Sheep Guarding Llama

So you’ve downloaded Solaris 11 Express and you want to try out this awesome new Zones feature.  Zones is Solaris’ powerful virtualization environment and it has been around since Solaris 10 but things change slightly between editions.  In this tutorial we are going to create a very simple, basic zone and go from new install of Solaris 11 to a working Zone that you can access remotely via SSH.  If you don’t have a dedicated machine on which to run Solaris 11, don’t fret, you can do Zones virtualization on top of another virtualization environment.  In my case, I am running Solaris 11 on Oracle’s VirtualBox and then running Zones on top of there.

To get started, we need to create a ZFS mountpoint as Zones now relies on ZFS.  I like using the /zones mountpoint as it is pretty common and very straightforward.  You can, of course, use any mountpoint that you would like – /vm or /images are popular alternatives.  You can use different features, such as compression and deduplication as you feel are applicable for you as well.

zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones -o compression=on -o dedup=on rpool/zones

This should create your mountpoint.  Now we can begin configuring our first Zone.  For our example, we will simply call it myzone.  We will assume that we are on the 192.168.123.o/24 subnet and will add a single network interface that bridges onto this network.  This is a very simple example.  You could do many more advanced things with Zones.

zonecfg -z myzone

Once we run this command we will be dropped into the zonecfg configuration utility which we will use to set features for our zone.  First we will configure the location where the Zone files will be stored.  Generally we want to name this the same as our zone to avoid any confusion.

set zonepath=/zones/myzone

Now we can set our networking to share a connection with the base Solaris environment.  This is the most common scenario.

set ip-type=shared

Now we can add in a network connection.  For this we will need to know the name of the physical connection used in the base Solaris installation.  On my system this is called “e1000g0”.  I will statically set this new server to be 192.168.123.5/24.

add net

set address=192.168.123.5

set physical=e1000g0

set defrouter=255.255.255.0

end

And that is all that we need for a basic configuration.  Now we just need to verify and commit these settings and we are ready to being.

verify

commit

exit

If all has gone well, we can now install and boot our new Zone for the very first time.

zoneadm -z myzone install

zoneadm -z myzone boot

Excellent, we already have a Zone up and running.  Now to enable SSH so that we can reach the machine remotely.

zlogin myzone “svcadm enable ssh”

zlogin myzone “svcadm restart ssh”

To complete the setup of our Zone it will be necessary to log at the console.  This will allow you to step through the setup process as well as to add a user with which you can connect over SSH since the root user is banned from logging in remotely.

zlogin -C myzone

We slept in a little this morning, just until nine thirty.  Liesl’s schedule has been drifting later and later and we have been getting less and less sleep because of it.  Today was our catchup day and as long as Liesl stayed asleep, so did we.

So it was a bit of a rush to get out of the door this morning as we are heading down to Mansfield to hang out with the family.  It is one of Liesl’s second cousin’s birthdays so we are heading down for that.

We had to make a quick pitstop at Walmart for card and gift.  Dominica was on top of things but didn’t want to send me to pick these things up last night as that would be too stressful for me after work to try to make these kinds of decisions.  Best to have her do it today.

It worked out, time wise, as she was able to shop at Walmart while Liesl and I made a quick run back to the house to pick up some stuff that we had forgotten to put into the car.  So it wasn’t wasted time.

We hung out with the family for probably around three hours.  Liesl had an awesome time.  She has gotten completely comfortable now with her second cousins and she just leaves us immediately to go play with them.  There are some older girls that have the best time with her and she, as always, loves having older girls around.  They played with a doll house and explored the house and they even got her outside for quite a long time playing soccer!

It was so adorable watching Liesl run around the yard with the bigger kids chasing the soccer ball.  She loves getting to play with them and being part of the group.  This is so good for her.  Boy is she going to sleep tonight.  She got some serious exercise today.

As we were leaving, Debbie gave us a huge dollhouse for Liesl.  It has never really seen any use and Liesl just loves it.

We got home and put Liesl down for her nap.  She was asleep in the car on the way home too.  The ride is just long enough that she nearly always falls asleep going to and from Mansfield.

The afternoon was pretty empty.  We mostly puttered around. Later on Souder stopped by to drop off my new eight foot ladder and some boxes of Cat5e cabling.  He didn’t hang out for long.  Just dropped stuff off and headed home to sleep.

Watson and Grey came by shortly thereafter and hung out for the evening.  Grey was originally returning to Denver today but had to push his flight off until tomorrow so has tonight off.  We all decided to be adventurous for dinner and discovered an interesting Pakistani restaurant and grocery not far away that does some very brisk business.  We were going to eat there but they were so busy that we had to get the food to go as there were no seats available.  The food was very good though, and very cheap.  We will be back there a bunch, I’m sure.  And great to have a Pakistani and Indian grocery right around the corner.  Very handy.

I did a bit of work on getting Solaris Express 11 up and running.  I ended up working late into the night, until three in the morning, working on Solaris 11 installs, ZFS and Zones stuff to get ready for the class tomorrow.

It is a very cold morning again today in Texas.  This whole week has been quite cold.

