Ajitabh Pandey's Soul & Syntax

Exploring systems, souls, and stories – one post at a time

Author: Ajitabh

  • Solaris10 on VirtualBox

    I installed Solaris10 11/06 on VirtualBox 1.5.6 OSE. The first problem immediately after installation I faced was that of mouse not being captured by virtual machine. So I open a terminal window and start the vold and then ran the volcheck command.

    /etc/init.d/volmgt start
volcheck

    The mouse started working after this. The reason for this I guess is because I did not had the mouse inside the virtual machine while booting. I need to confirm this.

    Moving the home directory of root from / to /root:

    Changing the home directory of root using “usermod” command does not work as the root user is logged in. So edit the /etc/passwd file and change root’s home directory to /root. Logout and login again. After that remove all the /.* files and /Desktop directory.

    vi /etc/passwd
rm -rf /.*pwd
rm -rf /Desktop

    Installing third-party tools

    Next I need to install third party tools in the virtual machine. I downloaded the “pkg-get” as:

    pkgadd -d http://www.blastwave.org/pkg_get-3.8.4-SunOS5.8-all-CSW.pkg

    Next I downloaded the static version of the wget utility using mozilla from http://www.blastwave.org/wget-i386.bin and renamed it as wget.
    Next I put the directory containing the wget utility and the /opt/csw/bin directory in default PATH. The first thing installed was wget itself, so that I can get rid of the static version.

    pkg-get install wget

    Patch check advanced is a utility which I installed next to apply patches to the operating system.

    pkg-get install pca

    The gnupg program was needed to verify the signatures on the catalogue files. This can be installed as:

    pkg-get install gnupg

    To install the gpg key of the blastwave repository use the following commands:

    wget --output-document=/tmp/gpg.key http://www.blastwave.org/mirrors.php
gpg --import /tmp/gpg.key

  • Swap Space Management in Solaris

    The swap utility provides an administrative interface to the management of the system swap areas. A standard swap partition which is not under the volume manager control cannot be resized, but swap space can be added using swap files.

    Create a swapfile of 512MB in /local:

    mkfile 512M /local/swapfile01

    Add the swap to system swap space:

    swap -a /local/swapfile01
swap -a /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1

    Add /etc/vfstab entry to add the swap space to make sure it is recognized after reboot:

    /local/swapfile01       -       -       swap    -       no      -
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1       -       -       swap    -       no      -

    Delete a swap space:

    swap -d /local/swapfile01
swap -d /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1

    The /etc/vfstab entry has to be removed after removing the swap space.

    List swap space:

    swap -l

    List swap space statistics:

    swap -s

  • Timezones in Solaris

    The available timezones in solaris are listed in /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/
    To find out the current timezone on the system:

    grep '^TZ' /etc/TIMEZONE

    and in order to change the timezone, modify the TZ line in /etc/TIMEZONE and then reboot the system.

  • Changing the IP Address of a Solaris System

    Use ifconfig to change the IP address immediately

    ifconfig

    If the new IP address calls for a different gateway then change it using the route command:

    route add default 
route del default

    Change the hosts’s IP address in

    • /etc/hosts file to take effect after each reboot
    • /etc/inet/ipnodes (for Solaris 10)

    Change the host’s subnet mask in /etc/netmask

    Change the host’s default gateway in /etc/defaultrouter

  • Interconnecting QEMU and VirtualBox Virtual Machines

    Sometime back I came across VirtualBox, an excellent replacement for commercial Vmware. I installed few OSes in VirtualBox and found the performance pretty good. In my opinion the performance of Windows virtual machines is much better in VirtualBox, perhaps because of the installed guest additions.

    Immediately a thought came into my mind. What if I want to create an internetwork of VirtualBox virtual machines and QEMU virtual machines.

    The default NAT networking in VirtualBox does not solve any purpose. The only useful networking option I found was the “Host Interface”. I went through several documents on VirtualBox website and realise that I needed to use bridging in order to do this. All the documents explained beautifully how to accompalish bridging with the ethernet interface on the host machine, but this is not what I wanted. I wanted the virtual machines to be in an isolated network connected together using VDE Switch as I was doing with QEMU. Searching on google for quite sometime did not help either, so I decided to give it a try.

