[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hipster 2020.10 text installer ISO Wow!!!!

[Reginald Beardsley]

On Wednesday, March 3, 2021, 11:22:10 AM CST, Toomas Soome <tsoome at me.com> wrote:

>It is a bit more complicated, I’m afraid. I guess, if you boot -k, you will see it will complain about >being unable to mount rootfs. *if* that is the case, you would need to boot from cd/usb, use >update_drv to bind ahci driver, then import rpool, beadm mount your be and use devfsadm -r and 
>bootadm update-archive -R

If this is truly the case please document it accurately. I suspect that what is really going on is that different Z400s have different motherboards and devices. So actual mileage may vary with some devices being usable and some not. As I only use OI for internet access, 60 MB/s disk write speed is quite adequate. And I would not dream of risking trouble on my Sol 10 u8 instance.

>MBR partitioning only does allow to address up to 2TB disks. Please use GPT/EFI partitioning >instead.

WTF? I've been through a multi-day exercise playing with GPT/EFI labels, creating multiple pools in EFI slices/partitions, wiping them out and recovering them and you point me to some "how-to-geek" BS about the difference between MBR and GPT/EFI? You ship an image with a gparted that dumps core. So to follow your "advice" the user needs to use another OS install disk and jump through hoops that are not properly documented. There is no reason for a new user to suspect that the text installer ISO has a *different* text installer from the GUI ISO.

My point is this:

IF THE USER SELECTS "USE FULL DISK" ON A >2 TB DISK, DO *NOT* PUT AN MBR ON IT! PUT A GPT LABEL ON IT. THAT IS AN INSTALLER FAIL, NOT A USER FAIL!

Got that? If FreeBSD can get the geometry correct, Illumos/OI should be able to do that also. It is *not* rocket science. It's common sense. And does not require even a lot of reading of the UEFI documents.

Setting the expiration on the root login at the first login is just dumb configuration of the install image. You've had the user specify a root password a few minutes earlier and now insist that they change it? 


With regard to other people's comments. No two computers are the same unless someone like me makes extreme efforts to make them the same. Everyone with significant admin experience in a large system context knows this. I once had a standing offer of $100 to anyone who showed me two systems in a major oil company that were the same. No one ever collected. I withdrew the offer as I was in the process of showing two regular employees who had been assigned to work under me how to do that. They then spent two months installing $100k/seat ISV packages and running a script I wrote that made a tarball of everything that vendor install had modified or installed. They then used dd and a 2nd disk to reimage the install disk to the same image I had built. and did the next ISV package. When it was all done I sat down, sorted out the munges to the system config files and made a unified distribution of the ISV stuff. It all worked like a Swiss watch despite my being 3000 miles from the system that it was installed on.

Single user environments and 10,000 user environments have *very* different admin requirements. RBAC and the other lavishly complex tools Sun built are important for large environments. Unfortunately, they are a complete anachronism if you've killed off your installed base as Sun did selling $40k Ultra 60's when a Linux x86 machine of equal capability was $3k or less. By the time they introduced the Ultra 20 it was too late. I had an Ultra 60 or top end Blade at work when I bought my Ultra 20. My home system was 4-5x faster than my work system.

Sun owned the technical workstation market across all industries lock, stock and barrel. They were smug and insisted on huge margins. Once IBM poured $1 billion a year into Linux those margins became unsupportable. And Sun's upper management made their change of control packages so expensive IBM walked away.

I have to use Windows and Linux. I don't have to use OI. I'd like to, but I've watched the user community shrink for years now and with the sort of gaffes in the install images it's only going to get smaller.


Reg