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 […]
When a user reports a problem with a server which is your responsibility there are a few checks you should always do. One thing that has complicated this on a Solaris 10 system is zones. It is possible that the zone you are working in is not the cause of the problem but you could […]
zlogin(1M) is used to login from a global zone to a local zone. It can also be used to execute commands in a local zone. And, it can be used to login to the console of the zone.
The console is where you can see the zone boot messages and other important information. It is the […]
If you have worked in a Linux environment you may be used to the locate command. It is very convenient to find files thay may be scattered around the hard drive. Solaris does not have this command by default but it is very easy to install.
I’m going to assume you have installed Blastwave. Blastwave is […]
Solaris is bundled with a tool called smpatch but my personal experience from using it is very poor. It is slow and not always that easy to use. This is of course only my personal opinion.
Fortunately Martin Paul has created a tool called Patch Check Advanced (PCA). It is fast and I find it very […]
SMF (Service Management Facility) was introduced in Solaris 10 and it radically changed how you work with services. Gone are the old SysV scripts but they still work and not all services that are shipped with Solaris 10 is converted yet. If you have been a UNIX admin for a while they will feel foreign […]
One of the first things you learn is that backups are important and restores are even more important. Either you learn it by reading about it or most likely you learn it the hard way when you lose your data. Unfortunately most people won’t learn from their mistakes but they will continue to keep no […]
One of many great features introduced with Solaris 10 zfs is probably one of the greatest. Once you have learned to use it you will be thinking why it took so long for someone to figure it out.
zfs provides you with end-to-end checksums of all data stored in the filesystem. It also provides you with […]
If you are doing a very sensitive operation on a server and you want to make sure that you can easily review your actions (and the result) afterwards you have two options:
Rely on the scrollback in your terminal. More often than not you will run out of scrollback
Use script
When you run script it will start […]
If you have some basic knowledge of UNIX you probably know about cron. But have you heard about at?
at is very similar to cron. You use it to schedule to run a program/script/command once at a specific time. A very basic example would look like this
$ at now
> date >/var/tmp/date.output
> ^D
job 1 at Mon Jun […]
