Sunday, January 13, 2008
Installing the OpenSolaris preview remotely
This was fun. I wanted to install the OpenSolaris preview on a ThinkPad. Unfortunately, the ThinkPad has an NVIDIA video card that isn't supported by the current version of the OpenSolaris LiveCD. But the GRUB menu shows a text-only option for booting, so I boot into that.
It boots and gives me a console prompt, and I try to figure out how to do a text-based install. There's /usr/bin/gui-install, but nothing obvious for a text-based install. A little bit of Googling, and I discover that there's no text-based install in the preview release. (It is the alpha release, so it's not terribly surprising.)
Okay, I'll just ssh in, run the GUI installer, and have it display on my desktop. When I try to ssh, I get this message: "no kex alg" (no key exchange algorithm.) Some Googling yields this thread, which indicates that it's simply a lack of host keys. I generate the host keys and successfully log in.
Okay, now X forwarding isn't working. I look at /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but things look fine there. I get this message on the laptop: "failed to create a directory for the temporary X authority file: Error 0; will use the default xauth file". Some Googling shows me this bug (which is actually a duplicate of this bug), which indicates that the error message is misleading.
On a hunch, I decide to check if xauth is installed on the LiveCD. Doh! No xauth. Oh, but that's okay, I'll just copy a version over and see if that works. From "strings sshd", I see that sshd has the hard-coded path "/usr/openwin/bin/xauth". Hmm, /usr is a read-only file system mounted from the CD.
Given that I can't copy xauth to the hard-coded path, what can I do? Well, there's the other option of changing the hard-coded path. I could just compile a version of sshd with a different path for xauth, but I'm feeling lazy, so I decide to just change the hard-coded path in the binary.
In trying to figure out how to do this with the tools available on the LiveCD, I run across mention that vim can handle editing binary files. (I'm sure that emacs would also be able to do it.) I copy the sshd binary to my desktop, open the file in vim, find the string "/usr/openwin/bin/xauth" and replace it with "/var/tmp/foo/bin/xauth". (Note that the lengths of the strings are the same -- I don't want to throw off the addresses for everything else in the file. Even then, the resulting file was one byte larger, although od shows me that that extra byte isn't in the modified string.)
I copy the sshd binary back to the laptop and give it a try. The binary runs, and X forwarding works (given that I'd already copied xauth to the appropriate location.) I run /usr/bin/gui-install, and bam! the installer window pops up on my desktop. A little while later, I have the OpenSolaris preview installed.
(And then I follow the instructions to update packages and grab the latest NVIDIA driver package. One reboot later, and I'm cooking with gas.)
It boots and gives me a console prompt, and I try to figure out how to do a text-based install. There's /usr/bin/gui-install, but nothing obvious for a text-based install. A little bit of Googling, and I discover that there's no text-based install in the preview release. (It is the alpha release, so it's not terribly surprising.)
Okay, I'll just ssh in, run the GUI installer, and have it display on my desktop. When I try to ssh, I get this message: "no kex alg" (no key exchange algorithm.) Some Googling yields this thread, which indicates that it's simply a lack of host keys. I generate the host keys and successfully log in.
Okay, now X forwarding isn't working. I look at /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but things look fine there. I get this message on the laptop: "failed to create a directory for the temporary X authority file: Error 0; will use the default xauth file". Some Googling shows me this bug (which is actually a duplicate of this bug), which indicates that the error message is misleading.
On a hunch, I decide to check if xauth is installed on the LiveCD. Doh! No xauth. Oh, but that's okay, I'll just copy a version over and see if that works. From "strings sshd", I see that sshd has the hard-coded path "/usr/openwin/bin/xauth". Hmm, /usr is a read-only file system mounted from the CD.
Given that I can't copy xauth to the hard-coded path, what can I do? Well, there's the other option of changing the hard-coded path. I could just compile a version of sshd with a different path for xauth, but I'm feeling lazy, so I decide to just change the hard-coded path in the binary.
In trying to figure out how to do this with the tools available on the LiveCD, I run across mention that vim can handle editing binary files. (I'm sure that emacs would also be able to do it.) I copy the sshd binary to my desktop, open the file in vim, find the string "/usr/openwin/bin/xauth" and replace it with "/var/tmp/foo/bin/xauth". (Note that the lengths of the strings are the same -- I don't want to throw off the addresses for everything else in the file. Even then, the resulting file was one byte larger, although od shows me that that extra byte isn't in the modified string.)
I copy the sshd binary back to the laptop and give it a try. The binary runs, and X forwarding works (given that I'd already copied xauth to the appropriate location.) I run /usr/bin/gui-install, and bam! the installer window pops up on my desktop. A little while later, I have the OpenSolaris preview installed.
(And then I follow the instructions to update packages and grab the latest NVIDIA driver package. One reboot later, and I'm cooking with gas.)
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No, I didn't. I figured that it was likely just an extra byte at the end of the file, but given that it worked and that I was under time pressure to go downstairs and help with kids, I didn't look any deeper.
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