Archive
Posts from 2007
Is ZFS ready for primetime?
Over the course of the past four months, I have encountered a couple of ZFS bugs that led to corrupt pools. One of the bugs hit this weekend, and resulted in us having to recover the pool from a snapshot on our storage array (this experience has made me truly appreciate the 3par's snapshot capability). These bugs have led me to question whether or not ZFS is ready for prime time, and if companies should be deploying it in production. If you have bumped into any ZFS bugs that led to data corruption, please leave me a comment.
$ read more →Getting patches to install on Solaris 10 systems
There have been a number of threads in zones-discuss relating to Solaris 10 patching. Most of the feedback came from folks who ran into issues related to delayed activation patching, or patching zones that run on ZFS file system. Running zones on ZFS file systems is not currently supported by Sun, but it appears installing the latest version of 119254 or 119255 will help address a number of issues related to running zones on ZFS file systems. I am posting this here for future reference, and in an effort to help others who may be stumbling into issues applying patches to their Solaris 10 hosts.
$ read more →Monitoring system utilization on Linux hosts
I am always on the look out for tools to analyze system performance. One nifty tool I recently came across is atop, which is an advanced system performance monitor for Linux. When atop is run, it displays overall system utilization in the header, and per-process CPU, memory, network or disk utilization information in the body (you need to patch your kernel to get disk and network utilization). Here is a sample atop session that shows just how awesome this utility is: I really dig the headers, as well as the network and disk utilization menus…
$ read more →Viewing SMBIOS data
The SMBIOS specification allows applications and operating systems to retrieve and store hardware configuration settings. Retrieving hardware settings from a shell prompt can be extremely useful, since rebooting to view a given BIOS menu requires the machine to be taken offline. If you happen to be running Solaris 10 or Nevada, you can run the smbios utility to display the contents of the SMBIOS image on a machine: This is good stuff.
$ read more →Getting to know the Solaris iSCSI stack article
I just posted my article getting to know the Solaris iSCSI stack from the August ‘07 issue of SysAdmin magazine to my website. If you are looking to deploy Solaris iSCSI solutions in your environment, you might find the article useful.
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