I came out into the living room this morning and ever since Dominica took down Liesl’s play hut thing that has dominated the living room the whole space seems so much nicer.  Instead of the “den” being all dark and full of stuff it is not bright and open and most of the stuff in it is pushed out of main view.  The whole public area of the house seems nicer now.  Dominica commented to the same effect last night.

This morning we are waiting to hear about the house although, now that it has gone into a protracted “wait for the bid to be selected” stage we have mostly written it off.  We are assuming that we are not getting it and probably won’t hear about it too promptly.  There were more people out looking at the house this morning.  It has garnered a lot of interest, suddenly.  More people have looked at it this week than have in the months since we started looking at our own house.  Of course, the only angle from which to see the house is from our yard so all of these people trying to get this house instead of us check it out standing in our front yard.

Lunch time rolled around and we did not hear anything about the house.  Since the offers closed at eleven I can only assume that they have been contacting the winners and that that is not us.

After lunch we were contacted by the bank looking for some additional information on our offer for the house.  So apparently we are not completely out of the running.  Although maybe with our answer we are.  Now they are hoping to know something by around Tuesday.  So now we have a fun weekend of waiting to see what has happened.

Of course, on top of not knowing about the house being fun enough, not knowing about the house also impacts our financial situation so we are waiting to begin projects on our existing house while we try to figure out how are finances look in the short term.  Buying a house requires some amount of capital to be in place and ready so we don’t want to overcommit ourselves.  Fun fun.

Lunch was at Rockfish today.  I haven’t been there in a while.

Afternoon was quite busy but worked started to wrap up on the early side and by six I was able to roll out of the office which is great for a Friday.  And very little scheduled for tomorrow either.

Dominica decided to send me out shopping on my way home.  So off to Lowe’s and Walmart I go.

The shopping went pretty quickly.  I picked up the needed supplies and we now have the LED lightbulbs that we need to be able to replace the bulbs that had all burnt out in the hallway, which is very annoying as we use those lights all of the time.  Of course, when I went to change them, we discovered that our stepstool was loaned out and we can’t reach them.

We have  an appointment scheduled on Monday morning with a landscaper to look at our back yard.  It is a total disaster right now – nothing but mud and clumps of clay.  There is barely a patch of real grass and nothing worth keeping.  We need the entire area completely overhauled from top to bottom.  It’s not going to be cheap but it is really making living there tough because except on frozen or very dry, very sunny days it is nothing but a mud pit and we have to give Oreo a quick bath after every trip in or out.  And we can’t pick up anything that he deposits out there because there is so much mud that we can’t go back there ourselves because we have no way to clean up that volume of mud.

We aren’t entirely sure of what we want to do with the yard yet.  Mostly we just want it leveled, drained and sodded.  From there we will figure out what else needs to be done.  We would really like Liesl to be able to go out and play and Oreo to safely be able to walk around and to just be able to enjoy it rather than not wanting to look at the horrid mess.  And we definitely want the two bushes blocking the windows in the den area to be removed as they do nothing but block the light which is not very smart.

This evening we just hung out at the house and watched a made for television Hillary Duff movie Beauty and the Briefcase, I believe it was called.  Not a good movie.  I’d skip it.

We were off to bed at a reasonable time tonight!  UNIX training, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been postponed.  We will be attempting to do it on Sunday instead.

We are waiting to hear about the offer than we put in on the house next door last night.  We didn’t hear anything this morning until lunch time when, while I was at home having just arrived, our agent called to let us know that we were currently one of two offers in on the house and that offers are only being entertained until eleven in the morning tomorrow.  So one way or another we will know if we got the house at that point.

While we were discussing the house, there were people outside looking at the house as well.  Demand is suddenly picking up now that we are trying to buy it ourselves.  Our only hope is that the other people don’t have good financing, aren’t prepared to wait through a foreclosure sale process or just don’t put in an offer as good as ours is.  We did up our offer to our “best offer” and can only hope for the best from here.  Nothing more to be done until we find out about it tomorrow.

Finding out that we are competing for the house certainly took some of the wind out of our sales.  There is a very good chance that someone will outbid us.  We are not making an extremely good offer and with other offers on the table ours is probably not going to be high enough.  The house has been there for months and months without an offer.  It is awful that we missed being the first one in by a few hours.  Again, I’m not happy with how long it takes to do things in Texas.  But we are treating this as a business decision.  We worked out the numbers that make sense for us and if we can’t get the house for that price, we don’t get it.  It’s that simple.

So now we wait.  It isn’t that long, at least.  And the people that I met looking at the house today seemed really nice.  But I doubt that they have enough time to get an offer in before the decision is made tomorrow.

After work I went over to La Cima for happy hour.  They have a guitar player playing in the lounge today and they wanted to wrangle up people to check it out.  It was really nice.  They normally have live piano in the restaurant but nothing in the lounge.  Having live guitar is a nice addition.  Hopefully they keep this up.

On my way home I swung by Ruchi Palace on Trinity Mills to pick up dinner.  Both Dominica and I were craving it after having it two nights ago.

