After that, the image-update went fine. I need to learn more of the options for pkg, apparently. I had skipped that before because my other OI machines did not have that non-sticky option set, and the upgrade worked there.

I can understand why the Gentoo devs did it (most people don’t need perl/python/ruby support embedded in Vim, for example), but I’m beginning to think there’s no way for me to keep up with changes, or if there is, I totally missed it, so everytime this changes I’ll be looking at Bugzilla and the Forums. Maybe there’s a way I can track these kind of USE flag changes on my own system, in a more obvious way then the output from eix-sync. I’ll have to look into it.

Turns out, I needed to build with “-introspection” in order to build it again with “introspection”. Or maybe I could just globally disable introspection, but not sure what that would change, it looks like a Gnome thing. As usual I ended up with lots of Gnome and KDE installed, and really I still just use Enlightenment everywhere. If it wasn’t Enlightenment, it would be Windowmaker or something similar.

This is suboptimal (risks corruption), but it does the job. The hosts in this case have kernel modules that the normal “rmmod” would hang on forever, and since they have no console/ILO or IPMI or other power control I am forced to use this or some other trick to take down (reboot -f or sending a NOC person out on the floor are the other common methods, the latter being our last resort).

Because this immediately forces the kernel to reboot (assuming you have the “Magic SysRq” option in your kernel), using ssh becomes a problem, as the TCP connection dies without you getting a RST packet, so normal ssh and TCP timeout mechanisms apply, and it’ll take a few minutes for the host to come back up and issue a TCP RST in response to a keep alive message for that connection.

Now, every once in awhile I do something without giving it enough thought. That’s a kind way of saying I do something really dumb. Imagine, if you will trying to reboot a lot of machines via an “at” job. Further imagine that you decided to change your normal reboot/shutdown -r to the aforementioned sysrq-trigger trick.

Also interesting is that using sysrq-trigger doesn’t allow the at job to be removed from the queue before the machine is restarted, and will just say there until the job is allowed to exit normally.

I think you see what I did. Dumb. Thankfully there are a few seconds available between boot and when the job runs to remove the job from the queue.

First, I always need to change the permissions on /dev/ptmx. Before you change the permissions to 666 on this STREAMs master clone device, the shell won’t have any terminal control, so:

Second, install SUNWuiu8 to get rid of an annoying message when you log in via ssh:

I think this is a missing dependency for SunSSH.

So,

I’ll add more as I think about it.

EDIT:

Sure enough, even with OpenIndiana 151a, I still need to change permissions on the /dev/ptmx device file.
The SUNWuiu8 problem is gone, though. It appears to already be installed now.

The ebuild is called dev-util/lafilefixer, and to run it:

Whoever put this together has now helped me a great deal… I had literally hundreds of .la files that it updated. Plus it fixed amarok and let me complete my emerge update.

How did this happen?  Because my /var/lib/portage/world file has a lot of packages in it that don’t really need to be there (they should be pulled in as dependancies of packages I do want, not in the way I have them.)   When I was migrating to this box, instead of just looking at the few hundred packages in world, I grabbed a list of everything I’d compiled, and used that to build my new box.   One result of that is that sys-libs/libselinux got compiled.  (At least, I think that’s how it happened.)   I noticed but didn’t think it was going to be a problem.  However, for some ebuilds (coreutils being the most important to me), if the selinux header files are installed on the box, the configure script detects files like /usr/include/selinux/flask.h and proceeds to include selinux support.   Then you will find that /bin/cp and many other critical utilities are linked against libselinux.so.1, so you can’t remove the sys-libs/libselinux, and since the USE flag has no effect other than changing RDEPEND in the ebuild, you’re stuck.   Catch-22, almost.

Today I finally resolved to fix this, because I got annoyed, and because sys-libs/libselinux is hard-masked after my latest sync (as a result of the sync and having to update my profile with eselect).

The first part, fixing coreutils is pretty easy:

Unfortunately, after that… you are still stuck.   The coreutils will work, but I was left with a number of packages that revdep-rebuild reports as missing libselinux.so.1… furthermore they all die when trying to link against libselinux:

/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2/../../../../x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld: cannot find -lselinux

Ah, portage, why are you so cruel to me?    The above example is from gnome-terminal.  Good thing I still use xterm.

Note: the next part could help, but it’s far easier to use lafilefixer these days.

So, what to do?   I’m not kidding, this is basically it, in one line form:

find /usr/lib64 -name '*.la' -print | xargs grep selinux | cut -f1 -d: | sed -e 's#^./##g' | xargs equery b | awk '{print "="$1}' | sort -u | xargs emerge

Built that up a command at a time once I realized that the *.la files still contained references to the libselinux (-lselinux).  Basically, it searches for all the .la files that contain references to selinux.   .la files are just text files that control the linking process, either as part of libtool or the compile-time linker. My command above just uses some rather lame shell tricks to run emerge against all the packages those files belong too.

Even after that was complete, I still had libnss3.so.12 breakage to contend with, but at least revdep-rebuild was working at that point (not breaking on every ebuild it found missing libselinux.so.1).    Frustrating.

I hope this saves someone some damn time, somewhere.

This actually seems legit to me, in all the particulars.  I want it to be true, anyway.

So… I backed off that plan and installed a pair of 120GB drives.  Now the system won’t boot.  And the console is, shall we say, unresponsive. I live a charmed life, I tell ya.

As a result, I have since collected a couple of other old Sun workstations via Ebay and the employee purchase program at work (which are basically “worthless”, like $65), and even an old Pentium 4 for Solaris x86.   So I’ve got the gear, but I haven’t had time to continue with any but the most cursory examinations of OpenSolaris.   I got 2 of them booted up with ZFS root on fairly recent versions of Nevada.   Waiting for the SPARC release of Indiana to be readily available.

In the meantime, I thought I might work on some of my other Solaris related projects.

One suggestion I keep running across in my normal google searches is to disable HWCursor in xorg.conf.   Messed around with that for a few days.

After a lot of tests, it turns out that killing xscreensaver fixes the problem…. no need to restart X.

Lately, the problem has stopped happening, so I am considering that an update to x11-misc/xscreensaver may have fixed the problem.