Archive
Posts from 2006
Building a network storage appliance
I came across two interesting storage appliance projects this week: The openfiler project: The freenas project: If your looking for a solution to host numerous terabytes of data at home, these might be for you.
$ read more →Extracting system and network statistics with net-snmp
The net-snmp software suite implements the SNMPv1, SNMPv2 and SNMPv3 protocols, and comes with several utilities to remotely retrieve data from servers and network devices. One such utility is snmpstatus, which allows you to retrieve the overall status of a given device: Another nifty tool that comes with net-snmp is snmpnetstat, which allows you to get a "netstat"-like view of any device that supports SNMP. The following example show how to retrieve the active and passive UDP and TCP ports from a device: Snmpstat also allows you to retrieve network statistics with the "-s" option: SNMP is a useful protocol, and I am looking forward to seeing more vendors support SNMPv3.
$ read more →Managing Solaris patches with pca
I have written repeatedly about the problems with the Solaris patch tools, and decided to test out the pca utility after Chris and Frank recommended it so highly. Pca is not only an awesome patching tool, but it blows away everything that is currently offered by Sun (pca has yet to throw Java exceptions and die in mysterious ways). To see what I mean, all you need to do is run pca with the help option: Pca has several modes of operation. It can list patches that are outdated on your system, retrieve patches from Sunsolve, and most importantly it can be used to install individual patches and groups of patches on a server…
$ read more →Useful DTrace links
I came across a couple of super useful DTrace links, and thought I would pass them on: Brendan Gregg's DTrace presentation in London: Opensolaris student guide (the chapter on using DTrace to debug device drivers is awesome): <
$ read more →Building Perl modules for Solaris
This week I needed to install a few Perl modules on a Solaris 10 host. I didn't want to download and install a fourth perl interpreter (Solaris 10 comes with 5.6.1, 5.8.3 and 5.8.4 for some reason), since Solaris 10 comes with a relatively recent version of Perl (5.8.4). To build the module in question (DBD::mysql), I downloaded the module from CPAN, verified that the MD5 checksum was correct, and used the following steps to compile the module: The 'make Makefile.PL' completed succesfully, but the make failed with the following errors: Since I was building the module with gcc, the compiler and linker got a bit confused when they were passed Sun studio compiler flags (i.e., -KPIC in this example). There are two fixes for this problem…
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