While I am waiting for Apache to build with the libtool –debug option, I thought I would share my thoughts on the siege utility. Siege is an open source HTTP regression and debugging utility. I have used curl and ab in the past to debug and benchmark websites, but prefer siege, since it allows me to debug and benchmark websites with a single well written utility. To debug the HTTP requests to a server, you can run run siege with the “-g” (Grab headers) and “-u” (URL to grab) option:
$ siege -g -v -u https://prefetch.net
This displays a summary of the request/entity headers for the entire HTTP transaction, and is super useful for debugging. To simulate 5-users hitting a website with a delay between successive page loads, siege can be run with the “-c” (user count), “-r” (number of times to run the test), and “-d” (add delay between 1 and the option passed to “-d”) options:
$ siege -b -v -c 5 -r 5 -d 10 -u https://prefetch.net
The Failed transactions, Response time, and Longest and Shortest transactions statistics can be used to profile a website, and to get an accurate picture of the time it takes to process a transaction. Siege also allows you to define a slew of URLs in a file called urls.txt, which will be processed during a connection from each user. I would like to thank Jeffrey Fulmer for writing the software! Make sure to check out his article in this month’s SysAdmin magazine.
After patching my box a few months back, I noticed the following messages on the console after I rebooted:
Apr 15 15:23:15 winnie md_mirror: [ID 437521 kern.info] NOTICE: md: d1: B_FAILFAST I/O disabled
Apr 15 15:23:15 winnie md_mirror: [ID 437521 kern.info] NOTICE: md: d2: B_FAILFAST I/O disabled
Apr 15 15:23:15 winnie md_mirror: [ID 437521 kern.info] NOTICE: md: d1: B_FAILFAST I/O disabled
Apr 15 15:23:15 winnie md_mirror: [ID 437521 kern.info] NOTICE: md: d2: B_FAILFAST I/O disabled
Due to the nature of the message, I grew somewhat frantic, and began feverishly scouring the Internet for answers. It didn’t take long to stumble across the following Sunsolve article. According to sunsolve, these are not errors, and the metadevices are not faulted:
“These are not errors. These are informational (NOTICE) messages telling you that the driver underlying your metadevices does not support the B_FAILFAST option and, as a result, that capability will not be active for speedier recovery. There is no way to disable these messages.”
I am knee deep in debugging another SEGFAULT issue, and was given a cool tip by my friend Clay this weekend. When you see lots of #ifdef, #ifndef, and #endif’s in a source file, you can see what the C pre-processor will produce by running the source through the C pre-processor command (cpp):
$ cat ack.c
#include
#ifdef SOMETHING
typedef int blah;
#endif
#ifdef SOMETHING_ELSE
typedef long foo
#endif
int main(void) {
int m = 5;
printf("%d
",m);
}
$ cpp -DSOMETHING ack.c
[ ... ]
typedef int blah;
int main(void) {
int m = 5;
printf("%d
",m);
}
I removed all the standard includes to simplify the example. This is super useful!
