Archive
Posts from 2005
Speeding up Safari
I recently got sick of the Safari spinning ball, and decided to conduct some research to speed up my favorite web browser. After reading numerous posts on the Apple discussion board, I made the following changes to significantly boost page rendering time: 1. Add Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file to /etc/hosts and restart lookupd 2. Purge the Safari cache from Safari -> Clear Cache 3…
$ read more →I attached myself to myself
I came across my new favorite error message last night while debugging some issues with the Solaris printstack() function: You gotta love some geek humor. :)
$ read more →Making sense of libfoo.so.2.6 on Linux systems
If you have ever done a long listing of /usr/lib on a Linux system, you probably choked and asked yourself what the f$%^ is this mess? After reading through Peter Seebach's article Dissecting Shared Libraries, things don't seem so bad, and the large number of files actually starts to make sense. Step one in sorting out the library madness requires making sense of the digits (the major and minor revision numbers) that appear in the shared library file name. Peter's article clarifies this with the following description: "One of the potential advantages of dynamic linking, however, is in fixing bugs…
$ read more →Getting Emulex adaptors working with Solaris
This past week I wanted to use the Solaris cfgadm utility to unconfigure a few LUNs. When I ran 'cfgadm -al', I noticed that the FC adaptors were not visible in the cfgadm output: This seemed odd, since I could see the controllers in the vxdmpadm output: Since the controllers in question were Emulex adaptors, I read through the Emulex admin guide and found that the platform and FC adaptor had to be DR aware to support configure/unconfigure operations. Since I couldn't locate a "DR aware" label in our vendors documentation, I decided to open a ticket to see if the servers supported cfgadm. After a week or two of chatting with support, our vendor indicated that we would need to use the Sun Leadville drivers to configure and unconfigure LUNs with Emulex adaptors in Solaris systems…
$ read more →Solaris 'w' command bug?
While reviewing some system information last week , I came across a discrepancy (which I would think is a bug -- at least according to the idle time description in the w manual pages) in the Solaris 'w' output: The user "user1234" logged in at 10:19, and according to w has been idle for 51 minutes (since they have been logged in for one minute or less, they obviously cannot be idle for 51 minutes). A quick check of w.c reveals that idle time is calculated using the atime from a stat of /dev/pts/[1-9]+: While who.c uses the mtime from a stat of /dev/pts/[1-9]+: To understand when atime and mtime are updated, I read through the Solaris stat(2) manual page: st_atime Time when file data was last accessed. Changed by the following functions: creat(), mknod(), pipe(), utime(2), and read(2). st_mtime Time when data was last modified…
$ read more →