PostgreSQL 8.3 Appliance using OpenSolaris Kernel (ZFS,DTrace)

What you need

Unzip the Appliance image zip in a directory
- The zip image consists of two files Postgres83Appliance.ovf (5.3KB) and Postgres83Appliance.vmdk (330MB)
Open Sun xVM VirtualBox GUI and select File->Import Appliance
- Select "Choose" Browse to the directory when you unzipped the files and select Postgres83Appliance.ovf
- Select "Next" to go the next screen of the Import Appliance Wizard
- It shows details of the VM being imported. Do not modify anything here and just "Import" the VM
There is a new VM called "Postgres83Appliance" now available in VirtualBox

Typically for an appliance you want external applications to connect to it and hence we need to change network settings to allow access
- Select the "Postgres83Appliance" and then on the right side click the blue colored "Network" link
- Change "Attached to: NAT" to "Attached to: Bridged Network"
- If you have more than one Network Adapters then click the icon next to it and make sure you select the right Network Adapter to connect
- Press OK and verify the changes are committed on the information screen

A new VM will start and show a grub menu "Postgres 8.3 Appliance based on OpenSolaris 2008.11"

Select the default grub menu and It will start an instance of the appliance with hostname "postgresdb" and import all 84 services defined.
Postgres 8.3 32-bit instance is one of them. This is where it will create a default Postgres 8.3 instance in /var/postgres/8.3/data
Postgres 8.3 will be running by the time you see a login screen
Login into the appliance as root with password opensolaris

Select a new password for the appliance instead of the default "opensolaris" password using "passwd" command
Modify /var/postres/8.3/data/pg_hba.conf to add your applications ip address so that those clients are allowed to connect to the Postgres instance
```
host    all         all         192.168.1.0/24          trust
```
Modify /var/postgres/8.3/data/postgresql.conf and atleast add
```
listen_addresses='*'
```
which will allow non-local clients to connect to the Postgres instance
- Also you can bump up following tunables for a better performance setup
```
shared_buffers=128MB
wal_buffers=128kB
checkpoint_segments=32
```

svcadm restart postgresql_83:default_32bit

You can verify the IP address of the server using ifconfig -a and find the ipaddress for the Network adapter in use

Verify that you the client machine can connect to Postgres

Example:

/usr/postgres/8.3/bin/psql -h 192.168.1.3 -d postgres -U postgres

Now the initial setup has been completed and ready to be now customized as per the requirements of the application

PostgreSQL Monitor is a JNLP based Java Application and runs in client JVM. Hence typically the IP of your laptop should be added to the pg_hba.conf of the Postgres 8.3 Appliance
Once that is set start the PostgreSQL Monitor by clicking the following url/image:
PostgreSQL Monitor

Select File-> Connect Server
- Host: Enter IP Address of Postgres 8.3 Appliance
- DB port: 5432 (default)
- DB name: postgres (default)
- DB user: postgres
- DB password: blank (trusted by default based on entry in pg_hba.conf)
- Hit "Connect to DB"
Currently it is a demo mode and just shows tables, tablespaces and other information