Back to that Pesky Virtual Frame Buffer

Sigh. While my procedures with the Solaris virtual frame buffer (see previous posts) has usually been working okay, I had to modify the kill command to make it definitely exclude the grep process even though it should have excluded it anyway - very weird:

/usr/bin/kill `ps -ef | grep Xsun | grep -v grep | grep ":5" | awk '{print $2}'`

The user reports that they're occasionally getting this error in their logs:

fstat: Bad file number
(failed to stat vfb)
stat: No such file or directory
(failed to stat vfb)
fstat: Bad file number
(failed to stat vfb)
stat: No such file or directory
(failed to stat vfb)
X connection to localhost:5.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

This is due to the VFB running in a local Solaris zone. According to a post I found at http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5233796&tstart=120 one can add /dev/winlock to the local zone this way to solve those errors:

"Steps to add the pseudo device '/dev/winlock' to the local zone:

As a superuser in the global zone,

1. Add the '/dev/winlock' pseudo device to the local zone:
global# zonecfg -z
zonecfg:zonename> add device
zonecfg:zonename:device> set match=/dev/winlock
zonecfg:zonename:device> end
zonecfg:zonename> exit

With this, the local zone will have access to '/dev/winlock' device.

2. Reboot the local zone
global# zoneadm -z reboot

Once the local zone is rebooted, '/dev/winlock' will now be available in the local zone."

I've made the change in the zone configuration so it will take effect the next time I reboot. I can see it now - I'll reboot, the instructions above will have been wrong, the zone won't come up, and it'll take me a half hour to remember what changes I made... hopefully I've made enough notes that I'll remember it.