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Posts in Solaris
Managing Solaris patches with pca
I have written repeatedly about the problems with the Solaris patch tools, and decided to test out the pca utility after Chris and Frank recommended it so highly. Pca is not only an awesome patching tool, but it blows away everything that is currently offered by Sun (pca has yet to throw Java exceptions and die in mysterious ways). To see what I mean, all you need to do is run pca with the help option: Pca has several modes of operation. It can list patches that are outdated on your system, retrieve patches from Sunsolve, and most importantly it can be used to install individual patches and groups of patches on a server…
$ read more →Woo hoo! smpatch lives!
After several frustrating days of debugging smpatch, I finally found a way to get it working on my X64 Solaris 10 server. I am not 100% certain why this fixed my problem, and since I don't have access to the smpatch source code I will probably never know. To recap the problem, I was able to register my server with the Solaris sconadm utility, but was receiving the following error each time I ran smpatch to check for new updates: Failure: Cannot connect to retrieve Database/current.zip: This system is currently unregistered and is unable to retrieve patches from the Sun Update Connection. Please register your system using the Update Manager…
$ read more →How to enable DMA mode in X64 Solaris
While perusing the system logfiles on a server running X64 Solaris 10 6/06 this weekend, I noticed several errors similar to the following: The syslog entry mentioned that the "atapi-cd-dma-enabled" eeprom property can be used to enable DMA on the CD drive, so I ran the eeprom utility with the "atapi-cd-dma-enabled=1" option to enable DMA: To verify that the setting took effect, I ran the eeprom utility: This stopped the errors from appearing in my system logfiles, and the CD drive is performing awesome.
$ read more →More smpatch madness
I have mentioned several problems with Sun's smpatch utility in the past few blog entries, and it looks like I hit another nasty bug. The sconadm utility allows me to register a server: sconadm is running Authenticating user ... finish registration! But when I run the smpatch utility to check for updates, it says the system isn't registered: Failure: Cannot connect to retrieve Database/current.zip: This system is currently unregistered and is unable to retrieve patches from the Sun Update Connection…
$ read more →Rotating and compressing Solaris logfiles with logadm
Solaris has been shipping with a robust logfile management facility for a few years now, and I have found it super useful for managing system and application logs. The log management facility revolves around the logadm utility, which allows admins to set policies on when and how logfiles are rotated. Logadm stores it's configuration in the file /etc/logadm.conf, and provides the "-w" and "-r" options to add and remove entries from the configuration file. The following example shows how to add an entry to rotate and compress the IP filter logfiles once per week: This example has several interesting options…
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