Saturday, August 7th, 2010
This post is more a reminder note for myself but it may help someone else.
I currently manage my printers via a VirtualBox XP instance running on my OpenSolaris server. My 2 year old daughter was irresistibly drawn to the UPS and shut it off which left the USB devices in an unusable state, they would show up in the list of available devices but VirtualBox couldn’t reconnect them.
To fix this I did the following:
prtconf -v and look until you find the device you want to fix, in my case it looked like this
printer (driver not attached)
Go to the compatible area and grab the first usb string from the value section
usb3f0,2b17.100 in my case
rem_drv ugen
add_drv ugen -m ‘* 0666 root sys’ -i ‘”usb3f0,2b17.100″‘ ugen
This should repair the issue and allow you to reconnect the driver.
Posted in OpenSolaris, VirtualBox | No Comments »
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
If you, like me, own a USB printer that requires the driver to load firmware into the system at boot time and you run anything other than windows you’ve probably experienced the joy of poor printing.
Until now the only solution I had was to plug it into my primary desktop and share it which wasn’t optimal, I originally tried to run Xen under Solaris with a Windows XP guest but the support for USB bridging isn’t there yet. I switched to VirtualBox but the attempts to get it to mount the usb device were always failing with errors in /var/adm/messages
Aug 30 14:31:04 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2093]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -a -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:04 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2093]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -a -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2095]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -d -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxUSBHelper[2095]: [ID 387370 user.error] VBoxUSBHelper: /usr/sbin/update_drv -d -i pci1043,8277@1a,7/printer@2 ugen
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxSVC[1688]: [ID 734376 user.error] USBProxy: failed to capture device Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 1020.
Aug 30 14:31:05 XXX VBoxSVC[1688]: [ID 734376 user.error] USBProxy: failed to capture device Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 1020.
Typing in the command manually showed that ugen wasn’t able to be properly mounted, poking around I found some articles about getting cameras to operate under Solaris and followed them to remap the printer device as a ugen as far as Solaris was concerned (Since I can’t actually reliably print with the printer under Solaris anyways this was no loss).
After that I hotplugged the printer and was able to finally mount and share the printer under my windows XP VirtualBox instance.
Hopefully this will help others who want to get a similar situation resolved with VirtualBox and Solaris.
Posted in OpenSolaris, VirtualBox | No Comments »
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
So I’ve been playing around with the new virtualization features that have been put back into Opensolaris and to say the documentation is a little sketchy is being kind. Most writing found on the web refers to installations that are using linux as the Dom0 and Solaris is doing it just different enough to make them useless.
As a helpful hint, when you are setting up Dom0 and you have multiple adapters don’t believe the documentation when it says that the default is the first device in dladm show-link. Because for me it wasn’t, and I wasted a bit of time trying to figure out why my networking wasn’t working.
Posted in OpenSolaris | 2 Comments »