Archive
Posts from 2007
Isolating network traffic with IP instances
With the introduction of Nevada build 57, the Solaris IP stack was enhanced to support IP instances. IP instances allow you to create one or more unique TCP/IP stacks on a server, and each stack can be managed independently. What makes these extremely powerful is the ability to assign an IP instance to a zone or Xen instance, and then configure the IP stack attributes (e.g., IP filter policies, DHCP settings, etc.) from inside the zone or Xen guest domain. To create an IP instance and assign it to a Solaris zone, you will first need to identify a spare physical NIC to dedicate to the zone (when Crossbow comes around, you will be able to allocate virtual NICs to zones, and these virtual NICs can reside on a physical NIC)…
$ read more →Getting core files when a Solaris hosts gets confused
In the past few months, I have had a couple of Solaris hosts go haywire (e.g., zones hanging, network interfaces no longer responding, etc.). When problems similar to these occur, I like to generate a core file from the running kernel to help the Sun support organization isolate the problem. There are two ways that I am aware of to grab a core file from a borked system. The first method utilizes the reboot utilities "-d" option: This will reboot the host, and will generate a core file as part of the reboot…
$ read more →Configuring hardware event notifications on X2200 servers
We live in a world where hardware breaks, and when it does, most adminsitrators want to get notified that something failed, and the specific component that failed. The Sun galaxy server line contains built-in hardware monitoring, and allows hardware events to be sent to administrators through SNMP, email and SYSLOG. The hardware notification facility in the X2200 servers complements the alerting capabilities built-in to the fault management architecture (FMA), and when the two are combined, hardware problems should be relatively easy to diagnose and fix. To configure the X2200 to send email when a hardware event occurs, an email server and recipient email address need to be configured through the ILOM interface…
$ read more →Updating the Solaris boot archive from single user mode
On more than one occassion now, I have run into problems where the Solaris boot archive wasn't in a consistent format at boot time. This stops the boot process, and the console recommends booting into FailSafe mode to fix it. If you want to do this manually, you can run the bootadm utility with the update_archive command, and the location where the root file system is mounted: I am hopeful that the opensolaris community will enhance the archive support to make it more fault tolerant. The current code seems somewhat brittle.
$ read more →Preventing domain expiration article
I just came across Rick Moen's Preventing Domain Expiration article. Rick did a great job with the article, and it's cool to see that they took my domain-check shell script and implemented it in Perl. The Perl version supports for TLDS, and contains a bit more functionality than the bash implementation. If I get some time in the next few months, I will have to update the domain-check bash script to support the same TLDs as the Perl implementation…
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