Bash's built in commands
If you're a frequent user of the bash shell, I would suggest taking a peek at the GNU reference guide next time you have a chance. There are a lot of cool built in functions/commands within bash that are pretty neat. To get an idea of what these built in commands are: Some of these do have binaries within the /usr or /bin namespace, while others do not. Bash's internal built in definition of these commands is what actually gets executed…
$ read more →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 →OpenSSH's VPN
Most SSH clients have the ability to perform local and remote port forwarding. This is a pretty neat use of SSH if you haven’t ever seen it before. OpenSSH can take it one step further and provide a full VPN solution encrypting all network traffic on all ports between two machines. This is pretty powerful stuff…
$ 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 →ZFS boot support for SPARC / x86
The flag day for ZFS boot supportwas just announced which will allow for root file systems (/, /var, /usr) to be bootable from both SPARC and x86 platforms. It looks like this functionality is going to come into OpenSolaris at build 88. The install support (selecting ZFS file systems from a jumpstart profile) or from optical media looks like it'll make its way into build 89. A lot of people have been waiting to play with this on SPARC platforms…
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