Archive
Posts from 2006
Renaming a Solaris zone
While reviewing the list of zones on one of my Solaris hosts, I noticed that I accidentally assigned the name "cone3" to a zone: While the name cone3 sounds interesting (for some reason cone3 reminds me of the coneheads movie), I originally intended for the zone to be called "zone3." To assign the correct name to the zone, I fired up the zone configuration utility (zonecfg), and set the 'zonename' variable to the correct value: Much better!
$ read more →Solaris virtualization slides
I gave a talk tonight on Solaris virtualization technologies, and posted my slides to prefetch.net. The presentation covered Solaris zones, Linux branded zones, project Crossbow, and shows how to configure each technology. The next two years will be exciting for members of the OpenSolaris community, since there are NUMEROUS awesome technologies currently in development (I am looking forward to seeeing Xen Dom0 and DomU support in an official Solaris 10 update!).
$ read more →Solaris nscd keep-hot-count issue
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: Since I had recently applied the latest connection manager patches to the server, I started to wonder if Sun had installed a cron job (or started a daemon) to periodically poll the server that hosted getupdates.sun.com. To see what process was querying getupdates.sun.com, I first reviewed the cron jobs on the system, and then I perused the list of daemons that were running. Everything checked out fine, so I fired up DTrace to see which process was actually responsible for the DNS requests. It turns out these DNS queries were coming from the nscd daemon…
$ read more →Moving Solaris zones
While messing around with zones and ZFS last weekend, I decided to create a new ZFS file system called /zones to store my zones. The /zones file system would be created as a striped ZFS file system, allowing me to take advantage of ZFS's data checksumming, compression, snapshots and zone cloning features. Since I already had one zone installed in /zones, I needed to migrate the zone to another location while I setup the new ZFS file system. There are numerous ways to do this, but I decided to use the zoneadm "move" option since it was designed for this purpose…
$ read more →Apple file vault and good backups save the day!
I frequently travel with my Apple powerbook, and have always been concerned that someone might steal my laptop, or the disk drive would fail (this is ahuge single point of failure). To address both concerns, I enabled file vault to encrypt my home folder, and backup my data once a week to a central file store. File vault does slow down certain operations, but it works great if you use your laptop for surfing the web, checking email, and chatting with folks online. Well -- this weekend one of my concerns came to fruition…
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