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Posts in Solaris
Viewing the contents of an ISO image from the command line
I had several ISO images lying around on my desktop, and decided to go through each image and purge the ones I no longer need. Several image files weren't labeled, so I decided to fire up the isoinfo utility to figure out what the mystery ISO images were. The first image I checked was a Solaris 10 update 4 DVD, as you can see from the "Volume id" field in the isoinfo "-d" (print primary volume descriptor) output: To double check that the volume descriptor was correct, I also ran isoinfo with the "-l" (list files) option to generate a file listing of each ISO image: With this information in hand, I added useful labels to the mystery images. Nice!
$ read more →Using the Solaris process tools on a specific thread
In Solaris 10 the ptools (process tools) were enhanced to display data for specific threads in a process. This functionality can be tapped into by appending a slash and a thread id to the ptool command line: This is extremely useful when you need to interrogate a specific thread in a process (e.g., a thread that is consuming 100% of a CPU), or when a process has 100s or 1000s of threads (which is typically the case with Java applications). Nice!
$ 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.
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