EGOPOLY

To mount a DVD or CD iso image:


lofiadm -a /full/path/imagename.iso /dev/lofi/1
mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt


How to install packages:


cd /mnt/Solaris_Software_Companion/Solaris_i386/Packages
pkgadd -d `pwd` SFWxaw3d


Where the hell is sudoers?


emacs /opt/sfw/etc/sudoers


No setuid? WTF?


chmod +s /opt/sfw/bin/sudo


To restart a service (like autofs, ssh):


svcadm restart /system/filesystem/autofs:default


Or maybe it should be called an iHack? Hack Pro?

In any case, I’m not sure it’s worth what would turn out to be about 12 hours of work to save a few hundred bucks.

But it’s good for future reference:

http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/build-a-hackintosh-mac-for-under-800-321913.php

I had a Sony Vaio notebook PC back in 1999. It’s good to see they are just as good today as they were back then. Ha. Sony deserves to have its lunch eaten.

The thing I remember most about mine was that it had a USB external floppy disk that didn’t work most of the time, like when you needed to install a driver. (Remember how shocking it was when the iMac came out with no floppy (or any other) writable removable media?)

I’m evaluating some Sun and Dell servers for work. They are pretty closely matched in terms of price, speed and features. One thing that is a quite a bit different is the remote access feature. Both systems have little dedicated tiny computers with their own ethernet cards. They let you connect to the machine over the network, via a web browser (or ssh) and power up and power down the server. They also have remote KVM (keyboard, mouse and video) access via their web interfaces.

I like the Sun implementation better.

1. The Dell implementation is an ActiveX Control, which means I have to use IE in my Windows VM. That’s a pain.
2. Dell doesn’t have menu items for sending F-keys, like F2 (used to enter the BIOS); and because of keyboard mapping or whatever, the F2 key was intercepted by something (either Mac OS X, or Parallels or Windows, it’s hard to tell) before it could get to the the virtual console. So no BIOS settings for me.
3. Dell has a horrible roll-down menu that is either in your way or invisible.
4. The Sun version is Java (of course) and it works on anything that has Java 1.5, including my Mac with FireFox.

Still, both implementations are better than the super-expensive and super-crappy Raritan hardware KVM over IP we had been using.