Hey all,

I upgraded my big-ass AMD server box to OpenSolaris yesterday, and it’s durned pretty and dead useful – I am doing AVCHD to QuickTime video-transcoding on it[1] which is not something that is typically said about Solaris-at-home.

A couple of things went wrong:

* I did manual network configuration; this failed in a few ways:

• Poking the config upon first post-installation boot-up, the network config GUI tool coredumped after unplumbing nge0, and would not let me configure it again, even after manual replumbing. A swift reboot fixed this.
• My DNS hostnames would not resolve; long story short it appears that manual network configuration currently (Nov 2008) provides no way to apply nsswitch.dns to the system config?
• All the automounted NFS mounts from my (Leopard) OSX machines, failed.

The latter was a big nuisance; I use ZFS everywhere on the big server, and part of the joy was that I didn’t have to maintain /etc/exports any more; but all of a sudden, having upgraded from Nevada 90-something to OpenSolaris, I was getting “permission denied” for the NFS mount request.

I addressed three things and finally fixed it: first I was getting messages like:

Nov 29 18:50:56 suzi mountd[453]: [ID 664212 daemon.error] No default domain set

…which is a reference to the contents of /var/run/nfs4_domain and the NFSMAPID stuff; to fix this I uncommented NFSMAPID_DOMAIN=domain in /etc/default/nfs; whether this helped I don’t really know, but it was one more thing ticked.

I IM’ed Darren who said he’d had a similar experience with NFS mounts failing when IP addresses on the server were not resolvable… so I populated /etc/hosts with the addresses of the clients.

Still nada.

Finally I repopulated the sharenfs parameter of my ZFS exports, and that worked; where formerly it read:

sharenfs=rw=192.168.1.3:192.168.1.7

…it now read:

sharenfs=rw=luther:zephyr

…which combined with the relevant entries in /etc/hosts, magically vanished the problem.

So, what’s this? No more explicit IP-address exports, then? Or is this an effect of zpool export?

—
[1] I am translating huge 1440x1080i M2TS video files from a Sony HDR-SR8 camcorder, into tragically huger 720p MJPEG, because my old iMac is not powerful enough to edit the content in its native highly-condensed format – and anyway Apple don’t supply a codec that lets you do that, so you need to use third-party software like Voltaic, or plug the actual camera into the machine and let iMovie convert it.

You are supposed to plug the actual camera into the Macintosh, because on it is AVCHD metadata describing the file format and “official” software needs that stuff in order to perform the conversion.

Of course, the original files have been deleted from the camera.

Instead I am archiving the M2TS (.MTS) files – nice and small – and re-converting them on demand using the latest FFMPEG and an extremely intricate driver script that I’m refining… FFMPEG is an adventure all by itself.

There are solutions for this out there on the web already. I think I have tried them all – all the free ones at least, and some of the commercial ones too. It’s been a nightmare of bad code and csh-scripting. They all are exceedingly painful, except for Voltaic but that costs money-per-machine and is slower than it need be.

Once I get the FFMPEG driver-script polished, I will share it.