Finally got opensolaris to install inside virtualbox. Seems the problems I was having were because I didn’t allocate enough memory to the VM. Solaris 0606 runs in 348Mb, opensolaris 200805 won’t install in less than 512Mb. It doesn’t unfortunately tell you why it won’t install, it just hangs, at different places in different attempts, very unfriendly installer. Up VM memory to 512 and continueth.
Of course when it was installed there were no drivers for the Virtualbox emulated NIC card were there. The old community boot driver diskette to the rescue again, I installed all the drivers on there, touch /reconfigure, reboot and I had a e1000g0 network device (I know, I’ve never come across it before either).
A ipconfig /all on the windows XP os showed no new interfaces though, just the single physical card in the machine. That is what I wanted as I chose NAT rather than create a host interface, but its going to make trouble shooting difficult.
I tried setting the device to my internal network range, plus a 10.0.2 address, and a 192.168.1 address, but trying to set the default route to any throws up network unreachable.
Investigating. /etc/nsswitch.conf had hosts search order as files dns as I would have manually added, the /etc/resolv.conf had a nameserver of 10.0.2.3. Manually setting the interface to a 10.0.2.200 and trying to set the default route to 10.0.2.1 also gives network unreachable.
Well I don’t use dhcp for any of my servers (fine for desktops, never for a server). Created /etc/defaultrouter containing 10.0.2.1, and a hostname.e1000g0 containing 10.0.2.200, added a /etc/hosts entry of 10.0.2.200 for the server. Then svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:nwan, svcadm enable svc:network/physical:default. touch /reconfigure for the hell of it and reboot again. Interface was set up as I expected as was the default routes, but obviously I guessed the adresses wrong.
I am obviously going to have to read the manuals on what address ranges are supported by NAT and how they work.
Creating a host interface is out of the question as that wanted to update some windows settings, and if the VM cannot be portable to Linux (ie: I want no single machine specific settings in the host environments, just a dick image to copy between platforms) then it’s of no use to me.
But I can’t be bothered reading the manual now.
I’ll read a sci-fi instead.
This is getting to be a lot of effort for no benefit. I think I’ll stick with the plug and play linux systems.
