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Posts in Solaris
Cool blog post about aligning partitions for performance
I came across a link to Dave Lutz's Partition Alignment Guidelines for Unified Storage blog post while catching up on zfs-discuss today. Aligning partitions correctly can make a HUGE performance difference, and it's amazing how many people are unaware of the consequences of not laying out their partitions to align with the storage they are using (this includes segment size and partition alignment). If you are new to this topic, you should definitely read through Dave's post!
$ read more →Ridding your Solaris host of zombie processes
We encountered a nasty bug in our backup software this week. When this bug is triggered, each job (one process is created per job) that completes will turn into a zombie. After a few days we will have hundreds or even thousands of zombie processes, which if left unchecked will eventually lead to the system-side process table filling up. Solaris comes with a nifty tool to help deal with zombies (no, they don't ship you a shotgun with your media kit), and it comes by the name preap…
$ read more →Managing 100s of Linux and Solaris machines with clusterit
I use numerous tools to perform my SysAdmin duties. One of my favorite tools it clusterit, which is a suite of programs that allows you to run commands across one or more machines in parallel. To begin using the awesomeness that is clusterit, you will first need to download and install the software. This is as easy as: Once the software is installed, you should have a set of binaries and manual pages in /usr/local/clusterit…
$ read more →Checking for patch dependencies on Solaris 10 hosts
I've been debugging an odd issue with an 8 link (nxge interfaces) aggregation on a Solaris 10 host. When this issue rears its ugly head, one or more of the interfaces in the aggregation go offline. I'm still trying to track down if this is a Cisco or a Solaris issue, and have been patching the server to make sure all of the drivers are current. When I applied the latest aggr and nxge patches, I noticed that these patches required four additional patches: Required Patches: 127127-11 137137-09 139555-08 141444-09 (or greater) To see if these patches were applied, I fired up my old friend awk: All of the patches I needed were indeed applied, so I was able to apply the nxge and aggr patches without issue…
$ read more →Solaris reporting multiple devices sharing IRQ assignments
One of my co-workers this week was fighting disk failure on a Solaris 10 x86 host. I was checking /var/adm/messages and came across something interesting. Weird. So, x86 hardware assigns different IRQ assignments to devices…
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