I haven’t really spent that much time configuring nscd, so I thought I would take a crack at it this morning while sipping my cup of joe. Looking at one of my production hosts, I queried for the “host” cache statistics. This is the nscd cache which keeps DNS lookups. With the nscd daemon running, [...]
There are so many different hardware sensors on machines now. If you have a machine with a iLOM (like Sun’s line of x86 hardware) you can probe all of this information over the network using ipmitool and direct it at the iLOM. Usage for ipmitool over the network: $ ipmitool -I lan -H (ip address [...]
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 [...]
I use numerous tools to perform my SysAdmin duties. One of my favorite tools it clusterit, which is a suite of programs that allows you to run commands across one or more machines in parallel. To begin using the awesomeness that is clusterit, you will first need to download and install the software. This is [...]
I periodically use the stock Solaris FTP server on some of my servers, especially when I need to move tons of data around. Enabling the ftp service in Solaris is a snap: $ svcadm enable network/ftp The default ftp configuration leaves a lot to be desired, especially when you consider that nothing is logged. To [...]
I periodically need to look for a given string in one or more compressed log files. Taking the time (and resources) to decompress each file on the file system takes time, especially when I don’t plan to leave the file uncompressed. When these situations arise, I turn to my good friends gzcat and zgrep. The [...]