    Following is what I did to accompalish this. After executing the following –

    1. QEMU virtual machines can talk to VirtualBox virtual machines and vice-versa.
    2. Host can talk to all virtual machines and vice-versa.
    3. All virtual machines can connect to internet via the hostmachine.

    As suggested on the VirtualBox website, in order to use bridging I need the uml-utilities and bridge-utilities packages:

    $ sudo apt-get install uml-utilities bridge-utils

    I need to load the tun/tap module and the kqemu module for QEMU

    $ sudo modprobe kqemu
$ sudo modprobe tun

    Next I wanted to make the “tun” device writeable by the users, so I out myself into the “vboxusers” group and gave the group write permission on the device.

    $ sudo chgrp vboxusers /dev/net/tun 
$ sudo chmod g+rw /dev/net/tun

    Then I created couple of persistent tap interfaces owned by an ordinary user:

    $ sudo tunctl -t tap0 -u ajitabhp
$ sudo tunctl -t tap1 -u ajitabhp

    Next I started the VDE Switch connected to the tap0 interface and make the control file world writeable:

    $ vde_switch -tap tap0 -daemon
$ chmod 666 /tmp/vde.ctl

    A bridge then needs to be created:

    $ sudo brctl addbr br0

    All interfaces which are connected to network segments to be bridged are to be put into promiscuous mode.

    $ sudo ifconfig tap0 0.0.0.0 promisc

    Add the tap0 interface to the bridge and start the DNSMASQ server to listen on br0 interface.

    $ sudo brctl addif br0 tap0
$ sudo /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --log-queries --user=named --dhcp-leasefile=/var/lib/misc/vbox-dhcpd.leases --dhcp-range=10.111.111.100,10.111.111.199,255.255.255.0,10.255.255.255,8h --interface=br0 --domain=virtual.lan --addn-hosts=/etc/my-host

    Next configure the br0 interface with an ip address. This br0 interface will work as the gateway for the virtual machines.

    $ sudo ifconfig br0 10.111.111.254 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

    Now add the tap1 interface to the bridge and bring it up.

    $ sudo brctl addif br0 tap1 
$ sudo ifconfig tap1 up

    Enable IP forwarding on the host machine and setup MASQUERADING:

    $ sudo su -
# echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
$ sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

    Following is how various interfaces look like after finishing this setup.

    $ brctl show br0
bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces
br0             8000.ae7729b64a80       no              tap0
							tap1
$ ifconfig 
br0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 6E:EA:39:83:8C:D4  
          inet addr:10.111.111.254  Bcast:10.111.111.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::6cea:39ff:fe83:8cd4/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:106 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:82 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:10696 (10.4 KiB)  TX bytes:10165 (9.9 KiB)

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:12:F0:28:6E:C3  
          inet addr:192.168.0.176  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::212:f0ff:fe28:6ec3/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:426 errors:32 dropped:32 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:327 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:1
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:356289115 (339.7 MiB)  TX bytes:18085137 (17.2 MiB)
          Interrupt:11 Base address:0xa000 Memory:d0200000-d0200fff 
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:7425 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:7425 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:610482 (596.1 KiB)  TX bytes:610482 (596.1 KiB)

tap0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 6E:EA:39:83:8C:D4  
          inet6 addr: fe80::6cea:39ff:fe83:8cd4/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:81 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:500 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:10808 (10.5 KiB)

tap1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr B2:03:C1:BE:1E:4E  
          inet6 addr: fe80::b003:c1ff:febe:1e4e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:106 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:46 errors:0 dropped:6 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:500 
          RX bytes:12180 (11.8 KiB)  TX bytes:4978 (4.8 KiB)
$ sudo iptables -t nat -L
Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         
MASQUERADE  0    --  anywhere             anywhere            

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

    Now start the QEMU virtual machines:

    $ vdeqemu -net vde,vlan=0 -net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=52:54:00:00:EE:01 -m 256 -hda ~/qemu/netbsd.img 1>~/logs/qemu-logs/netbsd.log 2>~/logs/qemu-logs/netbsd.error &

    In VirtualBox attach the network interface of all virtual machines to “Host Interface” and then select tap1 as the interface name.