Archive
Posts from 2008
Configuring ZFS to gracefully deal with pool failures
If you are running ZFS in production, you may have experienced a situation where your server paniced and reboot when a ZFS file system was corrupted. With George Wilson's recent putback of CR #6322646, this is no longer the case. George's putback allows the file system administrator to set the "failmode" property to control that happens when a pool incurs a fault. Here is a description of the new property from the zpool(1m) manual page: Controls the system behavior in the event of catas- trophic pool failure…
$ read more →Creating ZFS file systems during the jumpstart process
I use jumpstart at home to update the hosts in my lab as new Nevada builds and Solaris updates are released. As part of the unattended installation / upgrade process, I create a couple of ZFS file systems on each system. Since jumpstart doesn't have built-in support for creating ZFS file system, I had to add the zpool and zfs commands to my finish script. After a bit of tinkering around, here is what I came up with: This appears to work pretty well, and my boxes are now built and operational once the jumpstart process completes…
$ read more →Oh how I love my iRobot roomba
One of my friends recently purchased an iRobot Roomba, and he let me test it out while he was out of town. I thoroughly tested out his Roomba, and was amazed that it was able to do as good of a job as my existing vacuum cleaner! The Roomba also has a key advantage over my upright vacuum cleaner in that it could wander under couches, beds and dressers to get dust and debree that had made its way there. I was also overjoyed when I found out that once I pushed the CLEAN button on the Roomba, it would begin vacuuming the room with no manual intervention…
$ read more →Measuring the time an application was stopped due to garbage collection
I recently spent some of my spare time assisting a friend with debugging some Java performance problems his company was experiencing. When I originally looked into the performance problem several weeks back, I used the mpstat and jstat utilities to observe CPU utilization and object allocations, and based on some jstat anomalies, I used the techniques described in my object allocation p ost to get a better understanding of how their Java application was allocating objects. After a bit of analysis and a a couple of email exchanges with my friend and one of the developers he worked with, we were able to locate two application problems that the developer has since fixed. But even with these changes (which resulted in some significant speedups!!), my friend noticed that request times would periodically shoot up to unacceptable levels…
$ read more →Locating files on Solaris servers with pkgchk
Most Linux and BSD distributions ship with the locate utility, which allows you to quickly find files on a system: While not quite as thorough as locate, the Solaris pkgchk utility has a "-P" option that provides similar capabilities: Nice!
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