I do sincerely appreciate the 10 responses I got, totalling a MB or so
worth of text, mostly in the form of things to try. However, trying all
that would take a month and I will be crazy before then, so I will single
out for special thanks Liu Weidong, who said only, "Don't worry," and Dave
Scott and Bill Kearney who advised me to put the Ultra 5 back and take some
vacation.
Since SOMEONE is going to have to deal with this, I'm going to thank all
the others by telling you exactly what I did and I'll draw some preliminary
deductions:
(1) Some suggested inherent incompatibility between Solaris 9 and VNMR
6.1C. No - this is the combination I was running on the Ultra 5. It will
also work on a Blade because Boyd Goodson has this combination on an Inova
upstairs (installed a year or so ago and Boyd knows no unix and has not
tinkered with what the installer did).
(2) I *strongly* suggest that Sun's latest patch cluster is responsible. It
is a consistent difference between systems that work and mine. Now here's
what I did:
(a) Booted installation disk v 12/02, selected custom install, selected all
components plus OEM.
(b) Partitioned because I like partitions. On another Blade I use on my
desk, slices 4 and 6 are "unassigned" but waste 2 GB and 1 GB respectively.
I decided not to waste any disk space, so I defined a ufs for each slice:
/ 4 GB
/swap 512 MB
/usr 4 GB
/opt 2 GB
/var 1 GB
/misc 1 GB
/export/home 64 GB
networked? yes
IP? 192.168.1.2
gateway? 192.168.1.1 (my NAT device)
nameservice? none (you have to lie or it will query DNS and get unhappy)
maybe something I'm leaving out, but now we're at a booted system...
(c) created /etc/resolv.conf, edited DNS into nsswitch.conf, remmed out
parts of inetd.conf, unremming the tftp which is needed for console boot,
added auth logging to syslog.conf, changed sshd_config slightly to allow
X11 forwarding, created hosts.allow and hosts.deny
(d) disabled rc scripts I don't like (mv S88sendmail s88sendmail, for
instance) same with snmpdx and dmi
(e) rebooted, customized Netscape to my liking and visited sunsolve.sun.com
where I got 9_Recommended.zip
(f) I don't like to clutter the root directory, so I make /export/home/root
and put my OS patches there.
(g) Unzipped the cluster, init S, go to /export/home/root/9_Recommended and
./install_cluster
Patches that failed, return codes, and a little from their READMEs:
112875-01 2 rpc.walld
113279-01 2 klmmod
113023-01 8 Asia DSR
114153-01 8 Japanese BCP
115158-06 8 xscreensaver
114875-01 8 XML library source
114555-16 8 graphics accelerator
112912-01 2 libinetcfg (these don't look very
fatal to me)
At this point, I've invested 159 minutes and get the "WARNING: add_spec: No
major number for mpt" error messages upon boot. And I've already described
the mess I had with VNMR 6.1C
I think I will wait and see what the Varian installer does and take some
cues from that. If the Solaris patch cluster is responsible, installers
will probably be dealing with problems right now!
Meanwhile, I've decided I love my 270 MHz refurb U 5 with 384 MB RAM and 80
GB disk.
Bill
William C. Stevens, Ph.D. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility
Director Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL 62901-4405
618-453-6498 voice
618-453-6408 fax wstevens_at_siu.edu
http://opie.nmr.siu.edu
Received on Wed Aug 18 2004 - 13:58:27 MST