Archive
Posts from 2005
Nifty OpenSSH 4.0 feature
I was reading through O'Reilley's OnLamp today, and came across their interview with the OpenBSD developers. In the interview, Dave Miller discussed the new features in OpenSSH 4.X, and described the following awesome new feature: "Added the ability to store hostnames added to ~/.ssh/known_hosts in a hashed format. This is a privacy feature that prevents a local attacker from learning other hosts that a user has accounts on from their known_hosts file." So instead of hostnames being stored in plain text like: yourhost.example.com ssh-rsa AAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAp832eeMwYH... They are hashed first, so they don't reveal the hostname…
$ read more →Solaris 10 and hung serial ports
While reading through comp.unix.solaris, I came across the following hung serial port post from Andrew Gabriel: There is a bug (actually a POSIX bug) that can leave the port permanently wedged if there are characters buffered to be transmitted but they never will be (e.g. due to flow controlled off). This is circumvented in Solaris 10, in that if this situation arises, the driver will discard the buffered characters after a timeout if the process that had the port open no longer exists, so the port can be opened again and reused. (However, you can't run Solaris 10 on a SPARCstation 5.) This issue has bit me several times over the years, and I am glad to see that it's addressed in Solaris 10.
$ read more →Gathering kernel counters and statistics with kstat(1m)
The Solaris kstat(1m) utility can be used to display a variety of counters and statistics that are maintained by the kernel. These values range from IP datagrams received to the number of interrupts handled to values related to random number generation. To display all statistics maintained by the kernel, the kstat(1m) utility can be executed with no option: To get kstat statistics for a specific kernel module and an instance of that module, kstat(1m) can be executed with the "-m" (module name) and "-i" (instance name) options: I constantly find myself using kstat(1m) to analyze and debug the Solaris systems I support.
$ read more →Work-around for Solaris smpatch bugs
I like to keep my Solaris systems up to date with the the latest Operating System and application patches, and try to patch my systems monthly if time permits. If I am patching a production system, I always use recommend patch bundles that have been tested in a non-production environment. If I am patching QE or development machines, I like to use the automated patch features built into the Solaris smpatch(1m) utility. This makes patching a breeze, and ensures that all relevant patches are applied to the server…
$ read more →Converting RC scripts to SMF manifests
While reading through my daily BLOG roll, I came across a link to a well written document on converting RC scripts to SMF manifests. I plan to use this as a guide when adding dependencies to the manifests I am developing.
$ read more →