We encountered a nasty bug in our backup software this week. When this bug is triggered, each job (one process is created per job) that completes will turn into a zombie. After a few days we will have hundreds or even thousands of zombie processes, which if left unchecked will eventually lead to the system-side [...]
One of my co-workers this week was fighting disk failure on a Solaris 10 x86 host. I was checking /var/adm/messages and came across something interesting. Apr 11 03:29:21 sinatra.fatkitty.com nge: [ID 801725 kern.info] NOTICE: nge1: Using FIXED interrupt type Apr 11 03:29:21 sinatra.fatkitty.com unix: [ID 954099 kern.info] NOTICE: IRQ20 is being shared by drivers with [...]
I applied the latest recommended patch bundle this week to two X4140 servers running Solaris 10. When I rebooted, I was greeted with a grub> prompt instead of the grub menu: grub> This wasn’t so good, and for some reason the stage1 / stage2 loaders weren’t installed correctly (or the zpool upgrade caused some issues). [...]
I had a a process hang last week on one of my Solaris hosts, and was curious what each thread was doing. The mdb utility is perfect for locating this information, since you an combine pid2proc with the walk and findstack dcmds to get the call stack of each thread in a process (in the [...]
While reviewing the DNS logfiles on one of my name servers, I noticed that one of my Solaris hosts was querying getupdates.sun.com once per hour: Sep 30 02:28:05 dns named[1097]: [ID 866145 local0.info] client 1.2.3.4#47644: view internal: query: getupdates.sun.com IN A + Sep 30 03:27:35 dns named[1097]: [ID 866145 local0.info] client 1.2.3.4#47738: view internal: query: [...]
While I was analyzing the performance characteristics of one of my Solaris 9 Oracle database servers, I needed to map a file descriptor listed in the pfiles output to the actual file name on the file system (Solaris 10 provides this information in the pfiles output, which is yet another reason to run Solaris 10). [...]
