Nexenta 3.0 Zones: Fixing Broken Bones

As a rule of thumbs, when things installs very smoothly, I always suspect something wrong, because there is an old Ukrainian saying: "Devil lives in a silent lake". This time same thing happened to newly installed Nexenta Core 3.0 Release. Installation went just as sweet and smooth.

But when it comes to zones... :-(

Long story short: Zones are just totally broken in Nexenta Core 3.0 Release, end of story. SSH won't work, you won't login, no passwords asked, nothing. And I am quite surprised it was never fixed (probably nobody took a chance to test it). Now is the way how I fixed, grepping over bugs database:

First, before you install a zone, you have to fix broken /usr/bin/createzone Perl script. This should be done in two steps:

1. Replace elatte-unstable with hardy-unstable on a line #41.


2. Throw away @source_files with all its guts and replace with the following:
   

   my @source_files = qw(
   /lib/svc/method/nexenta-sysidtool-system
   /var/svc/manifest/system/nexenta-sysidtool.xml
   /lib/svc/method/nexenta-sysidtool-net
   );
   

Second, fix broken /lib/svc/method/svc-syseventd script. This is done in quite dirty way, but at least works fine:

1. In the global zone edit the script above. Find this line (below the CDDL header):
   

   . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh

   ...and add this:
   

   [ `zonename` = global ] || sleep 3600 & exit 0
   

   ...so in result you will get this:
   

   . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh
   [ `zonename` = global ] || sleep 3600 & exit 0
   

This will allow required services finally start.

Now you can install your zone (zoneadm -z yourzonename install).

Third, fix shadow and passwd. Boot your zone and zlogin to it in a single mode (-S), then issue pwconv command and exit.

Finally, after you anyhow login to that thing, reconfigure broken system service once again, like this:

dpkg-reconfigure sunwcsd
svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/system/sysevent.xml

And yes, this is Unix. You should reboot your zone in order it getting working right. :-)