Solaris 10: tips and tricks for system administration

As I've mentioned already, a couple day ago I've installed Solaris Express 2/06 on my desktop. And while the system isn't tuned for the maximum comfort, I thought I'd write a few entries for those of you who have just started learning and using Solaris 10.

Today I'll explain how to use Blastwave. It is a wonderful repository of hundres of Solaris software packages, which is, probably, the most quick and hassle-free way of getting newsoftware installed on your system. The beauty of using Blastwave is that with every new package installed, all the additional components it needs to use get downloaded and installed automatically. Below I'm showing the first few steps needed to start using with Blastwave.

1) Packages storage
Create a directory where all the downloaded packages will be stored. It will be better if this directory is on a filesystem with plenty of space - it's hard to make any space usage predictions, but I believe a couple of available gigabytes would be useful.

WARNING: this directory is merely a storage for the packages. The software installed from these packages will reside in a different directory structure - under /opt/csw (read on).



2) pkg-get
This command line tool is all you're going to ever need to download, install or update your Blastwave packages. Before you do anything else, you have to download the package with this tool and get it installed. I'm not showing the standard output commands will give you. Here I'm only giving you the commands you may use.



At this stage you'll have a /opt/csw directory created, where all the installed software will be put. pkg-get is the first installed software, and the full path to this command will be /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get

3) Configuring pkg-get

To change configuration parameters of pkg-get you're going to edit the /opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf file. These are the parameters you may want to change:

url - this specifies what mirror of the Blastwave repository we want to use.

For best results, visit the Blastwave Mirror Status page and select the mirror closest to you geographically.

In the pkg-get.conf file you have to find this:



and now edit the line to include your new mirror server, and not the default ibiblio.org. The closest one to me is heanet.ie:



WARNING: updating mirrors is a responsibility of their personnel, and not the Blastwave.org maintainers. Because of this, some of the official mirrors might not have all the latest changes of the main repository ibiblio.org. So, if something doesn't work, try changing this url parameter back.

UPDATED: for instance, heanet.ie didn't seem to have the Solaris 11 support - which is essentially what all the latest Solaris Express builds are. Because of his, pkg-get couldn't find the 5.11 catalog file for my Solaris version, so I had to get back to ibiblio.org, even though my access to it can some be really slow.

PKGADDFLAGS=-G - this line has to be uncommented if you don't want pkg-get trying to install new packages into any Solaris zones but the global one

PKGGET_DOWNLOAD
This parameter has to be changed to reflect the location of packages storage directory:



4) CSWcommon
This package has all the core files and directories pkg-get needs to begin with. This is also the necessary package to be installed as most of other Blastwave pacages depend on it.



5) That's it! Now you're ready to install any software packages from Blastwave!

Related links:
My first blog entry on Blastwave.org
The official and very thorough howto on Blastwave