Hi,

I installed Solaris 10 under my VMWare Workstation 5.5without problem.
But ...
I changed shell from sh to ksh and bash at the end, since I hate sh, but nothing happened. They all feel same and do not behave same way as they do on FreeNSD or Linux.
Basicaly ... no history ... cannot modify command and things like those.

Idea?

How did you switch and how did you test ?

Bash lets you do history and edit command lines. Did you remember to logout and log back in after changing your shell?

I couldn't find chsh so I edited /etc/passwd, logoff and login back.
#echo $SHELL
/usr/bin/ksh

... but it responds as bourne shell.

Is there a command I can use to swith shell?

I usually just type bash to switch to the bash shell. if you want it to stay you'll need to edit /etc/passwd

That's okay.
ksh is upward compatible with the Bourne shell, so this is no surprise.
Use "set -o vi" or "set -o emacs" to activate command editing functionality.
Alternatively, you can use /bin/bash or /bin/zsh if you expect the arrows keys to work.
As root:

THANK YOU!

That solved another long standing problem I've had... I had a user setup to use csh instead of bash. Unfortunately, with SSGD, csh users get weird screen artifacts (part of the language switching utility). I haven't been able to switch his shell due to the fact that SMC is broken (courtesy of some Sun patch), usermod is broken (courtesy of yet another Sun patch), and vipw is giving funky errors (unknown reason). Now I know a fourth way to change the shell, and it works!

Thanks.

Did you install the 120051-05 patch ?

What is the vipw issue ?

I can't install 120051-05 since it requires a reboot... The server is a little on the flaky side (and it's a mission-critical server). Rebooting is rolling the dice and taking a chance on data loss (it likes to blow up while booting sometimes). I'm working with Sun support on it (it's a v20z, insert my standard anti-AMD and pro-SPARC, for mission-critical servers, rant here :-) ), but no solutions from them yet.

vipw gives me "ptmp broken" or some such thing when I try to use it. I can get in, but get the error when quitting/saving, even if I don't actually change anything!

`passwd -e` definitely worked!!

Actually, this bug is unrelated to the architecture, so would have hit a SPARC based server the same way.

Hmm, you have a mission critical server without a back-up solution ?

My guess is someone made a modification that upset the good old BSD vipw, like root's homedir not being / ...

I'm not referring to that software bug, but my overall historically poor experience with AMD based systems and crashing problems.

The mission critical server has a fairly robust data backup plan. Unfortunately, we have to accept a little potential downtime and rely on Sun service in the case of a major failure. There's just no money available to run redundant servers. The last time it crashed and we had "data loss", none of *our* data was lost, but the "data loss" was that SSGD got mangled and had to be rebuilt.

That's exactly the error that vipw is giving, but it's wrong... Root's homedir *is* /, but it's complaining that it isn't :-/