PostgreSQL 8.3 Appliance based on OpenSolaris using VirtualBox

Based on Alex Eremin's blog entry on minimal script and some of my own hacking,  I have a script that should allow to create a basic PostgreSQL 8.3 Appliance using OpenSolaris 2008.11 Kernel  in Virtualbox easily with an image which is not bloated (No X, Gnome, etc).

Here is how to try it out:

• For the time being this requires the  OpenSolaris 2008.11 CD image (650+ MB) only to execute my script create_pg_appliance.sh which is about 6KB. Bear with me till I solve this problem and play along :-)
  
• Download Virtualbox and install it
• Create a New Virtual Box VM with following parameters in the Wizard Screen
  
• Call it PostgreSQL 8.3 Appliance
• Select OS Type "OpenSolaris" 
• Base Memory  768MB or increase it to 1GB if you can spare your RAM for it
• Create a New Dynamic Expanding Image with exactly 16.00 GB (Any other wise may not work)
• Once the VM is created, immediately  click the blue Network link and modify it to select a "Host Based Network"  (in the setup make sure it is connected to the active host interface - wired or wireless depending on the host system)
• Also Click the CD-ROM image and point it to the osol-200811.iso image that you downloaded earlier
• Boot up the VM and select the first LiveCD option in the Grub Menu options
• Select through the defaults to get the full Gnome Desktop
• Open Firefox in the VM and make  sure your VM  has internet access
  
• Open a terminal window and execute the following commands in sequence
  
• wget "http://blogs.sun.com/jkshah/resource/create_pg_appliance.sh"
• pfexec sh -x create_pg_appliance.sh
• pfexec reboot
• At this point stop the VM and disconnect the CD image connected to the VM and boot again or  select the  grub entry
• Boot from Hard disk
  
• Once the VM boots from the hard disk, select the  grub menu item
  
• PostgreSQL 8.3 Appliance based on OpenSolaris 2008.11
• The Operating system boots up to give a login prompt. Login as root/opensolaris
  
• The PostgreSQL database server is already running with PGDATA in /var/postgres/8.3/data
• Modify postgresql.conf  to add  listen-address='*' parameter
• Modify pg_hba .conf to  allow your clients in pg_hba.conf
  
•  Restart the postgresql server instance as follows:
  
• svcadm restart postgresql_83:default_32bit
• Now the PostgreSQL Appliance is ready to be connected from your clients.
• Remember to take snapshots of rpool/VOSApp/var so you can always revert back to earlier copies if you ever need it.

Note: In a trial installation on a MacBook Pro the script executed in  about 11 minutes which  includes the time it takes to download packages from pkg.opensolaris.org.  I thought that was fantastic.

Maybe I should also create a minimized LiveCD just to execute the script on Virtualbox.  If you have problems executing the script let me know.