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Posts in Solaris
Cleaning up failed package installations
While attempting to install a Sun package this week, I encountered the following error: After a bit of truss'ing, I noticed that the pkgadd commands were checking for the existence of files with the name .ai.pkg.zone.lock. in /tmp. Based on a cursory inspection of the package utility source code, it appears these files are used as lock files to prevent multiple package commands from running at the same time. Since this was the only package installation running on the system, I logged into the zone and removed the stale lock file: Once I removed this file, the package installed like a champ…
$ read more →The wonderful world of Leadville
In a SAN environment when dealing with external storage concepts such as EMC BCV's, you'll often have a request to create volumes on two different machines that are identical so replication on the back-end can occur. When you look at a LUN presented to Solaris, it'll appear with a cryptic name like the following: The c20 relates to the HBA (Fiber, SCSI, iSCSI) that provides a path to the device. The "middle" sequence 60060480000190100665533030393836 between the "t (target)" and "d (device" is the WWN of the LUN. Now, say your SAN engineer approaches you with some information like the following…
$ read more →Finding/setting nvalias (nvram) OBP settings from a running Solaris O/S
Using the command eeprom (1m) while in the Solaris O/S on SPARC platforms has been a useful way to view and set OBP parameters without bringing the entire machine offline and down to the ok prompt. Unfortunately, eeprom does not show nvalias definitions. These are most often used to specify root and mirror O/S boot devices. For clarity, these are then plugged into the boot-device and diag-device OBP variables…
$ read more →Locating files on Solaris servers with pkgchk
Most Linux and BSD distributions ship with the locate utility, which allows you to quickly find files on a system: While not quite as thorough as locate, the Solaris pkgchk utility has a "-P" option that provides similar capabilities: Nice!
$ read more →Figuring out which package a Solaris utility belongs to
While reading through some old notes this weekend, I came across a page I created eons ago about managing Solaris packages. If you want to find out the file modes, the user and group ownership and the package a file belongs to, you can run the pkgchk utility with the "-l" and "-p" options and the name of a file to check: Pkgchk is a nifty utility!
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