Archive
Posts in Solaris
Using cfgadm to display LUNs on Solaris hosts
If you are trying to configure and unconfigure LUNs on a Solaris host, you may be suprised to find that the default 'cfgadm -al' output doesn't display the LUNs on your system. To view the LUNs on a Solaris host, you need to use cfgadm's show_SCSI_LUN option:
$ read more →Finding words with look
If you have ever had a moment when you couldn't recall a word from memory, but knew something about the word, you probably wandered to one of the numerous online dictionaries to find the name. If you happen to have a Solaris box handy, you can avoid the web and use the look utility to find the word. Look is run with a string that you want to match to a word, and it uses the word list in /usr/share/lib/dict/words during the comparison. The following examples show this nifty utility in action:
$ read more →Splitting files with csplit
Periodically I find that I need to split a file into several pieces. There are a number of utilities that can be used to split a file, but I have grown to adore csplit. Csplit can split files based on regular expressions, or by quantity. The following example uses csplit to split /etc/services into a series of 10-line files: Tis good stuff!
$ read more →Viewing Solaris patches with patchadd
The Solaris patchadd utility is well known for being able to apply a patch to a system, but few people know that it has a nifty "-p" (print installed patches) option to print the list of installed patches: I recon 'showrev -p' is used a bit more frequently, since this is what the official patch documentation uses to list installed patches. It's the little things in life that make you the happiest. :)
$ read more →Benchmarking Solaris and Linux systems with sysbench
With numerous companies and individuals moving to virtualized environments (e.g., VMWare, Solaris containers, Xen, etc), it is important to understand the costs associated with doing so. How do you measure the cost savings and overhead associated with a virtualization layer? Calculating cost savings is easy (especially if you have had a few accounting or finance courses), since it is relatively easy to figure out the costs associated with ongoing operations, data center space, and power and cooling. But measuring the impact from the virtualization layer itself is somewhat difficult, especially since virtualization companies don't publish meaningful data to show the overhead associated with a given virtualization technology…
$ read more →