This post is part two of my “series” on Oracle on Solaris 8. In my first post, I discussed installing Solaris 8 on VirtualBox and then installing Oracle 8i. In this post, I will discussed how I installed the Oracle database driver for the Perl DBI module and also write some simple Perl programs.
In a past post, I discussed installing Oracle 8i on Solaris 2.6 inside the QEMU SPARC32 CPU architecture emulator. This worked well, but due to the need for the host machine to emulate another CPU architecture, even an “antique” one, the CPU demands are high. A more efficient way to experiment with Solaris on a virtual machine is to install the x86 version on VirtualBox, which is the only hypervisor I’ve been able to get it to run on. Recently I downloaded an ISO of Solaris 8 x86 and decided to install it on a VirtualBox VM, while also installing Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition. I also patch Solaris 8 in this post and install OpenSSH. Finally, I included a brief section on getting Solaris 7 up and running with Oracle 8i.
One of my goals in my recent experimentation with Oracle and Solaris was to write some programs that could query and modify the data in a database. In my time as a systems administrator, I have written a number of Perl scripts that query Oracle using the DBD::Oracle module. For my lab experimenting, I wanted to be able to write scripts that could run against the late-90s Oracle 8i I installed on Solaris 2.6. Until now, my efforts at getting the DBD::Oracle module compiled on Solaris with the 8i client have failed. In this post I will write about how I finally got this to work.
Following up on my previous post, Running Solaris 8 and 9 under the QEMU SPARC32 Emulator, I decided to try running Sun Solaris 2.6 in the QEMU SPARC32 Emulator. Someone has graciously shared the CD images for both the SPARC and X86 Solaris 2.6 images out on the Internet Archive. I also installed the Oracle 8i database server and connected to it from Solaris 9 QEMU machine. My ultimate goal in this exercise was to query Oracle 8i with the Perl DBD::Oracle module, but I ultimately failed at this. More on this later. This post will be similar to my other one on Solaris 8/9 in QEMU, so I’m going to skip steps such as how to set up QEMU for this.
One of the really cool features of QEMU (Quick Emulator) is that it can emulate CPU architectures other than x86-64, such as PowerPC, AArch64, and SPARC. In my experimentation with Solaris, I’ve really wanted to try the SPARC and SPARC64 emulators with Solaris, and do something similar to this article: Build your own SPARC workstation with QEMU and Solaris. However, I really wanted to do this with Solaris 8/9/10, as 2.6 is more limited in what you can do with it. In particular, I wanted to run Solaris 8 in this, as installing 8 in VirtualBox is a hassle, with barely-functional graphics. In the end, I was only able to run Solaris in the 32-bit emulator, which emulates a SPARCstation 5 by default. The SPARC64 emulator can only run BSD and Linux variants, and not Solaris. In the future, I intend on writing another post on the SPARC64 emulator.
Since I’ve started experimenting with Solaris in my home lab, I’ve really wanted to try managing systems with some sort of configuration management software. I originally thought about trying Rex, a Perl configuration management tool, but I’ve yet to take the time to learn it. I do, however, know Ansible, and it came as a welcome surprise to me that I can install Python, which is needed by Ansible, on Solaris without having to go through the hassle of compiling it from source. This is because Python can be installed using the pkgutil tool from OpenCSW. In addition, the community.general collection in Ansible includes a pkgutil module that allows Yum/Apt-like package management. One day I decided to see if Ansible would work on Solaris.
Note: your results may vary in following these directions; I can’t guarantee that they will work for you.
When I recently started getting back into Solaris, one of the things I wanted to get working was LDAP authentication, so that I can log into systems with the same set of credentials like in a business environment. As with most Solaris tasks, the information on how to set this up is scarce on the Internet, especially for Solaris 8 and 9.
I already had three LDAP instances set up in my lab environment: a primary instance and two replicas. This post will not cover the setup of these, but all three are AlmaLinux 9 containers running OpenLDAP 2.6. The replicas have been configured to allow non-SSL connections to them, for the purpose of authenticating legacy operating systems such as Solaris. I don’t recommend allowing this in a production environment of course. Perhaps at a later date I will work on configuring Solaris to connect to OpenLDAP via SSL, but even this will require allowing insecure versions of SSL/TLS.
As mentioned in a previous post, I recently purchased a SunBlade 100 workstation off eBay. The first operating system I installed on it was Solaris 8, as this was the only version of Solaris I had CD ISOs for and it only has a CD-ROM drive (later I was able to install Solaris 9 on it over the network). I was disappointed to find out that Solaris 8 didn’t come with OpenSSH preinstalled; it wasn’t until Solaris 9 that SSH was installed with the base OS. I also had an x86 Solaris 8 virtual machine running in VirtualBox that I wanted to be able to access from my Linux systems (installed using the steps here: https://github.com/mac-65/Solaris_8_x86_VM). I decided to try installing OpenSSH on the VM first, as I could take snapshots and revert to a working state if a step failed. Prior to starting these steps, I applied the below patches per mac-65’s guide:
I didn’t have to apply any patches to my SunBlade 100.