Solaris refuses to boot

Recently one of the Solaris servers which was down for maintenance by unix team, refused to boot.

While searching for a solution to this problem I came across the Nick Grossman's article How to get Solaris Box Online which is something anyone working with Solaris as the OS should know. I am pasting it below:

How to get a Solaris Box Online

Notes: I've done this many times on Solaris 2.6. Other versions may or may not be different and may or may not work. The following assumes a static IP address, a full-time Ethernet network connection, and the desire to use DNS for name resolution. This information is provided as a courtesy. It may or may not be accurate and it may or may not work for you. Use at your own risk. 1. Log in as root 2. cd /etc 3. Edit /etc/hostname.hme0 This file should contain the hostname of your machine, without the domain name. So, if the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name = hostname + domain name) is solaris-box-1.yourdomain.com, the file should look like this: # cat hostname.hme0 solaris-box-1 This assumes that your Ethernet adatper is hme0, the default device name for the first Ethernet adapter—the filename format is hostname.. On Solaris 10, it's iprb0, so you need to edit /etc/hostname.iprb0 instead. (Thanks to Robin Joinson for supplying the Solaris 10 info!) 4. Set up your /etc/hosts file. It should look something like this: 127.0.0.1 localhost 192.168.0.150 solaris-box-1 solaris-box-1.yourdomain.com loghost Make sure the second line has the correct IP address, hostname, and FQDN. The first line is the loopback entry. Along with #5, Solaris will know its name and IP address. 5. Create or edit /etc/nodename Contains the hostname of the computer (same as hostname.hme0). # cat nodename solaris-box-1 6. Create or edit /etc/defaultrouter Surprisingly enough, this file contains the IP address of your default router (or gateway). When you reboot and the network initialization scripts run, it will add a default route to the IP address in this file. # cat defaultrouter 192.168.0.1 Now it knows about it's own network parameters and it's time to get it to use DNS. The next steps will tell it to use other nameservers. If you want to set up a nameserver on the local machine, see the man page for named. 7. Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf If you haven't edited this file before, it should look suspiciously like like this: passwd: files group: files hosts: files networks: files protocols: files rpc: files ethers: files netmasks: files bootparams: files publickey: files # At present there isn't a 'files' backend for netgroup; the system will # figure it out pretty quickly, and won't use netgroups at all. netgroup: files automount: files aliases: files services: files sendmailvars: files Add the word 'dns' after 'files' on the 'hosts' line: passwd: files group: files hosts: files dns networks: files protocols: files rpc: files ethers: files netmasks: files bootparams: files publickey: files # At present there isn't a 'files' backend for netgroup; the system will # figure it out pretty quickly, and won't use netgroups at all. netgroup: files automount: files aliases: files services: files sendmailvars: files Now it knows to query a nameserver when looking up a name. Next we have to tell it what nameservers to use: 8. Create or edit /etc/resolv.conf Here you tell it three things: What domain we're in Specify any additional search domains What the nameservers are (it will use them in the order you put them in the file) When you're done it should look something like this: # cat resolv.conf domain yourdomain.com search yourdomain.com search client1.com nameserver 192.168.0.9 nameserver 192.168.0.11 For more information, see the man page for resolv.conf. 9. Reboot or re-initialize networking # sync;sync;sync # reboot OR # /etc/init.d/network # ifconfig -a (Thanks to Michael Hicks for the non-rebooting method!) You should now be normally online. If not, check everything above; if it's correct, try ping your gateway ping a machine on your local network ping your nameservers ping a well-known host, like www.yahoo.com 10. Go to www.sunfreeware.com and download some stuff. They maintain a fairly comprehensive archive of free software precompiled for various versions of Solaris. It'll make your life a lot easier, especially if your home environment is Linux. Packages I suggest are: Program Function joe editor pico editor (required to run pine w/o any additional configuration) pine email client gzip file compression tar GNU tar, more flexible and includes gzip file compression gcc GNU C compiler gdb GNU debugger top memory monitoring tool perl scripting language bash shell apache web server less text paginator (use instead of more) That's about it. If you have any comments or corrections, please email me at nick@pantsblazing.com. Author: Nick Grossman Last Updated: 5/30/2000