv.conf

Then recreate them as empty files with the touch command:

bash-3.2$ touch /etc/defaultrouter
bash-3.2$ touch /etc/resolv.conf

Now reboot and note the new settings take effect.

Solaris basics: configuring ethernet interfaces Comments Off on Solaris basics: configuring ethernet interfaces

Recently I’ve had several clients who’ve just started with Solaris, and who have had roughly similar questions. So I thought I’d put up a few “How To” posts covering some Solaris basics.

Each LAN interface in Solaris has a configuration file in /etc which is named after the interface name and it’s instance.

So, let’s assume that you have two e1000g interfaces configured – you’d have two configuration files:

/etc/hostname.e1000g0
/etc/hostname.e1000g1

These files will just contain a hostname, which maps to an entry in /etc/hosts.

An example from my OpenSolaris development workstation:

bash-3.2$ cat /etc/hostname.e1000g0 
grond 

And this is /etc/hosts:

# Internet host table 
# 
::1 grond grond.local localhost loghost 
127.0.0.1 localhost 
192.168.13.100	grond grond.local loghost 

When Solaris boots, all it does to configure a LAN interface is look for hostname.* files in /etc. It then looks up the hostname in /etc/hosts to find out the IP address, then configures the interface.

So if you need to change the IP address of a LAN interface in Solaris, all you need to do is edit the hostname entry in /etc/hosts and reboot. For example, to change grond’s e1000g0 IP address to a different subnet, /etc/hosts would be modified to:

# Internet host table 
# 
::1 grond grond.local localhost loghost 
127.0.0.1 localhost 
192.168.125.100	grond grond.local loghost 

Then reboot the host for the changes to take effect.