I seem to be having a very irritating problem with my Solaris 11 Express fileserver which I built for my small home business. The basic problem is that the system will hang or freeze about 20 seconds into booting up. Grub comes up fine, and I can select between pre-napp-it and current build. It always seems to freeze at the same position. Here are my system specifications:
Intel Xeon E3 1220 3.1ghz Quad-core CPU
Intel S1200BTL Motherboard (has caused me all sorts of dramas)
16GB (4x4GB) ECC Transcend DDR3 1333mhz RAM
2x Western Digital 320GB notebook drives as boot in zpool RAID
6x Samsung 2TB disks in Raidz2
5x Samsung 2TB disks in Raidz1
Corsair VX450w PSU
Antec 1200 case with lots of cooling
Napp-it web-gui 0.500s
Now I have been experiencing all sorts of incompatibility issues with the Intel Motherboard. Firstly, it wouldn't accept my Hynix ECC ram and I had to go out and buy some transcend which worked okay. It also consistantly rebooted itself if I was running certain applications for some unknown reasons. Eg. Older versions of Memtest and Seatools will cause the system to hang or reboot. Installing VirtualBox within Solaris also caused a reboot. Occationally it would reboot randomly.
I disabled some features in the BIOS, and some of these issues went away. However yesterday, shortly after I got VirtualBox to successfully install, it was copying some files to the server which failed halfway through. It dropped off the network, and when I went to look at the monitor connected to the server, it said it was "out of range". I rebooted the server, and it has frozen on startup ever since. I tried both disks in my zpool mirror, with no success.
I don't have any ZFS snapshots, because I only just finished building the damn thing and I hadn't got around to learning how to backup the zpool. I also don't have a clue how I would restore a snapshot. Is there any disk check or file integrity check I can run? The disks themselves are tested to be fine, as is the memory. Could re-installing Grub help this issue? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
Hi
I think you need to install the OS on anther server. It also seams that some of your programs may not work with Solaris 11. Remember Solaris 11 is a bata system and not really ready for production systems. You might want to install Solaris 10 or run RHEL which is a little more user friendly then Solaris. If you don't have the money for RHEL then install CentOS, which is for the most part the same thing.
Solaris 11 Express is beta? I thought it was just the free community version of Solaris 11, which hasn't been released yet. This isn't a server that needs super 100% reliability, I operate the business by myself. I have an 8 year old Celeron 2ghz system which runs more reliably though.
All I need is a reasonably reliable OS which will do software RAID and host a few VMs in VirtualBox.
Strange thing is that I actually had it boot before. I left it long enough at the screen where it freezes, and it rebooted itself. After that, it started up fine and I was able to log in. Shortly after though, it reset and I was back to square one.
Edit: I have the original Solaris 11 Express CD which I can boot off and run commands, but I have no real idea what to do from there... I would much rather not re-install!
No, I haven't tried a verbose boot. Could you fill me in how this works? I typed "verbose boot solaris 11 express" into google and the top result was this thread. Haha
Thanks for that link. Okay I enabled verbose boot and enabled kernal error message arguments to a $kernal boot command. No different, still boots like it has been, freezes on bootup, doesn't display any error messages... I also updated my BIOS on the board incase that was the issue. No change.
Kinda getting tired of fooling around with this, might just bite the bullet and re-install... again. Sigh
---------- Post updated at 08:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:53 PM ----------
Well here is an interesting development. On grub prompt, I can press "e" to run a command on boot. If I run "bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris" which is the second default/suggested command, it will boot up without issue! However, if I let the system boot normally without any commands, it will freeze again. I go back to "bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris" and it boots normally again. Can anyone explain this or give me an idea on how to make this permanent? Could it be a grub issue?
Smokin Whale,
Yes Solaris 11 Express is a bata. The free community version was called OpenSolaris, but Oracle shut that down. The OpenSolaris has forked and is now called illunmos. Also Solaris 10 is free to use as well.
Solaris 11 Express is not beta. It is a production version which you can get support for. Whether is stable enough to call production worthy might be debatable.
This thread isn't really a debate about whether Solaris 11 Express is beta or not... Either way, it has caused me plenty of problems in the past, and I'm keen to change to something not so buggy. Once it's running though, it's great. It's only a server for a home business, for one person. It's not a huge deal, but it is wasting my time...
I have access to masses of system logs, would these be of assistance in finding the problem?
In other news, I changed a few settings in the BIOS, namely virtualization and power saving features, and suddenly it won't boot with these commands. Changed it back and it then booted fine via commands.
Remove Virtualbox because it's almost 100% sure that program cause system crash. I had problems with Solaris 10. I installed Virutalbox and after a few reboots I could'nt boot to Solaris anymore so when I take a look into system logs I saw Virutalbox has crashed my box.
VirtualBox was the problem. I'm not sure how it didn't occur me earlier!!! :wall: Managed to uninstall it and my system now operates like normal! I will try an older version of VirtualBox and see if that exhibits different results. I am a very happy man right now!
Hey Smokin Whale,
Why why where you using Virtual Box? You know Solaris has has a feature called zones that can give you virtual Solaris servers on your server. This is used mostly to manage system resources and give prigram isolation. You can make a zone of Solaris or Linux, thought Linux is a little harder. It can't do Windows, if you want that I believe Red Hat can do that. Also VMware EXI can do all the operating systems. VMware gives you a 60 day trail when you download it. The software doen't stop working after the 60 day trail is over.
I need to run two Windows based servers... one for an AutoDesk Vault server and one for an old accounting system which is remotely accessed.
VMWare ESXi is too much effort for what I'm trying to do... Solaris Zones are useless to me too unfortunately. I don't have much choice apart from VirtualBox, and even older versions do not want to work... I'm going to try and old build from 2010 and see if that helps
