Sysadmin Corner opensolaris solaris zfs | General | Friday October 03, 2008 | By William Hathaway

When I am talking to someone who is looking at getting started with ZFS, I typically recommend they hit the following resources: ZFS Administration Guide (previous link was for Solaris users, if you are using OpenSolaris/Solaris Express, look here ) --...

Sysadmin Corner niagara cmt oracle solaris | General | Monday September 22, 2008 | By William Hathaway

Glenn Fawcett (Sun) and Andrew Holdsworth (Oracle) gave a presentation on Optimizing Oracle on CMT machines at Oracle Open World today that is freely available.  It is a good read if you have Oracle or another RDBMS and want to run it on one of Sun's CMT...

Sysadmin Corner solaris sparc console break t5220 t5120 | General | Wednesday August 06, 2008 | By William Hathaway

The T5220 is one of the first SPARC based servers to use the ILOM lights out management software.  The interface is a bit different than ALOM, which is what most of Sun's volume SPARC servers have used in the past.  If you need to send a break to one...

Sysadmin Corner security opensolaris solaris solaris10 | General | Tuesday August 05, 2008 | By William Hathaway

Glen Brunnette (security guru from Sun) has just announced an updated version of his excellent Solaris 10 Security Deep Dive presentation.  It covers lots of good topics, such as: minimization executable stacks SMF Process Rights Zones Secure by...

Sysadmin Corner jumpstart efi solaris format smi zfs | General | Saturday August 02, 2008 | By William Hathaway

I was working with a colleague recently trying to track down a jumpstart issue and thought this might be helpful to other people. The Problem A T2000 had a pair of 146G drives (c0t0d0 and c0t1d0) and a pair of 73s (c0t2d0 and c0t3d0) Each pair was...

Directory Services nameservices ldap solaris opends | General | Wednesday July 16, 2008 | By William Hathaway

An article got posted showing the steps for installing OpenDS and using it to provide name services for Solaris.  Right now generating an SSL certificate is a bit more complex than it will be in the future, but once you are past that, the rest of the...

Sysadmin Corner solaris sunray | General | Thursday July 10, 2008 | By William Hathaway

Versatile has been working with Sun's Sun Ray thin-client platform  since it came out in late 1999.   There has been a lot of renewed interest from customers lately given the amount of attention paid to the low energy needs (2-4 watts) of Sun Rays...

Sysadmin Corner solaris lacp networking nortel | Solaris | Wednesday July 02, 2008 | By William Hathaway

I configured some aggregated links using LACP and wanted to share the steps. I was performing this on two T5220 servers that each had two NICs plugged into a Nortel switch.  If you have a network administrator, you should really ask them to help on...

Sysadmin Corner socks proxy solaris | General | Wednesday April 23, 2008 | By William Hathaway

If you need to install a SOCKS based proxy server on a Solaris, you can download the source from the SS5 project at sourceforge. The only wrinkle not mention in the documentation is that you will need to set a CFLAGS environment variable before running...

Sysadmin Corner opensolaris solaris10 solaris security | General | Friday April 18, 2008 | By William Hathaway

Brent Paulson gave an interesting presentation on Practical OpenSolaris Security to the London OpenSolaris Users Group ( LOSUG ). The presentation covers a wide variety of Solaris security features and provides examples showing how different configurations...

Sysadmin Corner solaris sun t5240 niagara2 t5140 | General | Wednesday April 09, 2008 | By William Hathaway

Sun announced the new dual-socket Niagara 2 servers today.  They hold two 64 thread Niagara 2 chips, pretty impressive computing power in a small and energy efficient box. Check out the details on the 1 rack-unit T5140 or the 2 rack-unit T5240...

Software Development solaris pargs debug solaris10 | General | Wednesday April 02, 2008 | By Bill Kratzer

I was troubleshooting an application problem on a Solaris 10 box today, and I was using ps to get some process information.   One of my co-workers told me to use pargs .    The pargs command (short for "process arguments") can show...

Sysadmin Corner x4450 solaris x4150 intel install sunfire | Solaris | Wednesday April 02, 2008 | By William Hathaway

We recently received a Sun x4150 in our lab and while it is an awesome machine (8 fast cores and 8 disk drives in a 1u package), we wanted to document the few steps we needed to take to get a copy of Solaris 10 08/07 running.   Our configuration...