The Battle With Solaris Part 1

I was asked to re-ip a Solaris 10 box via the VMWare Infrastructure Client and set up an Oracle DB on that machine (Oracle was already installed). Being a novice at Oracle, having to google what Solaris was (unix-like), never using VMWare before, and having to re-learn unix made for a pretty daunting task. Here is Part 1 of what I learned:

First with the Re-IP'ing. You can alter files directly to change your IP or you can open a terminal on your Solaris machine and run the command "sys-unconfig". It will ask you if you're sure you want to and blah blah blah, but when the machine restarts your hostname will be "unknown" and you will be able to specify a new IP address, default gateway, hostname, etc.

The steps are relatively self-explanatory. There were a few terms I didn't know. In general if I didn't understand what the term meant, I didn't set it up. One thing worth noting, before running sys-unconfig I wasn't able to type the | (pipe) character into the shell. When you sys-unconfig, you have the option to change your keyboard configuration and wouldn't you know, it was set up as some UK bull rather than a US keyboard, so I made that change and the | character was typable again.

Anyway back to the re-ip. I entered the new values into the sys-unconfig wizard, the machine restarted, and it had altered all of those files that I would have had to manually alter. When doing a ping from the Solaris box I was getting a response, however when I was pinging the common gateway from the Solaris box, or the IP from my local machine, I was not getting a response.

This made little sense to me who has no networking experience. Why could I ping internally but not from my external machine. And why could I externally ping the common gateway but not from the Solaris box.....

Long story short, after I re-ip'd the machine, I was supposed to go into VMWare and right click -> Edit Settings on the Solaris machine. On the Hardware tab, clicking Network Adapter 1, the device status was not connected and connect at power on was unchecked. By clicking those checkboxes and saying "Ok" everything worked internally and externally (both the default gateway and the IP were pingable).

My guess as to what was going on:
1) With no network connectivity, when pinging the IP from the solaris box, it saw it was the local IP and therefore did not need network connectivity to hit that IP.
2) Since there was no network connectivity, when pinging the default gateway the Solaris box wasn't able to call out to the gateway IP which is why ping was unsuccessful
3) My local machine could ping the gateway IP because both my machine and the gateway had network connectivity
4) My local machine could not ping the new Solaris IP because the machine had no connectivity.

These are guesses.

And the end of this post.

More to come in later parts like chown, df -k, and stuff.