Have you ever needed to create a file of a specific size? Not where the contents are anything specific, but you just need a file that is whatever size so you can test disk I/O or network transfer speed or whatever it is you want to test. For whatever reason, I have found it very handy to be able to create these test files when needed, so I thought I would pass along some tips to that end. Here are some ways you can accomplish this with Solaris and Linux.

Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that Sun and IBM have struck a deal to help Solaris adoption by supporting it on many IBM servers. This could really help Sun and IBM both, and from someone who is deeply entrenched in Solaris (ableit on the SPARC platform), I think this is great news. As much as I love Linux, nothing I have seen can scale as large or run as well as Solaris. Linux is great, and works for many things, but when you need big systems, Solaris and SPARC work wonderfully. Now, one note is that if it fits the situation, Linux clusters have proven very powerful. Check out the article.

I guess this could be considered part of the password post that I put up a few minutes ago, but I wanted to post this script over in the forums that is a PERL script which generates passwords for you. Check it out, take a look and maybe you can get something beneficial from it!

Here’s a quick tip for anyone who is tinkering with a Solaris box, and it stems from a question I get from folk who are new to Solaris, and that is “How do I mount a CD ROM?”. The short answer is to use the mount command, but there is a little more to it. You need to know what device your CD drive is, and the easiest way to find out if you don’t already know, is to use the iostat command, specifically running it with -En so that the (iostat -En) results look like this:

c0t0d0 Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Model: ST3120026A Revision: 8.01 Serial No: 4JT0S129
Size: 120.03GB <120034123776 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 0
c0t2d0 Soft Errors: 4 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Vendor: TSSTcorp Product: CDW/DVD TS-H492C Revision: SI00 Serial No:
Size: 0.00GB <0 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 4 Predictive Failure Analysis: 0

From the output you can see that one drive is a hard drive by the line Model: ST3120026A and Size: 120.03GB, and the other drive is the CD ROM then because it says Vendor: TSSTcorp Product: CDW/DVD. There you go, find the one that says it’s a CD ROM and we know the device we need to mount is c0t2d0.

Read the rest of this entry »

This article could be called a continuation of the article I posted yesterday about creating mirrors in SVM, only this time I am talking about replacing failed drives in those mirrors we just created.  Take a look and see some options for dealing with failed drives, and how to make Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) happy with it!

Ok folks, for any of you out there that manage Solaris machines (or want to), I have written up an article detailing one of the fundamental and basic things you do a lot of. Creating disk mirrors with SVM or Solaris Volume Manager. Now, this article does more than just tell you how to create the mirror, although it does do that. In addition, I tried to explain what was going on so that you could get an understanding of what was happening when you were running the commands. In the near future, we’ll have more articles dealing with SVM on such topics as how to replace a failed drive, and even other RAID options. For now though, we dig in to the area of mirrors. Check it out, I hope you find it useful!