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Posts in Solaris
Summarizing system call activity on Solaris hosts
I previously described how to use strace to to summarize system call activity on Linux hosts. Solaris provides similar data with the truss "-c" option: The output contains the total elapsed time, a breakdown of user and system time, the number of errors that occurred, the number of times each system call was invoked and the total accrued time for each system call. This has numerous uses, and allows you to easily see how a process is intereacting with the kernel. Sweet!
$ read more →Getting VMWare tools to configure on Solaris 10 guests
I built out a Solaris 10 update 10 guest on a vSphere 4.1 machine this past week. When I went to configure VMWare tools I received the following error: After doing some debugging I noticed that /mnt is used temporarily and if you happen to be using it (or if volfs is) the installer will fail. I temporarily stopped volfs and unmounted a device that was mounted on /mnt and the installer completed without issue. Figure I would share this with others so you don't have to waste your time debugging this problem.
$ read more →Configuring NSCD to cache DNS host lookups
I haven't really spent that much time configuring nscd, so I thought I would take a crack at it this morning while sipping my cup of joe. Looking at one of my production hosts, I queried for the "host" cache statistics. This is the nscd cache which keeps DNS lookups. With the nscd daemon running, you can query the size / performance of the caches with the -g flag…
$ read more →All good things (opensolaris) must come to an end
This past weekend I unsubscribed from my last opensolaris mailing list. While reflecting on where technology is heading, I had to take a few minutes to reflect on where things were just a few years back. I remember vividly the day that the opensolaris.org website came online. After the announcement came out, I spent 24 straight hours signing up for mailing lists, reading documentation and reviewing the source code for a number of utilities…
$ read more →ipmitool + LOM = rad amounts of hardware data collection.
There are so many different hardware sensors on machines now. If you have a machine with a iLOM (like Sun's line of x86 hardware) you can probe all of this information over the network using ipmitool and direct it at the iLOM. Usage for ipmitool over the network: Typically Sun iLOMs use either "root" or "admin" as the username. Adjust to your hardware / environment…
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