EON ZFS NAS meets IPS packages

Adding drivers/binaries to your EON ZFS NAS presents a bit of challenge as it requires acquiring the matching SNV_xxx DVD to source the package. There is an alternative called the image packaging system. This is basically Sun's network packaging system similar to apt, RPM in Linux. I've assumed here that the network card is fully functional and internet connectivity, is working.

So assuming your nic works, a wide array of options become available with the help of IPS. This may be useful to add or run certain binaries such as unzip, ipmitool, powertop, openssl, pmconfig, etc. So how do we add pkg and other IPS goodies? First we download the pre-installed toolkit here.

Then, unzip it to a smb/cifs share somewhere on a storage pool (this example unzipped to /deep/pkg-toolkit-sunos-i386). Now let's create the packaging db in /deep/ips

mkdir -p /deep/ips
cd /deep/pkg-toolkit-sunos-i386/pkg/bin
./pkg image-create -F -a opensolaris.org=http://pkg.opensolaris.org /deep/ips

After this completes, we are ready to add packages to the /deep/ips repositories. Note, I am not adding the packages to / (root). This would store the downloaded binaries in RAM and reduce the available memory and most likely cause a crash of the OS. It would also not survive a reboot. So for now, let's use a local repository /deep/ips and lets add unzip. First, I need to know which package unzip, is a part off. So, let's try to find that

cd /deep/ips
/deep/pkg-toolkit-sunos-i386/pkg/bin/pkg search -r unzip
INDEX      ACTION    VALUE                     PACKAGE
basename   file      usr/bin/unzip             pkg:/SUNWunzip@5.53.7-0.101
basename   file      usr/bin/unzip             pkg:/SUNWunzip@5.53.7-0.96
basename   file      usr/bin/unzip             pkg:/SUNWunzip@5.52-0.75

We see the package name is SUNWunzip as well as the versions available at the repository (5.52, 5.53). Let's give it a dry run without installing to see dependencies. Still in /deep/ips

/deep/pkg-toolkit-sunos-i386/pkg/bin/pkg install -nv SUNWunzip

And to install it and all its listed dependencies in /deep/ips

/deep/pkg-toolkit-sunos-i386/pkg/bin/pkg install -v SUNWunzip

This can also be used for drivers, for example the sil 3124 sata chipset driver

/deep/pkg-toolkit-sunos-i386/pkg/bin/pkg search -r 3124
INDEX      ACTION    VALUE                     PACKAGE
description set       3124                      pkg:/SUNWsi3124@0.5.11-0.101
description set       3124                      pkg:/SUNWsi3124@0.5.11-0.75
description set       3124                      pkg:/SUNWsi3124@0.5.11-0.89

Then, simply adding this SUNWsi3124 or specifically SUNWsi3124@0.5.11-0.101 will get us the driver. One thing I note is the package naming varies slightly to the opensolaris DVD package names. I also could not locate packages SUNWzfsgu, SUNWzfsgr and SUNWmconr to attempt adding the ZFS smcwebserver GUI/BUI administration interface. Some cool pkg usage techniques can be found here at the observatory blog. A cool Hello World example.