Archive
Posts from 2008
The wonderful world of Leadville
In a SAN environment when dealing with external storage concepts such as EMC BCV's, you'll often have a request to create volumes on two different machines that are identical so replication on the back-end can occur. When you look at a LUN presented to Solaris, it'll appear with a cryptic name like the following: The c20 relates to the HBA (Fiber, SCSI, iSCSI) that provides a path to the device. The "middle" sequence 60060480000190100665533030393836 between the "t (target)" and "d (device" is the WWN of the LUN. Now, say your SAN engineer approaches you with some information like the following…
$ read more →ZFS boot support for SPARC / x86
The flag day for ZFS boot supportwas just announced which will allow for root file systems (/, /var, /usr) to be bootable from both SPARC and x86 platforms. It looks like this functionality is going to come into OpenSolaris at build 88. The install support (selecting ZFS file systems from a jumpstart profile) or from optical media looks like it'll make its way into build 89. A lot of people have been waiting to play with this on SPARC platforms…
$ read more →Respect my ~/.Xauthority !#@$!
South Park is a hilarious show, and I think that Cartman is the best character. One of Cartman's classic lines is "YOU WILL RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH!#!" about X11 Forwarding / SSH, but maybe there is a moral to the story. You have to execute some sort of GUI program on a remote host and it requires root access in order to execute (or you have to change to a different user to execute the GUI with correct permissions)... At first, when you logged into the machine for the first time without X11 forwarding enabled, your ~/.Xauthority file doesn't exist…
$ read more →A new blogger joins the prefetch family
My good friend Mike recently joined the prefetch family, and will be adding additional content to the prefetch blog (his first blog post rocked!). Mike is one of the most skilled UNIX administrators I have ever met, and I am extremely excited that he is going to add his real world experiences to this site! Welcome Mike!
$ read more →Finding/setting nvalias (nvram) OBP settings from a running Solaris O/S
Using the command eeprom (1m) while in the Solaris O/S on SPARC platforms has been a useful way to view and set OBP parameters without bringing the entire machine offline and down to the ok prompt. Unfortunately, eeprom does not show nvalias definitions. These are most often used to specify root and mirror O/S boot devices. For clarity, these are then plugged into the boot-device and diag-device OBP variables…
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