Kludge for running Samba in StormOS/Nexenta hybrid system

A very long time ago, I upgraded a bunch of packages on my Nexenta NCP 3.0.1 fileserver to their StormOS "Hail" counterparts; however, I encountered a problem with the samba package:

Setting up samba (2:3.3.2-2stormos3.2) ...
Starting Samba daemons...:ld.so.1: smbd: fatal: relocation error: file /usr/lib/libcups.so.2: symbol __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_oid_desc: referenced symbol not found
/etc/init.d/samba: line 33: 17304 Killed                  start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --oknodo --exec /usr/sbin/smbd -- -D

Well, this was no fun. It looked like smbd was not getting a symbol it needed. I shelved the upgrade and forced dpkg to put a "hold" on the old version of samba, until I finally had an idea today.

I "grepped" through the /usr/lib directory in search of the provider of the missing symbol:

find /usr/lib -type f -exec grep __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_oid_desc '{}' \;

... and I discovered that it was provided by /usr/lib/libgssapi.so.2.

baitisj@raid:/usr/lib$ objdump -T libgssapi.so.2.0.0  | grep hostbased       
0002ba80 g    DO .data  00000008  HEIMDAL_GSS_2.0 __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_oid_desc
0002ba78 g    DO .data  00000008  HEIMDAL_GSS_2.0 __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_x_oid_desc

Therefore, I added the following LD_PRELOAD kludge into /etc/init.d/samba:

...

PIDDIR=/var/run/samba
NMBDPID=$PIDDIR/nmbd.pid
SMBDPID=$PIDDIR/smbd.pid

# Baitisj: kludge for missing symbol
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libgssapi.so.2
export LD_PRELOAD
...

Voila! My nifty ZFS fileserver now runs Samba 3.3.2.

Moving ZFS root filesystem from one computer to another

A few weeks ago, I decided to move the drives in my OpenSolaris (NexentaCP 1.0.1) box from one computer into another computer with slightly different hardware. The old machine used an Intel ICH6 SATA controller; the new box uses an inexpensive SIL3124-based four-port PCI controller card.

GRUB seemed to load fine, and was able to find and load the kernel (unix) and boot_archive files. However, Nexenta didn't boot: the kernel flashed an error message and immediately rebooted the system. After I added the -kv kernel debug option in GRUB, I was able to read the error message:

panic: cannot mount root path /ramdisk:a

After a great deal of effort, I finally figured out the solution. The problem was that the zpool.cache file inside of boot_archive was telling the Solaris kernel to look for the root filesystem at the wrong place. Booting from the Nexenta CD in rescue mode, mounting the root filesystem, and executing bootadm update-archive -R wasn't enough, because the zpool.cache file was never refreshed.

The solution, kind reader: if you move your ZFS root filesystem from one box to another, boot a Solaris "rescue" cd (I just use the NexentaCP 1.0.1 install CD), import your root filesystem, and manually freshen the zpool.cache file. Then update your boot archive using bootadm. On Nexenta, the root filesystem is labeled <<syspool/rootfs-nmu-XXX>>, where XXX corresponds to an apt-cloned version of the root filesystem. Here are the steps that I used, once I booted into the Nexenta installer and pressed the F3 key for the shell:

# mkdir /tmp/mnt

# zpool import -f syspool

# mount -F zfs syspool/rootfs-nmu-002 /tmp/mnt

# cp /etc/zfs/zpool.cache /tmp/mnt/etc/zfs/zpool.cache

# bootadm update-archive -R /tmp/mnt

Creating boot_archive for /tmp/mnt
updating /tmp/mnt/platform/i86pc/boot_archive

# umount /tmp/mnt

# reboot

... and... voila! system works again.

I've also noticed that NexentaCP 2 doesn't seem to want to boot if I have a SIL3124 card installed in the machine; this looks like a more recent bug in the latest OpenSolaris; however, NexentaCP 1.0.1 works just fine with the card.