I’ve just started getting into OpenSolaris for many reasons (Sun has some cool stuff – ZFS / VirtualBox). But I have always wanted to run OpenSolaris as a headless server, and from what i initially found VirtualBox didn’t have the easy to use autostart on boot features that vmware server had. But there are always ways to get things working…

OpenSolaris 2008.11 has desktop sharing (system->preferences->desktop sharing) which is half of the job — enable this.

I had issues if i used a password protected session (it kept prompting on the actual console for password to unlock the key chain), so chose not to prompt for password for now. Now every time after you have logged in you are able to connect to your machine via VNC. (veno-server)

The other half of the problem is how to have the machine automatically log on as a user on boot-up. This is easily enabled via /etc/x11/gdm/custom.conf or gdmadmin. See this post for more details on the autologon.

Updated : 26/07/2009

After a bit of playing about I’ve found another way to make opensolaris the perfect headless box. First fire up gdmsetup and enable the required remote sessions.

Go to the “Remote” tab and set the style to “same as local”, then under security ensure that “Deny TCP connections to Xserver” is not checked.

Next go into the services GUI and tick the box next to X server (x11/xvnc-inetd). Next type;

svcs | grep vnc

Disable all vnc services except the one we want to enable (below);

svcadm enable xvnc-inetd

Now to get the vnc session to remain open when you disconnect update the service with the following parameter change;

svccfg -s xvnc-inetd setprop inetd/wait = boolean: true

Reboot. Done.

You should upon reboot be able to vnc straight into the box with a session that wont reset on disconnect.

Related posts:

1. OpenSolaris – Samba server Time to share your newly created ZFS volume via samba...
2. VirtualBox – crashing / freezing I’ve had some problems since my upgrade to virtualbox 2.2.0...
3. Opensolaris – white screen on logon I had this problem when i enabled 3d effects on...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

You must insure that your drives are using the sata driver (if they are sata disks), quickest way to check is that they will be called sda sdb etc…. and not hda hdb, as this is the default IDE driver and will slow down the performance majorly.

How to check performance;

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

Modern drives should be getting over 50MB/s easily. If your getting about 5MB/s you have the problem.

How to Fix;

I had to change the sata mode to Enhanced in the bios and disable any of the on-board IDE controllers. When rebooting all your device names will change, and you will need to edit the /etc/fstab file as appropriate.

Apparently this is due to a conflict in the drivers, and them confusing your SATA drives as standard IDE disks.

Related posts:

1. opensolaris – zfs PCI-e sata controller Time for me to add some more sata ports to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.