Archive
Posts in Solaris
Finding hardware details on Solaris 10 hosts with SMBIOS
I have previously written about the Solaris smbios utility, and how the utility can be used to discover various items about the hardware platform you are running on. While reviewing one of my mailing lists over the weekend, I came across a post that describes the SMB_TYPE_BASEBOARD and SMB_TYPE_SYSTEM properties. In most cases these two properties will allow you to discover the hardware platform you are running on, and details about the motherboard in use: If you are building an inventory system, or just want to see what type of system is in use, this information will be of great value!
$ read more →Monitoring network bandwidth with bwm-ng
There are a bunch of utilities available to monitor bandwidth utilization on Linux hosts, and I've touched on a few in previous posts. I recently came across bwm-ng while perusing the Debian package repository, and decided to try it out. When bwm-ng is executed without any arguments, it provides a relatively simple curses interface with throughput statistics for each interface in the system: But the simplicity of the tool stops there, since there are a SLEW of options to control the output format, and whether or not sampled data is written to a file. This is a nifty utility, but I think I will stick with iftop.
$ read more →Using paste to create columns from input data
I periodically need to take input data from various utilities and convert it to columnar data. There are a million ways to do this, but I have come to rely on the paste utility to perform this task: In the output above, paste will take the input given to it and print the data in 3 columns (you can add more hyphens to get more columns of data). If anyone has some interesting little tidbits such as this, feel free to add them to the comments section. Thanks!
$ read more →Adding environment variables to an SMF service
I create an SMF manifest last week for a new service, and needed two environment variables to be set prior to the services' start method being invoked. After poking around the svccfg manual page, I came across the setenv subcommand, which can be used to set an environment variable: Since I was creating a manifest from scratch, I ran this against a temporary service and then used the svccfg "export" command to display the entry I needed to add to the manifest I was creating: Here is the XML that was displayed for the environment variable addition: I like SMF, but sometimes wonder if it is over-engineered for what it actually needs to do. If you have opinions on this, please let me know by submitting a comment.
$ read more →SCSI Enclosure Services
Eric Schrock has done some really cool work with integrating disk (SMART) /platform monitoring (IPMI) information into Opensolaris. Just recently, he has extended FMA with a new technology called SES (SCSI Enclosure Services) into build 93 of OpenSolaris. This looks like some really cool stuff. The following was taken directly from his blog on the examples of using the new fmtopo utility to map out an external storage array.
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