My first glance at OpenSolaris

Today I was having my first glance at OpenSolaris. Getting the ISO burned, booting the LiveCD and all this didn’t take long and the system was booted, welcoming me with a Gnome Desktop environment - which I personally dislike for several reasons - but at least it is something to work with. And don’t forget: Solaris is the system offering ZFS underneath, which should be worth a look. So I clicked the install icon on the desktop and waited for the process to complete.

As the system finally rebooted, it was up and running. It seemed to me, like I could start working and so I fired up a browser and - had a network issue on screen. It looks like something went definitively wrong.

As an old Linux guy, I changed to the shell environment and checked the network card: cable attached, link up, ip address set up, gateway and nameserver are looking fine. So where’s the problem?

To make sure it isn’t the DNS server, I tried to ping its IP and it replied. Even nslookup delivered a fine result - but the system refused to do so. As I am on a Unix system here, there is no reason to feel lost at that point, but I did until I remembered the nsswitch.conf file which defines the way lookups are handled:

passwd:files shadow:files group:files hosts: files bootparams:files ethers:files netmasks:files networks:files protocols:files rpc:files services:files automount:files aliases:files

The problem was found in the line saying ‘hosts: files’ as it defines that no DNS server is queried for resolving hostnames. So changing it to ‘hosts: files dns’ did the trick and I am finally online.