Brendan Gregg wrote an awesome article on how DTrace can be used to compliment truss while debugging system and application problems. As always, Brendan did a killer job with this!
While poking around /var/adm/vx this week, I noticed that VxVM (Veritas Volume Manager) 4.x logs all commands that have been executed to /var/adm/vx/cmdlog:
$ tail -6 /var/adm/vx/cmdlog
# 7601, 24143, Mon Sep 12 09:21:04 2005
/usr/sbin/vxdg list -o alldgs
# 32045, 24257, Mon Sep 12 09:21:47 2005
/usr/sbin/vxdisk -o alldgs list
# 13637, 24444, Mon Sep 12 09:22:03 2005
/usr/sbin/vxprint -G -q -n -A
This is super cool, and will be extremely valuable for troubleshooting storage related problems.
The Emulex hbacmd(1m) utility can be used to print numerous configuration and performance attributes. The performance attributes can be used to gauage throughput and signal loss, which can aide in debugging performance and reliability issues. To view all available performance metrics, the hbacmd utility can be invoked with the “portstat” option and the WWPN to view:
$ hbacmd PortStat 10:00:00:00:c9:49:28:47
Port Statistics for 10:00:00:00:c9:49:28:47
Secs Since Last Reset : 21573
Exchange Count : 1308267
Responder Exchange Count: 363
TX Seq Count : 1315705
RX Seq Count : 6357365
TX Frame Count : 1336810
RX Frame Count : 161483066
TX Word Count : 31567104
RX Word Count : 3316320000
TX KB Count : 123309
RX KB Count : 12954375
LIP Count : -1
NOS Count : 0
Error Frame Count : 0
Dumped Frame Count : -1
Link Failure Count : 1
Loss of Sync Count : 0
Loss of Signal Count : 0
Prim Seq Prot Err Count : 0
Invalid TX Word Count : 8
Invalid RX Frame CRC Cnt: 0
This data could easily be integrated with Orca to provide useful historical graphs. Nice!
One of my favorite features in wordpress is theme support. Themes can be used to change the look and feel of a site, and are easily installed by extracting the theme in the ${BLOG_HOME}/wp-content/themes directory, and selecting the theme in the wordpress admin console. I am currently using theBack in Black theme, which has a mellow relaxing layout.
While perusing the Solaris network discussion forum today, I came across a cool post on Sun’s clearview initiative. This project will attempt to unify the existing IP HA features (e.g., IPMP, trunking, etc.), and will be well received by the SysAdmin community (especially the ipmpadm utility and ipmp interface types). If your interested in learning more about this technology or providing feedback, check out the design document and post comments to the Solaris networking forum! Your voice will be heard!!