We didn’t do too much tonight.  Ate dinner, hung out with Liesl, went to bed early.  We are all pretty tired.  I took the trash out and put it by the curb.  After our pick up tomorrow we should be finally caught up for the first time after having moved in to the new house.  We generated so much trash in the move that we are just now catching up with us putting out the maximum amount every week.

My early morning call was canceled for tomorrow so it is a normal work day morning for me.

Today was Liesl’s second day of “home school pre-school.”  Dominica has a ton of activities planned out and has been posting pictures to Flickr of Liesl’s progress.  Liesl is enjoying it too.  It is interactive time and she enjoys learning.  I ask her, when I get home, if she had fun at school today and she says “yes”.

The first thing that happened today, after getting into the office in Las Colinas, was that we got the news from our bank in New York that our loan was approved and we now have everything that we need in order to be able to put in an offer on the house next door that we are interested in picking up as an investment property.  It has been two days of continuous work trying to get that all lined up but we appear to finally have all of our ducks in a row so that we can now attempt to put in an offer today.

This morning Dominica has started doing “school” with Liesl.  We are attempting to home school our little girl and we are trying to get started with it.  She is definitely at the age where she can be doing some structured learning activities every day.  So yesterday Dominica went out shopping and stocked up on “school supplies” for Liesl.  Dominica has some curriculum books for pre-“pre-schoolers” that start at around age two so she is using those to come up with a learning path for Liesl.

Today Liesl was working on two different projects.  The first is a sorting task where she takes lots of brightly coloured little pom-poms and has to sort them into colour-matched plastic containers.  She thought that that was very cool.  To a lesser degree she also enjoyed stringing beads.  I’m not sure how the beads are done or what the educational goal is with those, Dominica is writing about this in her own blog as well.

At lunch I drove back home so that Dominica and I could discuss the house and the offer that we want to put in on it.  Dominica heated up leftovers from dinner last night for us to eat and Liesl showed me how she could sort pom-poms. She is already very good at it and knows exactly what to do.

We got a chance to discuss the house next door situation and, with all of the relevant information now available, we made our decision and called our real estate agent in order to put in our initial offer on the house.  How exciting.  The offer is “in” to our agent but won’t actually make it to the sellers until tomorrow.  As we said before, everything takes a really, really long time in Texas.  If this was New York the whole process would be done by mid-afternoon.  Here in Texas the seller doesn’t even know that we’ve been working on this for several days and have put in an offer until tomorrow.  Such a bizarre way to do things.

Dominica finally got back into blogging today.  It has been about two years since she last blogged.  Maybe having another little one on the way made her think more about it or maybe it is because Liesl is starting her homeschooling now.

There are more people looking at the house next door today.  That’s not good.  There has been a pickup of traffic over there.  We get really nervous about this as we are not confident that our agent communicates effectively with the bank and that the bank might take another offer not even knowing that we had put one in earlier.  I absolutely hate the lack of communications that goes on here compared to back home in New York.  Everyone would have already spoken and everyone would be on the same page.

Doing real estate in Texas reminds me of reading books about the seventeenth century when ships would set sail from a port and until arriving in the next port would have no access to news, updates, mail, etc.  So all kinds of bad things could happen.  Like the ship’s orders could change, the alliances between the ship’s parent nation and other nations could change, the captain could be fired, and on and on.  A sailor might be attacked by a ship that they think is from a friendly nation but that ship hasn’t been to port as recently and things that they are from a waring nation.  All because they are waiting for the news to sync up.

That’s what is going on here.  We’ve put in an offer but someone putting in an offer after us could, in theory, have the offer get put in, negotiated and accepted all before the seller even finds out that we had put in an earlier offer.  It is seriously frustrating to even think about.

Tonight is pasta night at La Cima.  Dominica and Liesl were all set to go with us but Liesl took her nap several hours later than usual so that might cause problems.  We are hoping that they can still make it – possibly just for a shorter period of time.  They might be able to show up, eat and run which actually is easier to do when you have Liesl than needing to stay for an extended period of time where she gets restless.

I uploaded a number of pictures that Dominica took on her DroidX of Liesl doing her first day of school.  You can check them out on Flickr.  I also uploaded two very short videos that I took of Liesl using my iPod.  I bought a new app yesterday called “8mm Camera” that makes the iPod take videos in an 8mm film style.  It is cute.  It has filters for things like 20s and 70s style and does a pretty good job of making things actually look like old home movies, I think.  It’s cute.

Just before I was going to leave work to go to the club Dominica pinged me to tell me that the paperwork for the offer on the house was done.  So I ran over to the real estate brokerage as quickly as I could, signed all of the papers and we got them submitted.  Now we just wait.

Then it was off to the club.  Watson beat me there but only by a minute.  We were there for probably half of an hour before Tara, Souder and Jen joined us.  Then Grey just a little bit later and Dominica and Liesl joined us once we had already ordered food – which works out pretty well as it means that Liesl has to sit still for a much shorter period of time.

We had a really nice time at dinner.  Then we went home and Liesl could not fall asleep.  Dominica and I were very tired and just waiting for Liesl to get to a point where we could put her to bed so that we could go to bed.