Instrumenting Java code with JSDT probes
A few months back, I got wind from the world famous Jarod Jenson that Keith McGuigan was working on adding JSDT probes to Java. JSDT probes struck me as an extremely useful feature for realtime problem analysis, so I decided to instrument some sample code to see how they worked. After a couple of e-mail exchanges with Keith, I had a working Java build that supported JSDT. After reviewing a number of Java projects, I chose to instrument the PostgreSQL Java type IV driver, since I wanted to learn PostgreSQL along with JDBC…
$ read more →OpenSolaris network virtualization slides
I gave a talk tonight on network virtualization at the Atlanta UNIX users group. The talk focused on the OpenSolaris network virtualization project (project Crossbow), and described Crossbow and how to use it. I posted the slide deck I used on my website, so you can grab the presentation and the latest Nevada build and start creating virtual networks today!
$ read more →Patching zones in parallel
While catching up on some of my favorite blogs, I came across a post pertaining to parallel zone patching by Jeff Victor. In his write up, Jeff discussed a couple of methods for decreasing the time it takes to patch a host with one more more zones. Of the methods listed, the "Zones Parallel patch" feature caught my eye: "Sun has developed an enhancement to the Solaris patching tools which is intended to significantly decrease the elapsed time of patching. It is currently being tested at a small number of sites…
$ read more →Assigning static IP addresses to Fedora Core hosts
I built a Fedora Core 10 host this weekend, and configured it to use DHCP to retrieve its IP address and network configuration during installation. Once the host was built, I decided to update the ifcfg-eth0 file to use static IP addresses. Here is the configuration I added to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to assign the static IP address 192.168.1.50 to the server: I copied this configuration from another Fedora Core host on my network, but wanted to paste it here for future reference.
$ read more →Debugging a Solaris fault manager fault
I recently debugged an issue where a host panicked with the following message: These errors are typically generated due to CPU or memory faults, but on this specific machine nothing was being displayed when I checked the fault and errors logs. Upon closer inspection, it looked like the fault manager wasn't running and had transitioned into the maintenance state: After poking around Sunsolve, I noticed that there were a number of issues that can cause fmd to enter the maintenance state. In this specific case, the daemon was core dumping at startup so I had a core file readily available to help debug the source of the problem. Upon inspecting the panic string, it turned out that we were bumping into bug 6672662…
$ read more →