Archive for the 'OpenSolaris' Category

Asus EEE - the perfect Christmas gift

I’ve been looking a lot at the Asus EEE and I’m quite convinced that I will get myself one for Christmas this year. It is really small enough to carry around everywhere and since it is based on x86 you can basically run any operating system you like on it. If you use google a […]

Security Guidelines for Solaris 10

Glenn Brunnette is announcing that Sun together with Center for Internet Security has published new security guidelines for Solaris 10 11/06 and 08/07. Read the whole story on Glenn’s blog or go directly to the documents.
Read here for more security related material on this blog.

Virtualization options in Solaris running on Sun hardware

Virtualization has been a hot topic for quite some time. If you are using Solaris and Sun hardware you have had a number of options for many years already and the last few years there has been even more options made available. Today you have four different virtualization alternatives when you want to run Solaris […]

Consistent MySQL backups using ZFS snapshots

It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I really like ZFS. Personally I think it is one of the biggest developments in file system design in many many years. One place where I’ve started to use it recently on my own home server is to make instant and consistent backups […]

Use pfiles to peek into your application

Have you ever asked yourself what files a specific application is accessing at the moment? If the answer is yes and you are running Solaris then pfiles(1) is the answer.
First you need to find the PID of the application that you are interested in. In this example will we look at syslog.

# ps -ef […]

Sysadmin Related Links

Here are a few sysadmin related links:

There is a new Ruby and sysadmin related book available, Practical Ruby for System Administration. The last few years Ruby has really sailed up as a good alternative to Perl and Python. Personally I must say I prefer Python over Perl but with all the hype around Ruby I […]

Clone your ZFS root file system with one easy command

In their latest release Nexenta added support for ZFS boot. I also wrote an article about how to clone and boot another ZFS file system. The process is quite simple but it still contains a number of steps.
To make things even easier I decided to write a script to automate the process. This can be […]

6 Basic Information Resources for a Solaris Sysadmin

To follow up on my previous post, 7 Basic Solaris Troubleshooting Tips, I now thought I would present some of the great information resources that are available to a Solaris sysadmin. As someone pointed out in a comment on this blog, it is not always easy to know what is different between a Linux and […]

Solaris, Secure by Default

If you know about OpenBSD (and you really should, it is a great OS) you may also know that one of their slogans are “Secure by Default” which now also Solaris is adopting. OpenBSD is one of the few operating systems you can put directly on the Internet and be quite sure that I won’t […]

How to detect hardware problems in Solaris 10

There was many great new features included in Solaris 10, including SMF that I blogged about earlier on how to utilize it to detect problems. Another wonderful tool is the Solaris Fault Management. It is part of the Self Healing technologies available in Solaris 10. It monitors your system and if it detects errors it […]