The logadm(1m) utility comes with the Solaris Operating System, and allows system and application logfiles to be rotated at configurable intervals. logadm(1m) is controlled through the logadm.conf configuration file, which contains the logfiles to rotate, and information to describe how to rotate the logfiles. When I need to add new entries to the logadm.conf configuration file, I usually invoke logadm(1m) with the following options:
-w ENTRY - Write an entry to logadm.conf
-a - Command to run after a logfile has been rotated
-b - Command to run before a logfile is rotated
-C COUNT - Number of logfiles to keep around
-e EMAIL - Send an email to EMAIL with the results
-o OWNER - Change the owner to OWNER after rotating the file
-g GROUP - Change the group to GROUP after rotate the file
-m PERMS - Set the permissions to PERMS after rotate the file
In addition to these flags, there are dozens of available options to control where logfiles are stored after they are rotated, the format logfiles will be stored in, and several directives to control when a file is rotated (e.g., when a file is bigger than size, or after X days/weeks/months). The following example can be used to rotate the IP filter logfiles daily:
$ logadm -w ipflog -C 30 -o sys -g sys -m 600 /var/log/ipflog -a 'kill -HUPcat /var/run/syslog.pid'`
This will keep thirty copies of ipflog, set the owner and group to sys, and restart syslogd after the logfiles are rotated. logadm(1m) will run each day at 3:10am, and provides the “-p” option to rotate logfiles at specific points in time. The following example will rotate the IP filter logfiles now:
$ ls -al /var/log/ipf | head -3
-rw------- 1 sys sys 65316 Apr 5 10:05 /var/log/ipflog
-rw------- 1 sys sys 0 Apr 5 09:47 /var/log/ipflog.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 103495791 Apr 5 09:49 /var/log/ipflog.1
$ logadm -p now ipflog
$ ls -al /var/log/ipf | head -3
-rw------- 1 sys sys 149 Apr 5 10:05 /var/log/ipflog
-rw------- 1 sys sys 65316 Apr 5 10:05 /var/log/ipflog.0
-rw------- 1 sys sys 0 Apr 5 09:47 /var/log/ipflog.1
logadm(1m) also supports regular expressions, so entries similar to the following are possible (this item came from the logadm man page):
/var/apache/logs/*{access,error}_log
This is a nifty little utility.
Solaris 10 now ships with the patchpro suite of utilities, which assist with analyzing and applying Operating System patches. Patchpro makes patch installation super easy, since you are not required to download recommended bundles, or dig through patchdiag information to find the “required” patches. The patchpro smpatch(1m) utility can be run with the analyze option to compare the current set of patches from updateserver.sun.com with what is installed on a server:
$ smpatch analyze
119145-01 SunOS 5.10: usr/snadm/lib Patch
119042-02 SunOS 5.10: patch usr/sbin/svccfg
117463-02 SunOS 5.10: passwdutil Patch
119143-02 SunOS 5.10: patch lib/libinetutil.so.1
118822-01 SunOS 5.10: kernel Patch
If you want decided to download and install each patch listed by the analyze option, you can run smpatch(1m) with the update option:
$ smpatch update
119145-01 has been validated.
119042-02 has been validated.
117463-02 has been validated.
119143-02 has been validated.
118822-01 has been validated.
Installing patches from /var/sadm/spool...
119145-01 has been applied.
119042-02 has been applied.
117463-02 has been applied.
119143-02 has been applied.
118822-01 has been applied.
/var/sadm/spool/patchpro_dnld_2005.04.07@12:25:28:EDT.txt has been moved to /var/sadm/spool/patchproSequester/patchpro_dnld_2005.04.07@12:25:28:EDT.txt
Each smpatch run produces a logfile with notes on required reboots, and additional instructions:
$ cat /var/sadm/spool/patchproSequester/patchpro_dnld_2005.04.07@12:25:28:EDT.txt
This patch bundle was generated by PatchPro.
Please refer to the README file within each patch for installation instructions. To properly patch your system, the following patches should be installed in the listed order:
1) 119145-01
2) 119042-02
3) 117463-02 !!! REBOOT !!!
4) 119143-02 !!! REBOOT !!!
5) 118822-01 !!! REBOOT !!!
If you want to view the smpatch(1m) configuration options, you can run smpatch(1m) with the get option:
$ smpatch get
patchpro.backout.directory - ""
patchpro.download.directory - /var/sadm/spool
patchpro.install.types - rebootafter:reconfigafter:standard
patchpro.patch.source - https://updateserver.sun.com/solaris/
patchpro.patchset - patchdb
patchpro.proxy.host - ""
patchpro.proxy.passwd - ""
patchpro.proxy.port - 8080
patchpro.proxy.user - ""
patchpro.sun.passwd - ""
patchpro.sun.user - ""
smpatch(1m) contains a several options in addition to “analyze,” “update” and “get.” The “add” option allows individual patches to be installed, “remove” backs out patches from a system, “download” grabs a patch from “patchpro.patch.source,” and “set and “unset” are used to configure smpatch(1m).