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Posts in Solaris
Monitoring the IPMI system event log
If you have a relatively recent server, your machine most likely supports IPMI. One technology that makes IPMI extremely useful is the baseboard management controller (BMC), which is an out-of-band controller that monitors the health of your server platform. Health monitoring is accomplished by distributing sensors throughout the server, and feeding the data these sensors collect back to the BMC. If the BMC detects a fault condition, it can log an error to the system event log…
$ read more →Getting patches to install on Solaris 10 systems
There have been a number of threads in zones-discuss relating to Solaris 10 patching. Most of the feedback came from folks who ran into issues related to delayed activation patching, or patching zones that run on ZFS file system. Running zones on ZFS file systems is not currently supported by Sun, but it appears installing the latest version of 119254 or 119255 will help address a number of issues related to running zones on ZFS file systems. I am posting this here for future reference, and in an effort to help others who may be stumbling into issues applying patches to their Solaris 10 hosts.
$ read more →Viewing SMBIOS data
The SMBIOS specification allows applications and operating systems to retrieve and store hardware configuration settings. Retrieving hardware settings from a shell prompt can be extremely useful, since rebooting to view a given BIOS menu requires the machine to be taken offline. If you happen to be running Solaris 10 or Nevada, you can run the smbios utility to display the contents of the SMBIOS image on a machine: This is good stuff.
$ read more →Proxying requests through the Solaris SNMP daemon
Earlier this month I described how Orca could be used to graph JVM utilization. In order to get this solution working, you need to enable the Java SNMP agent. This can be a problem if you are running multiple SNMP agents on the server, and want both agents to use the standard SNMP port (UDP port 161). Fortunately the Solaris SNMP daemon (and anything derived from the net-snmp SNMP implementation) can be configured to proxy requests to one or more agents on the local machine (it can also proxy requests to remote systems)…
$ read more →Running the Solaris SNMP daemon as an unprivileged user
During much of my IT career, I have needed to support SNMP in one form or another. Typically the companies I have worked for deploy an SNMP agent to each server, and a network management station periodically polls this agent to retrieve health information. Most of the SNMP daemons I have worked with run as the user root by default, which opens a big gaping whole in system security. The Solaris SNMP daemon is no different in this respect, though you can configure it to run as a non-privileged user…
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