I really dig Solaris, but it is missing a few basic features I have come to rely on. One of these features is the ability to send the dd utility a signal to get the status of a copy operation. Since Solaris is now opensource (or mostly opensource), I thought I would hack some code [...]
Having now worked with the Sun V40Z for more than a year, I can safely say that it is one of the best server platforms I have ever used. It has incredible lights out management, does a killer job of monitoring the platform environmentals, and can be configured to alert staff to problems it detects. [...]
One nifty feature that recently made it’s appearance in Solaris 10 is device in use checking. This feature is implemented by the libdiskmgt.so.1 shared library, and allows utiltiies to see if a device is being used, and what it is being used for. This is really neat, and I love the fact that format now [...]
While perusing the system logfiles on a server running X64 Solaris 10 6/06 this weekend, I noticed several errors similar to the following: $ tail -10 /var/adm/messages Jul 16 15:45:49 neutron genunix: [ID 935449 kern.info] ATA DMA off: disabled. Control with “atapi-cd-dma-enabled” property Jul 16 15:45:49 neutron genunix: [ID 882269 kern.info] PIO mode 4 selected [...]
I met up this week with one of my friends that I haven’t seen in a while. We chatted about life, work and eventually started chatting about Linux and Solaris (we are both SysAdmins). My friend mentioned that his company had decided to quit buying Sun hardware in favor of Dell servers running Redhat Linux [...]
A few years back I developed a script to mirror the primary boot device as part of the jumpstart process. I was amazed that jumpstart didn’t support automated mirroring, and was hopeful that Sun would eventually provide a solution to address this. Someone at Sun was obviously paying attention to the numerous RFEs that were [...]
