[OpenIndiana-discuss] Some questions about OpenIndiana

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

Hi there.

Well, I spent 24 hours straight on OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana yesterday...

Didn't have much fun let me tell you !

I first tried NexentaStor community edition, using the same kernel
patches as the "stable" openindiana b134... I could see my v28 pool,
then I thought that I had to be mad to try a kernel I compiled myself,
for an operating system that I never used before and end up with a
screwed zpool.

So I ditched it and install OpenIndiana "stable" 134+ ; after
navigating through a web page in Russian wanting me to install some
internet plugins then  staring at the screen for almost 5 hours for
the download to complete . I finally got it installed.

Quickly realised there wasn't much point continuing in that direction.

First, I quickly discovered that I couldn't use what I thought would
be the most attractive feature of the solaris kernel: kernel CIFS. It
can only join a workgroup or an AD domain. I do not use either, but a
samba domain (Windows NT-like).. So had to give up on that cifs kernel
and use samba server.

Got samba installed.

The version of samba shipping with it is very old (3.0.36), I had no
problem joining our Samba domain; but none of the Windows 7 machines
could connect to it; would keep getting invalid password, and as
Windows try to reconnect several time in a row, and the LDAP directory
has a security policy of disabling the account after 10 incorrect
retries ; all Windows 7 users would have got a disable account the
second they tried to connect to samba.

I tried to compile Samba 3.5.6 myself... Oh boy.... gcc wouldn't
install (SUNWgcc package or something like that); broken dependency on
lint..
So I installed gcc from a 3rd party repository blastwave.com

I had forgotten about SysV habbit on installing everything in their
own directory, what a mess to configure the paths..
Spent a good hour compiling samba, especially as the gcc from
blastwave isn't even configured to use its own headers by default!

I couldn't get to compile with ACL nor zfsacl module..

So I restarted from scratch with OpenIndiana 148...

Things started to look much better at first, recent version of gcc
that do install properly, samba is 3.5.4... neat..

Except that the default svcs config for samba, wouldn't start it
properly, it seemed to be using paths that did exist in OpenSolaris 10
(like /usr/sfw/sbin/smbd when it's now nstalled in /usr/sbin). I could
manually start it by using smbd -D from the command line .
Only to realise that for some reasons, that version of samba couldn't
join or samba domain (macos 10.6.5 server). Very weird, as I had no
problem making my own compiled version of samba 3.5.6 join the domain.
Not sure how the OI version was compiled  to make it fail join our samba domain

LDAP:
We use LDAP for authentication on our network, after finding the magic
arguments to run ldapclient and it be successful (took me over an hour
just for that one).
configured pam.conf, nssswitch.conf .. Perfect, could authenticate and
login using an LDAP user...

Then I restarted the box, and I hit that bug:
http://www.illumos.org/issues/487

e.g. when I restart, ldap fail to initialise and that box isn't
accessible anymore. Have to reboot in single-user mode, disable the
ldap pam module , continue booting, re-enable pam ldap module.

I'm thinking now that I will save myself a lot of hassle, by simply
re-creating a new zfs pool on another system, transfer all my data
across, recreate a v14 pool that I know will work everywhere...

And maybe retry nexenta once again, I was very impressed by how well
everything was integrated for the short time I used it ; and at least
samba is working..
plus gnu userland is something I'm very familiar with...

Sorry if this sounds a lot like a rant... the past 24 hours have been
very long and frustrating..

Jean-Yves