Fintan

... and other tails. Back in the distant past I used to host a personal blog on journalspace, so I've watched the stories coming out about the loss of all of journalspace's [slashdot] user data[journalspace] with more than a passing interest. It has really brought home to me that no matter how cheap storage gets, and with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems we are radically redefining storage economics (and allowing some Australians to vent their cricket frustrations at some jbods, just a theory mind...), you do sometimes need some form of offsite backup. For most businesses that is still tape.

Of course tape by itself is not a disaster recovery plan, and here at Sun we offer a whole range of Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Services to meet your needs, with specific services within our Managed Services portfolio to address storage, including remote back up.

As an aside I wrote a small script to migrate journalspace content at the time I moved blogs, its available on my personal site if someone wants to grab it. A quick look at Andrews entry on how to recover journalspace entries with google cache suggests it would be a pretty straight forward set of changes to get the script to drag data from google instead. ~

But every change counts - here in Ireland they have an often derided, but very effective government program The Power Of One which covers the most simple ways to effect change, turn of that light, plug out the tv rather than leave it on stand by, you know all of those simple things.

Business can make changes as well, and we have been leading the way here in Sun for several years with our continuous long term investment in Eco Innovation ranging from our CoolThreads Servers, to our innovative Suite of ECO Services services along with our world leading virtualization software such as VirtualBox and the performance analysis tools available in OpenSolaris which allow you to get the most of your investments. Save money, help your business and save the environment - sounds good to me. With the political will that Obama is putting behind the environment the momentum is now truely there, and everyone, all around the globe, benefits.

yes thats me getting the best of multiple worlds with OpenSolaris running in VirtualBox on my MacBook (running OS X which includes Sun innovations such as DTrace and ZFS) and installing NetBeans. Adventures in my development environment to follow...

And if you want to use OpenSolaris in production with the peace of mind that a support contract brings your boss take a look at our various OpenSolaris subscription services.

A lot of people have gone down this path before me, so I'll focus specifcally here on getting the ndis wrapper working for the onboard broadcom card, however before going there, a quick list of the places I found info at (and the odd credit as well).

First off I used rEFIt, suggested to me by Nicky as an alternative to Bootcamp, although I did use BootCamp to do the initial partioning of the disk up. Before installing you need to do a bit of fiddling around with EFI id's, the details of which I found from an entry by Paul Mitchell, How to Dual Partition a MacBook Pro with MacOS and Solaris.

After that it was a straight install from a dvd, then onto setting up the required networking. The ethernet nic is a Marvell Yukon, scanpci details area

pci bus 0x000c cardnum 0x00 function 0x00: vendor 0x11ab device 0x436a Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Marvell Yukon 88E8058 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller

This is supported by Masayuki Murayama's myk driver (ported from FreeBSD's msk) from and can be downloaded from his driver page. Details are all in the readme. In my case I went with the i386_gcc compile as we need to boot in 32bit mode for the ndis wrapper we will get to in a moment.

Now the awkward part, getting the wireless. The wireless nic in this macbook is a Broadcom, details below

pci bus 0x000b cardnum 0x00 function 0x00: vendor 0x14e4 device 0x4328 Broadcom Corporation BCM4328 802.11a/b/g/n

The folks over at the laptop community on opensolaris.org have a detailed page on useing ndis. You need to pull down 1.2 ndis kit, and the relevant driver files (search for 14E4,4328). Now with the arrival of Fast Boot (PSARC/2008/382, flag day) in build 100 of Solaris Express we have a new driver entry point which has yet to be reflected in the ndis code, the fix is a simple change to the if_ndis.c (thanks to Michael Li for the correct quiesce option).

+++ if_ndis.c Mon Nov 10 05:39:52 2008 @@ -159,7 +159,7 @@ uint32_t identify; DDI_DEFINE_STREAM_OPS(ndis_dev_ops, nulldev, nulldev, ndis_attach, ndis_detach, - nodev, NULL, D_MP, NULL); + nodev, NULL, D_MP, NULL, ddi_quiesce_not_supported); static struct modldrv ndis_modldrv = { &mod_driverops, /* Type of module. This one is a driver */

Guidelines for the rest of the process are listed on on the ndis page mentioned above. Once you have built the modules and copied them in place add the ndis driver with

add_drv -i '"pci14e4,4328"' bcmndis

Plumb up the interface and you should be ready to go. The trade off here is that you have to use a 32bit kernel, so make sure you've booted into one.

The final item to get working is a right click emulation, covered in detail in Pradhaps entry Solaris Nevada / OpenSolaris Mac book right-click. Anyway after all of that, unless you really want to have Solaris running natively on your macbook I'd suggest using Sun xVM VirtualBox, and OpenSolaris.