Archive
Posts from 2009
Configuring an OpenSolaris host to use a static IP address
I installed OpenSolaris 2009.06 yesterday, and noticed that the installer doesn't give you the option to configure a static IP address. Network address are retrieved via DHCP, which isn't an option for this host. To configure the host to use a static IP address, I changed the /etc/nwam/llp file. Here is the file before: And here is the file after: Now my host can take advantage of NWAM, and use the static IP I allocated for it!
$ read more →Generating Netbackup throughput data reports
If you support Netbackup at your site, I'm sure you've had to look into issues with slow clients and failed backups. The nbstatus script I mentioned in a previous post is useful for identifying connection problems, but it doesn't help you understand how well your clients are performing. To help me understand how much data my clients are pushing, I wrote the nbthroughput shell script: The script will display the fastest clients, the slowest clients, and how much data your clients are pushing to your media servers. I find it useful, so I thought I would post it here for others to use.
$ read more →Fixing Solaris hosts that boot to a grub> prompt
I applied the latest recommended patch bundle this week to two X4140 servers running Solaris 10. When I rebooted, I was greeted with a grub> prompt instead of the grub menu: grub> This wasn't so good, and for some reason the stage1 / stage2 loaders weren't installed correctly (or the zpool upgrade caused some issues). To fix this issue, I booted to single user mode by inserting a Solaris 10 update 8 CD and adding "console=ttya -s" to the end of the boot line. Once my box booted, I ran 'zpool status' to verify my pool was available: To re-install the grub stage1 and stage2 loaders, I ran installgrub (you can get the device to use from 'zpool status'): To ensure that the boot archive was up to date, I ran 'bootadm update-archive': Once these changes were made, I init 6'ed the system and it booted successfully…
$ read more →Watching process creation on Linux hosts
I have been debugging a problem with Redhat cluster, and was curious if a specific process was getting executed. On my Solaris 10 hosts I can run execsnoop to observe system-wide process creation, but there isn't anything comparable on my Linux hosts. The best I've found is systemtap, which provides the kprocess.exec probe to monitor exec()'s. To access this probe, you can stash the following in a file of your choosing: Once the file is created, you can execute the stap program to enable the exec probe: This will produce output similar to the following: While systemtap is missing various features that are available in DTrace, it's still a super useful tool!
$ read more →Cleaning up space used by the OpenSolaris pkg utility
I've been experimenting with the new OpenSolaris package manager (pkg), and ran into an odd issue last weekend. The flash drive I was running image-update on filled up, and after poking around I noticed that /var/pkg had some large directories: In this specific case, pkg downloaded close to 900MB to the download directory, but failed to remove the downloaded files once the image was updated. :( The pkg tool currently doesn't have a purge option to remove old stuff in this directory, so I had to go in manually and remove everything in the download directory. It appears bug #2266 is open to address this, and removing the contents from the download directory is safe (at least according to a post I read on the pkg mailing list)…
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