Archive
Posts from 2006
Running Linux applications in Solaris Linux branded zones
While playing around with the latest version of Nevada this week, I decided to see how well Linux branded zones work. In case your not following the Sun development efforts, Linux branded zones allow you to run Linux ELF executables unmodified on Solaris hosts. This is pretty interesting, and I definitely wanted to take this technology for a test drive. After reading through the documentation in the brandz community, I BFU'ed my Nevada machine to the latest nightly build, and installed the packages listed on the brandz download page…
$ read more →Mapping pfiles output to files
While I was analyzing the performance characteristics of one of my Solaris 9 Oracle database servers, I needed to map a file descriptor listed in the pfiles output to the actual file name on the file system (Solaris 10 provides this information in the pfiles output, which is yet another reason to run Solaris 10). When you run pfiles on a process or core file, it gives you the type (e.g., socket, fifo, regular file, etc) of file that the file descriptor references, and the inode number associated with the file: To map the inode listed after the "ino:" field to the file name, I first used the "dev:" identifier to locate the device the file was located on: Once I had the device name and associated mount point, I used the trusty old find utility to locate the file by it's inode number: Some folks might be wondering why I didn't use lsof. Well, unfortunately the version of lsof available in various package repositories isn't able to interpret the VxFS metadata, and I would have spent more time building the new package than analayzing the problem I was trying to solve. Viva la Solaris!
$ read more →Opensource rocks!
I received two more awesome patches for ssl-cert-check. Ken Gallo sent me a patch to allow ssl-cert-check to process certificates stored in PKCS#12 databases, and I am hoping to integrate his changes this upcoming weekend. Quanah Gibson-Mount sent me a patch that adds nagios support to ssl-cert-check, and also adjusts the default binary locations to work on more systems out of the box. Since numerous people are contributing patches to make opensource solutions better, I truly do think opensource is the way to go (I think closed source solutions have value as well)…
$ read more →Brendan Gregg amazes me again
I spent some time last night catching up with mailing lists, and saw that Brendan Gregg recently added DTrace SDT probes to one of the Javascript engines. If you don't know who Brendan is, he is a brilliant guy, and the author of the DTraceToolkit among other things. I always love reading about his work, and I find it interesting that he recently joined Sun Microsystems. Sun is extremely lucky to have such a great guy working for them, and I can't say enough about how much I respect Brendan and his work.
$ read more →NFSv3 guarded writes
While debugging another NFSv3 problem this week, I came across a create procedure with the "GUARDED" flag set: This was the first time I have reviewed an NFSv3 packet capture with the GUARDED flag set, so I decided to read RFC 1813 to see how the create procedure should be implemented. Here is what the RFC says about the GUARDED flag: "Creation modes: One of UNCHECKED, GUARDED, and EXCLUSIVE. UNCHECKED means that the file should be created without checking for the existence of a duplicate file in the same directory. In this case, how.obj_attributes is a sattr3 describing the initial attributes for the file…
$ read more →