SCSA10-1 Objective 3.5 - Solaris boot and shutdown, unresponsive systems
Perform system boot and shutdown procedures, including identifying the system’s boot device, creating and removing custom device aliases, viewing and changing NVRAM parameters, and interrupting an unresponsive system.
Bringing up the topics of shutting down or rebooting a Solaris box can stir controversy. To shut down a Solairs system, you can use either shutdown or init, either will perform a clean shutdown. The shutdown command eventually calls init to do the actual shutting down, but shutdown warns users before the shutdown occurs. On a system often used by users, it is kind to use shutdown. However, if you know that no one will be affected by bringing the system down, then init will do the job quicker.
The init command is used to make the system change run levels. A normally running system operates at run level 3. Run level 0 and 6 are used to bring the system down, run level 0 takes the system to the BootPROM while run level 6 powers the system down. Methods for shutting down a Solaris system are detailed at Sun’s documentation site.
Booting a properly configured system generally requires turning it on. From the ok prompt, all you have to do is type boot. Sun provides details on their docs site. Remember that shutdown and rebooting must be done as superuser.
The system’s device aliases can be viewed from the ok prompt by running the devalias command. This will list the device aliases and the associated device paths.
The default boot device can be viewed with the following command:
printenv boot-device
This command will display something like this:
boot-device disk disk
The devices are referenced by their aliases. The first disk indicates the current setting, the second shows the default value.
Creating and removing device aliases are straightforward, but care should be taken because changes here can cause boot problems (that can be fixed by correcting the device aliases).
Viewing and changing nvram parameters is possible from the Solaris command line (when the operating system is running). It is also posisble to perform these actions from the ok prompt. Just type printenv to list the nvram configuration parameters and their default values. To set a parameter, use setenv param value from the ok prompt. For example, setenv auto-boot? false
Sun provides a list of nvram configuration parameters.
If a system becomes unresponsive, there are several options. The tried and true “unplug” method should be a last resort (but is effective). For a SPARC system, if a Sun keyboard is connected to the system, pressing STOP-A will take the system to the ok prompt. If a serial connection is available to the system’s console, sending a break charachter will also bring the system to the ok prompt. There is no exact equivalent for an x86 version of Solaris since there is no BootPROM. If kadb is running, F1-A will halt the system and take it to the kadb prompt which can be used for debugging.