Respect my ~/.Xauthority !#@$!
South Park is a hilarious show, and I think that Cartman is the best character. One of Cartman's classic lines is "YOU WILL RESPECT MY AUTHORITAH!#!" about X11 Forwarding / SSH, but maybe there is a moral to the story. You have to execute some sort of GUI program on a remote host and it requires root access in order to execute (or you have to change to a different user to execute the GUI with correct permissions)... At first, when you logged into the machine for the first time without X11 forwarding enabled, your ~/.Xauthority file doesn't exist…
$ read more →A new blogger joins the prefetch family
My good friend Mike recently joined the prefetch family, and will be adding additional content to the prefetch blog (his first blog post rocked!). Mike is one of the most skilled UNIX administrators I have ever met, and I am extremely excited that he is going to add his real world experiences to this site! Welcome Mike!
$ 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 →Configuring ZFS to gracefully deal with pool failures
If you are running ZFS in production, you may have experienced a situation where your server paniced and reboot when a ZFS file system was corrupted. With George Wilson's recent putback of CR #6322646, this is no longer the case. George's putback allows the file system administrator to set the "failmode" property to control that happens when a pool incurs a fault. Here is a description of the new property from the zpool(1m) manual page: Controls the system behavior in the event of catas- trophic pool failure…
$ read more →Creating ZFS file systems during the jumpstart process
I use jumpstart at home to update the hosts in my lab as new Nevada builds and Solaris updates are released. As part of the unattended installation / upgrade process, I create a couple of ZFS file systems on each system. Since jumpstart doesn't have built-in support for creating ZFS file system, I had to add the zpool and zfs commands to my finish script. After a bit of tinkering around, here is what I came up with: This appears to work pretty well, and my boxes are now built and operational once the jumpstart process completes…
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