Archive
Posts from 2007
Viewing port utilization on Brocade switches
The Brocade Silkworm family of switches maintain a number of important performance and reliability counters for each switch port. Performance and reliability counters for specific switch ports can be viewed with the porterrshow, portshow and portStatsShow commands. To view system wide throughput statistics, the portPerfShow command can be run with an optional interval: The individual switch ports are listed above the dashes, and the numbers below the dashes contain the number of bytes transmitted and received per second. This is a super useful tool for getting a high level overview of what your switch is doing.
$ read more →Backing up Brocade switch configurations
Brocade switches have become one of the most widely deployed componets in most Storage Area Networks (SANs). One thing that has led to Brocade's success is their robust CLI, which allow you to view and modify almost every aspect of their switch. This includes zoning configurations, SNMP attributes, domain ids, switch names and network addresses, etc. All of this configuration information is necessary for the switch to function properly, and should be periodically backed up to allow speedy recovery when disaster hits…
$ read more →Populating /dev/sg when Leadville drivers are in use
For the past day and a half, I have been trying to create device entries for several STK 9940B drives in the /dev/sg directory on a Solaris 10 server that is using the emlx driver. This should be straight forward, since Netbackup provides the sg.build shell script to assist with populating the sg.conf and devlink.tab files. Due to some issues with the way the sg.build script parses the output from luxadm, the script isn't able to locate the WWPN of the emlx controlled HBAs in our servers. Once I found the problem, I was able to get things working by hand editing the results from the sg.build prior to updating the system files…
$ read more →Monitoring and Managing Linux Software RAID article
I just posted my article Monitoring and managing Linux software RAID from the April '04 issue of SysAdmin magazine to my website. While some of the information has been made obsolete by the incredible mdadm utility, there is still some useful stuff in there.
$ read more →Preparing for the Sun cluster 3.2 certification
I recently passed the Sun Certified System Administrator For Sun Cluster 3.2 exam, and thought I would share my thoughts on the exam in case others are interested in taking it. When I decided to take the exam, I had limited experience with Sun Cluster 3.X, and didn't have money for a training course. To prepare for the certification exam, I first read the following documents cover to cover (I didn't read the entire developer's guide, just parts of it to better undertand how data services actually work): Sun cluster 3.2 concepts guide Sun cluster 3.2 system administration guide Sun quorum server reference manual Sun cluster 3.2 data service for Oracle guide Sun cluster 3.2 data service for Oracle RAC guide Sun cluster 3.2 data service developer's guide In addition to the documents listed above, it is also important to understand how Solaris Volume Manager and Veritas Volume Manager work in clustered environments. While I can't go into test specifics due to the agreement I signed when I took the exam, you should fair pretty well if you read through the documents listed above, and understand each of the items listed in the Sun cluster certification objectives…
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