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>>>>> "sd" == Sean Davis <dive-nb@endersgame.net> writes:

    sd> I can't install Solaris on the Ultra 5 (my original plan)
    sd> because Solaris apparently refuses to detect non-IDE drives in
    sd> Ultra 5's.

Yes, the Solaris installer has *a lot* of problems.  However it does
work for me to install onto an NCR 53c896? dual-channel SCSI card in
an Ultra 5.  I think I scored a special Sun SCSI card.  In my case I
installed '/' on SCSI and '/usr' onto a Firewire disk to get around
the Solaris 137GB IDE barrier (NetBSD has no 137GB barrier on the same
hardware).

The install boot CD has no Firewire driver, but the intalled system
_does_ have a Firewire driver.  so, if you are lucky, you'll find the
same thing about your Adaptec card: maybe it doesn't work in the
installer, but it does work once installed.  Or maybe your Adaptec
card needs to be ``initialized'' with some microcode or something, and
there's just no hope.

And newfs has some stupid issue with disks of certain geometries where
it insists you use a different fragment size and quits.  Maybe you're
likely to run into this using non-Sun-branded disks.  If you just
cut-and-paste the mkfs line that newfs prints, the relevant heads and
sectors numbers are embedded in there---you can just change them and
get a filesystem with 512-byte fragments anyway.  But in the
Installer, this isn't an option---the install just quits silently with
error making filesystems, and you don't even get to see the actual
error from newfs.  so, I had to boot NetBSD and use 'disklabel' to
change the label geometry of the disk, so Installer newfs would feed
this more friendly geometry to mkfs/UFS.

The disklabels written by NetBSD are recognized by OpenPROM and the
Solaris disk kernel modules, but the 'format' and 'fmthard' programs
consider them corrupt and load them as a bunch of random garbage.  so
while I wasn't able to complete my Solaris install without using
NetBSD disklabel program, I still had to zero out NetBSD's disklabels
and remake them using Solaris 'format' or 'rmformat/fmthard', which is
a pain in the ass since you can't edit the labels of mounted disks,
since even though I wasn't changing mounted partitions 'format'
thought I was because it couldn't read the existing label the same way
as the kernel did, and the only ``rescue'' medium is the Install CD,
and the Install Kernel doesn't support Firewire, and 'format' has all
these idiot-protection switches features where it just refuses to do
reasonable things.

Also Solaris has a silly distinction between removeable and
nonremoveable media.  If it thinks a device is ``removeable'' like
Firewire, then the 'format' command is arbitrarily disabled, as is the
installer and LiveUpdate.  You can use 'fmthard' on a removeable disk
but it can't update geometry and sometimes refuses to change labels
with nonsensical complaints, and of course the Installer won't work.
Hopefully it doesn't think your oddball SCSI controller is
``removeable''.  I had to install on my disk as 137GB-barrier IDE,
then move it to Firewire, relabel the disk for 200GB, use the Install
CD as a rescue disk to run drvconfig and disks (since Solaris can't
add new disk drivers and /dev/dsk/* nodes until /usr is mounted, and I
was moving /usr to Firewire), and I don't remember what else.  It was
a real nightmare.

Anyway at least the Solaris Firewire driver works reliably.  Solaris
doesn't crash on me yet, and they have a decent fs*king journaled
filesystem that can be exported reliably over NFS and that doesn't
crash or have quirks that keep going away and then coming back (now it
is softdep problems with ``slow machines,'' I just can't play these
games any more.  I need at least _one_ machine with a hundreds-of-GB
stable filesystem), but Solaris is still an obnoxious fussy little
bitch full of many stupid and unnecessary annoying bugs.  I still hate
this COBOL-ish garbage and miss SunOS.

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