As a Solaris administrator I love using the command line. One annoyance I find when installing Solaris 10 is the auto-start of the desktop environment. This is a quick tip on how to disable auto-start of the desktop. Open a console and issue:

/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d

This should disable the desktop from startup the next time you reboot. To re-enable desktop startup upon boot issue:

/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -e

This will re-enable the desktop environment upon startup.

This is a quick tip on using your shell more efficiently by using !$. How !$ works is it takes the last argument you supplied in your last command and allows you to repeat it.

Here is a good example of how to use it:

cp source.tar.gz /usr/local/src

Here I am just copying a source.tar.gz file into /usr/local/src so I can begin to compile. To save me time of typing out

cd /usr/local/src

I can simply issue:

cd !$

The following is a quick tutorial on how to mount the CD-ROM manually within Solaris. This can be helpful if the CD-ROM was not automatically mounted on boot and you need access to the media.

First we need to determine the logical device of the cdrom device. To do this issue:

iostat -En

The following tutorial covers obtaining your MAC address (physical address) of your network interface on a Sun Sparc machine. Obtaining your MAC address is often necessary when you are using JumpStart and need boot off a non-default network interface.

At the Open Boot Prom issue the following commands to list the devices on the system:

show-devs

The following tutorial describes the process of installing and getting Xen virtualization up and running on your CentOS 5 machine. The following tutorial assumes the following:

1. You installed CentOS 5 and performed a security hardening procedure before deploying the machine into production.
2. You have applied the latest patches and bug fixes.

This is a quick tutorial on how to get OpenWrt to update with dyndns.org. If you are unfamiliar with dyndns.org it is basically a service that allows your residential IP address to be mapped to a friendly URL similar to DNS. The benefit to dyndns is that you don't need to run your own name servers and when your dynamic IP address at home changes you can still reach your server via the dyndns address.

The purpose of ez-update is to update your current IP address on your router with the dyndns servers. This allows them to keep track of your IP address if it changes.

If a Solaris network interface gets disconnected and you cannot reconnect to the network it is often necessary to bring the interface up and down to regain connection. This tutorial demonstrates the process of plumbing and unplumbing an interface, this is Sun's terminology for bringing the interface up (plumb) and bringing the interface down (unplumb).

First we need to unplumb the interface:

ifconfig ce0 unplumb

Next we can bring the interface backup online using:

ifconfig ce0 plumb up

When a Solaris system is in single user mode it is often useful to enable networking support. One instance why this could be useful is if you backup your system to the network and need to perform a restore.

With networking turned on we can mount or connect to network resources to restore files not on the CD-ROM or Tape.

To accomplish this we need to bring the system into single user mode:

boot cdrom -s