Archive
Posts in Solaris
Implementing shared memory resource controls on Solaris hosts
With the availability of the Solaris 10 operating system, the way IPC facilities (e.g., shared memory, message queues, etc.) are managed changed. In previous releases of the Solaris operating system, editing /etc/system was the recommended way to increase the values of a given IPC tunable. With the release of Solaris 10, IPC tunables are now managed through the Solaris resource manager. The resource manager makes each tunable available through one or more resource controls, which provide an upper bound on the size of a given resource…
$ read more →Adding status support to the Solaris dd utility
I really dig Solaris, but it is missing a few basic features I have come to rely on. One of these features is the ability to send the dd utility a signal to get the status of a copy operation. Since Solaris is now opensource (or mostly opensource), I thought I would hack some code together to implement this feature. After a bit of coding (and testing), I requested a sponsor to putback my change into opensolaris…
$ read more →Taking IPMP managed interfaces online and offline
I use Solaris IPMP (IP multipathing) on several of my servers to allow them to keep operating in the event that a network interface or switch were to fail. Periodically I need to take IPMP managed interfaces offline, but I need to keep the IP addresses attached to those interface up and operational. Solaris comes with the if_mpadm utility, which provides a simple and straight forward way to take IPMP managed interfaces online and offline. Prior to using the if_mpadm utility, it is useful to check the status of the interface you want to take online or offline…
$ read more →Running processes in fixed time intervals
While messing around with Sun Cluster 3.2, I came across hatimerun. This nifty program can be used to run a program in a fixed amount of time, and kill the program if it runs longer that the time alloted to it. If hatimerun kills a program, it will return a status code of 99. If the program runs in it's alloted time, hatimerun will return a status code of 0…
$ read more →First thoughts of Sun Cluster 3.2
Over the past few weeks, I have been heads down studying for the Sun Cluster 3.2 beta exam. I finally took the certification test this week, and am hopeful that I passed (I am pretty sure I did). Prior to studying for this exam, my last experience with Sun's clustering technology was Sun Cluster 2.2. I was not a big fan of it, since it caused a number of outages at my previous employer, and lacked a number of features that were available in Veritas Cluster Server…
$ read more →