An Avantic Software Container, also known as an Avantic Container, is a virtual server environment running OpenSolaris. Avantic Containers are built and configured with Solaris virtualization technology called Solaris Containers which is composed or two major components:

1. Solaris Zones (zones)
   Isolated virtual operating system environment.

2. Solaris Resouce Manager
   Controls system resources available to virtual environments.

The global zone is the zone that the server boots into at first boot. It holds the root account for the server, so shutting down the global zone will shut down the whole server. A non-global zone is similar to a virtual server. It has its own root account, issuing a reboot from within a non-global zone will only reboot that zone.

Non-global zones can be configured to be either whole root, where all files are duplicated from the global zone into the non-global zone or sparce root, where the directories /lib /platform /sbin and /usr are all inherited from the global zone and are read only from the non-global zone.

All Avantic Containers are sparse root zones. We have also removed most of default software install that come with a full solaris install. This reduces the size of our zones down to 30MB of disk space, leaving you plenty of storage space.

Sun Microsystems Sun Fire T2000 servers running UltraSPARC T1 8 core (4 threads per core) processors with high capacity RAM and high speed redundant SAS disks.

Yes and yes.

Yes, login as root and you will have superuser priviledges to your zone. As a root user you will not be able to write to any of the inherited directories, or be able see any process running outside your zone.

You can install and run most software that will run on Solaris, the major caveats are the software can't write to inherited read-only file systems or directly address the servers hardware.

The total capacity is 5 Gigabytes of which approximately 30MB Megabytes will be used by the system.

We pride ourself on being responsive to our customers needs. Our current guarentee is that any new orders will be available within 24 hours, and all upgrades will be made within 12 hours.

Yes, you sure can. Here at Avantic Software we have expirience in many technologies, manly those based on the Java language. The following are a list of software that we will install for you when creating your container:

• Apache
• Tomcat
• Glassfish
• Mysql
• Postgres
• Subversion
• Maven

Both traffic in and out of your Avantic Container is counted towards your monthly bill. Each Avantic Container receives 10GB of traffic each month for free. If you have more than one container with us then the bandwidth allowance and usage is accumlative for the whole account

Traffic within our network is not counted. Traffic from http://mirror.pacific.net.au/ is also not counted.

Yes you can.. At the moment we are only allowing upgrades/downgrades between our current configurations. If you require something larger, Please see the question below.

Thats fine, drop us an email and we will quote it for you.. The reason we do not advertise configurations larger is because in most situations you will be better off with a couple of containers.. ie one for your database and another for your application, or another container for a replication database. This allows greater flexibility for security and redundancy..

Aside from the root account you will have 1 other account created. The username for this account is admin. The passwords for these user accounts will be given to you when the accounts are first created.

As root run this command:

$ reboot

A reboot takes less than 10 seconds and your logged-in shell will be disconnected.

Bind 9 is already installed and ready for configuration. Click here for more information on configuring Bind.

Once configured then refresh the DNS Server

$ svcadm refresh dns/server

With the current release of OpenSolaris each zone cannot maintain their own firewall, this can only be configured from within the global zone. To keep our servers and your zones the most secure we by default only allow access to the following ports

• 22 ssh
• 25 smtp
• 80 http
• 53 dns
• 110 pop3
• 143 imap
• 443 https

If you need any other port open then we can do this for you, just drop us an email. We also have the ability to customize our firewall for your zone, so if there is any other rules you would like added then let us know. ie we can restrict traffic from certain subnets/IPs to any ports..

By default you will not be able to ssh to your container as root. To get root access, ssh to your container as admin then su.

Sendmail is already installed and running.

Your Avantic Container uses a virtual network interface which is completely visualized within the OpenSolaris operating System. Although your container is not alone on the physical server it is networked as if it was physically separated.

You have your own publicly addressable IP address. By default your container will be running as a DNS client and will be using /etc/resolv.conf to find its nameservers. By default these will be using Avantics Name servers but can be changed if you wish.

You can find out your hostname by running the command:

$ hostname

Please remember that this is not the hostname you may have configured on your DNS for this Server/IP

To change this name then you must edit the following files

• /etc/hosts
• /etc/nodename

This will depend on a few things.

If you have your own DNS server resolving this domain then add the IP address we gave you with whatever name you want to resolve.

If you do not have a DNS server then see if your domain name registrar can provide this service to you.

You can also setup a DNS server on your container or purchase a small container dedicated to these services

After that sinking feeling resides from the realization of what you have done, then drop us an email and we will boot your container back up again.

We are currently working on ways so you can do this yourself. Stay tuned.

The first question that all long time LINUX first time Solaris users ask..

The Solaris equivalent is prstat, although I would not call it the equivalent as prstat is much better.

The answer is simple Solaris is UNIX not LINUX and GNU by definition is "GNU is not UNIX".

The good news is that OpenSolaris also ships with most of the GNU tools that you will be use to. They are located in /usr/bin

The default tar and grep are OpenSolaris and have some differences to the GNU versions you may be use to. So for your convenience the GNU versions are gtar and ggrep

The simplest is using the ps command.

$ ps -ef

By running prstat with the -Z flag will give you totals for your zone.

$ prstat -Z

Please note that the percent values are a percentage of the physical server..

For a simple answer run the following:

$ df -h

This will give you human readable values.

Remember that the /usr /platform /sbin /lib are all read only from the global zone. The only file system you should be looking at is the root (/) which will show usage of your allocated disk space

The swap and /tmp file systems show the amount of virtual memory is available on the server.. Please remember your container has a memory cap which is not shown here.

$ useradd -d /home/fred -m -s /bin/ksh -c "Fred Smith" fred

Now this is where all the long time LINUX users will fall of their chair..

The answer is SMF and the tools are svcs and svcadm. ie no more init.d. This topic is too big for this section, so for more information please refer to Solaris Service Management Facility - Quickstart Guide

There are a few ways to get software installed in your container. Ask us when we create your container and we will do it for you free of charge. Please note, this is only available on selected software.

Use blastwave, trust me they are terrific and most installations are a brease.

Third option is the traditional download and install using the install options from the software vendor.

Services like DNS server and sendmail are already installed, and most of the UNIX utilities are available including C compilers.

If you want to install any software within your zone then first consult the Blastwave website. There are 2 great reasons why this option is preferred:

This site is dedicated to providing stable software to the solaris community, it is kept up todate and is very reliable. Plus the process of installing from them is very easy and well thought out.

Also we offer free bandwidth to their Australian mirror, so you will not have to pay for downloading the software from them.

If you have a look in /usr/jdk you will find both version 1.5 and 1.6 installed. Running java from the command line will always use 1.6, regardless of what you specified on your order.

Based on your order if you specified which java version you would like to use we will setup the appropriate environment variables for your Java based software to use the correct versions.

If you need to run with a different version of java then we recomend you download the correct version for our hardware from the sun site, and install it into the /opt directory.

If you need to run a java version other than 1.6 from the command line, the best solution would be to modify your PATH envrionment variable.

This will only occur on our smaller containers as the default behavour for the JVM is to use a minimum and maximum heap size of 1/64th of the physical memory. Since our servers have 16GB of physical memory this equates to 256MB which will be more than what our smaller containers have available.

The solution is simple. always specify a maximum heap size on all your java processes. eg.

$ java -Xmx64M -version