Archive
Posts from 2006
Capping a Solaris processes memory
Solaris 10 introduced numerous capabilities, including the ability to use memory caps to limit the amount of memory available to a project. Memory caps are configured through the project(4) facility, and use the rcap.max-rss resource control to limit the amount of memory that a project can consume. Memory caps are enforced by the rcapd daemon, which is a userland process that periodically checks process memory usage, and takes action when a process has exceeded it's alloted amount of memory. To use memory caps on a server or inside a zone, the rcapadm utility needs to be run with the "-E" (enable memory caps) option to enable memory caps: In addition to starting rcapd, the capadm utility will enable the SMF services to start rcapd when the system boots…
$ read more →SMART utilities for your favorite operating system
While perusing the web a few weeks back, I came across SMARTReporter. SMARTReporter is a wicked cool software package that can be used to monitor hard drive SMART data under OS X, and it is 100% free (you should probably send a small donation to the author if you decide to use it). Now that I have SMARTReporter in my software arsenal, I have a tool to monitor SMART data on each of operating systems I support: For Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux, I use Smartmontools For OS X, I use SMARTReporter For Windows, I use Active SMART All three package rock, and they have saved my bacon on more than one occassion!
$ read more →Viewing utilization per file descriptor on Solaris 10 hosts
While load-testing a MySQL back-end last weekend, I wanted to be able to monitor read and write utilization per file descriptor. The DTraceToolkit comes with a nifty script named pfilestat that does just that: In addition to displaying the amount of data that is read from or written to each file descriptor, pfilestat also provides information on how much time is spent sleeping and waiting for I/O. This is yet another reason why the DTraceToolkit is da shiznit!
$ read more →Tracing vxassist activity
While creating a few Veritas volumes last week, I wanted to see the commands that vxassist was executing under the covers. This was easily accomplished by adding the "-v" (trace commands executed by vxassist) option to the vxassist command line: VxVM is an awesome volume manager, and there are all kinds of cool things buried in the manual pages!
$ read more →New version of ssl-cert-check
I received a nifty patch from Ken Gallo to allow ssl-cert-check to report when certificates stored in a PKCS#12 database will expire. This is super useful, especially if you are managing iPlanet/SunONE/Netscape products. If you haven't used ssl-cert-check before, it's a bourne shell script that can be used to alert you prior to a certificate expiring. The script is available on prefetch.net, and is documented in the article proactively handling SSL certificate expiration…
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