Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:46:00 GMT
Patching Solaris is difficult
Patching Solaris is historically hard work involving cross referencing the installed patches (showrev -p) with the installed release (cat /etc/release) and the latest Recommended patch cluster and patch report at SunSolve.
Sun tools actually make it harder
Since this is such a nightmare, Sun have offered a huge number of methods for patching Solaris systems. Some are no longer properly maintained or don’t support recent releases, some are heavy X based monsters, some have a huge dependency list (33 packages for smpatch in Solaris 10 6/06, and that’s not only the ‘light’ version, but is also incomplete). The one thing they have in common is that they suck.
smpatch is the worst of the lot
After a recent experience where smpatch not only rendered a production machine unbootable, but required three reboots to do so and then had failed to even offer all of the available patches, I’ve had enough.
From now on we’ll be using Patch Check Advanced (PCA) from http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/.
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Posted in Software, Solaris, Sun
Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 28 Apr 2006 19:57:00 GMT
Our T2000 arrived. We went for the 8-core 1.0GHz, 16GB version to allow us to use the Solaris resource management tools to carve it up in various configurations.
So far I’ve used it to great effect to test out an Oracle Data Guard configuration that I’m building, and particularly to understand how you are supposed to set up your clients in order to benefit from the redundancy goodness — some notes on that will be forthcoming real soon as I couldn’t find a single useful document on that.
Michael Bushkov’s Summer of Code project, cached(8), which adds caching for nsswitch along with enabling nsswitch for the services, protocols and rpc databases finally got committed today. This is really interesting work, similar to nscd(1M) on Solaris1, but with each user having their own cache.
Also, I discovered that a post on BSDNews is a good way to saturate a crappy cable modem link. :-)
Oh yeah, and John Birrell is making superb progress on a DTrace port to FreeBSD.
1 Yes, nscd(1M) has a bad reputation, but I strongly believe that’s because people don’t understand how to work it.
Posted in FreeBSD, Oracle, Solaris, Sun | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:28:00 GMT
I added a new system board to one of our v880s this afternoon, after which picld(1M) spat out the following errors on boot, despite all diagnostics having passed:
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: ERROR running psvc_check_temperature_policy_0
on CPU5_DIE_TEMPERATURE_SENSOR (2757672)
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: ERROR running psvc_check_temperature_policy_0
on CPU5_DIE_TEMPERATURE_SENSOR (2757672)
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: No such file or directory
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: No such file or directory
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: ERROR running psvc_check_temperature_policy_0
on CPU7_DIE_TEMPERATURE_SENSOR (2757768)
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: No such file or directory
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: ERROR running psvc_check_temperature_policy_0
on CPU7_DIE_TEMPERATURE_SENSOR (2757768)
Mar 24 16:48:21 vleappc picld[320]: No such file or directory
The solution is as simple as a reconfigure boot.
Update [07/04/2006]: Chris Mackowski mailed me to point out that devfsadm -C works just nice too, of course. Thanks Chris.
Posted in Solaris, Sun | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Thu, 09 Mar 2006 13:39:00 GMT
I don’t know if there is some trick to this, but every organisation that I’ve worked at has had some problems with Sun and Cisco kit autonegotiating link capabilities.
Since hardwiring the capabilities at both ends fixes the issue, it’s not too much of a problem… until you want to boot from the network.
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Posted in Sun | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sun, 04 Dec 2005 12:19:00 GMT
Adrian Steinmann and I knocked the crunchgen(1) patch into submission; it’s now available for testing. All pre-existing configuration files should produce the same code — only use of the new libs_so keyword should make a difference. We’re looking at a 6 week MFC period or so.
I can’t mail Marius Nünnerich for some reason, so if you know him, let him know that his patch doesn’t work on the FreeBSD cluster; use bytes doesn’t exist in Perl 5.00503. I suspect that we can just get away without it.
I finally managed to buildworld after about 6 weeks; took a make installincludes and a make install in lib/libmemstat for some reason; I must have screwed something up somewhere. I can start work on some of that kernel side stuff I mentioned, though I don’t really have a test machine :-/
On which note, I’ve decided on a laptop that I want but I don’t think that December is the best time of year to be buying. I’m expecting the usual raft of price drops in the new year, and if the rumour about Apple based Intel laptops coming in January turns out to be true, I may be better off with one of them (assuming that it will run Windows too — that’s the real clincher here).
Sun released practically their entire Enterprise suite as free (as in beer, for now). This means that the Java Availability Suite which, despite the crappy name, is Sun Cluster and some other tools is now free, and so is the Grid Engine. The Grid Engine supports a whole bunch of operating systems and is a much better candidate for a compile farm than I thought Condor was. I strongly suspect that the Linux bits will work fine on FreeBSD too. I’ll be firing up the old Netra for a fiddle when these downloads finish; Stef will be pleased — I suppose it will save on heating.
Posted in Apple, Condor, FreeBSD, Solaris, Sun | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:18:00 GMT
ZFS has finally been unleashed and it looks as good as we’ve been promised.
Check out the flash demo showing how to create pools, filesystems and quotas (not traditional quotas as you know them). Bryan Cantrill has collected a morass of links to further information which I will spend the rest of this week salivating over. Unfortunately I will need to discover bfu before I get to try it.
It’s good to have something interesting to learn again.
Posted in Solaris, Sun | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 11:47:00 GMT
I installed Solaris 10 on an old x86 server in order to get some zones(5) and jumpstart development done (the jumpstart document currently references Solaris 11. Ooh.)
Since this was a really old server, it didn’t have quite enough memory to run the installation in graphical mode (which is good, because I don’t like it), so when the freshly installed Solaris booted into a blank screen I wasn’t too concerned - I simply needed to configure X.
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