blog'o thnet - Comments

Solaris vs. RHEL Costs And Features Comparisons - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:05:21 +0100

Hi Jim,

Thank you for posting this comment, for your updated chart, and your great inputs as a Solaris, and OpenSolaris evangelist. Keep up the good work!

Solaris vs. RHEL Costs And Features Comparisons - Jim Laurent

Jim Laurent — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:00:40 +0100

Julian,

Thanks for posting this. I've actually created an updated version of the Solaris/RHEL comparison chart since the posting you referenced.

The new chart includes OpenSolaris and Windows 2003 server and can be found at:

http://blogs.sun.com/jimlaurent/ent...

Announcing Solaris 10 10/08 - Mick Russom

Mick Russom — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:55:39 +0100

Is the install process on x86 still a 32-bit kernel ?

If Sun hasn't fixed the "I'm too stupid to install on disk with 1TB or larger partitions" I'm going to be really pissed.

I really wish Sun would dump the 32-bit installer, the time has come.

Discrepancies Between df And du Outputs - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:31:41 +0200

Thank you, Irwan, for your comment. By truncate the unlinked file, I mean something such as cat /dev/null > /proc/1252/fd/3, in my previous example.

Discrepancies Between df And du Outputs - Irwan

Irwan — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:38:28 +0200

Nice post! I'm also facing this situation when working in a complex enterprise environment. Could you elaborate more on 'Truncate the unlinked file' and probably give an example?

Fake the hostid of a Solaris Zone - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:00:42 +0200

Well, this solution is not the proper, and with recent Solaris releases you can do the same thing as with the zhostid, but directly from the non-global zone.

Using the LD_PRELOAD trick, didn't forget to unset the variable just after executing the hostid command.

Fake the hostid of a Solaris Zone - gerard

gerard — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:48:40 +0200

hello,
i'm trying the second solution, it works for hostid, but fails with other commands:
reglisse-root% ptree 11984
ld.so.1: ptree: fatal: /tmp/newhostid.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32
Killed
reglisse-root% ldd /usr/bin/ptree
/tmp/newhostid.so
libc.so.1 => /lib/libc.so.1
libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/sfw/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
libm.so.2 => /lib/libm.so.2
/platform/SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200/lib/libc_psr.so.1

any idea?

thanks,

How to Patch a Live System Mirrored with SVM - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:00:56 +0200

Absolutely. In fact, we proceed in a similar way right now. The point is, it was not planned beforehand on the system I worked on in this post to used Live Upgrade to update/upgrade the environment. Thank you for your comments.

How to Patch a Live System Mirrored with SVM - GMO

GMO — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:07:49 +0200

Hmm, we do it a little different than this. We simply create one BE on slice 0 of drive #1 and mirror it to slice 0 of drive #2. We then format another slice (say slice #6) and make it the same size as slice 0. This will be our Secondary BE and it is mirrored to slice 6 of drive #2. This way we never break a mirror (which leaves the system vulnerable during the patching period and we keep our old BE around until we patch again.

GMO

How to Patch a Live System Mirrored with SVM - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:58:43 +0200

The fact is fsck works as excepted using the raw device, the block device or the mount point (if known from the /etc/vfstab configuration file). But you are right, the proper way is to mention the raw device as argument--from the fsck manual page:

special represents the character special device on which the file system resides, for example, /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s7. Note: the character special device, not the block special device, should be used. fsck will not work if the block device is mounted.

How to Patch a Live System Mirrored with SVM - Mike Purton

Mike Purton — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:13:18 +0200

Great doc very helpful :-)

My only comment is on the fsck command, you seem to be running fsck on the block device /dev/dsk rather than the raw device /dev/rdsk

Regards

Mike

Getting Emulex HBA Information on a GNU/Linux System - suresh

suresh — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:25:51 +0200

It was really nice article Julian. People like me are searching for lot of information since I'm getting into storage side. Please do write such information often.

Comparison: EMC PowerPath vs. GNU/Linux dm-multipath - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:55:52 +0200

As for EMC PowerPath, it can update its configuration on LUN name change if used with CLARiiON system. I don't know if it is possible for other storage provider (but this not important from PowerPath point o view). The final aim is to be able to properly discover multipath devices, which generally operate under LVM management: in this case, both solutions are usable nevertheless.

What really matter is that the multipath device follow automatically device name change (whatever the name is), and LUN renumbering. It doesn't really matter how is named the device if the multipath software can't recognize it (unless for human intervention in case of a software failure in order to reconfigure it properly). If the alias capability is the solution to do that with dm-multipath, that is a good news.

Comparison: EMC PowerPath vs. GNU/Linux dm-multipath - someone

someone — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:20:55 +0200

One of the nice things I've found with multipathd is that you can alias devices based on their unique LUN ID (using the "alias" directive, I can end up with a /dev/mapper/SAN_LUN3 etc based on the unique ID of the LUN). This way you can be sure that the same LUN will have the same name across multiple hosts, between boots, after removing or adding LUNS etc. I haven't been able to replicate this using powerpath? Does anyone know if there is a way? It seems it just picks the emcpower<a,b,c,d...> names however it wants? i.e. if I attach 4 LUNS to one host then the same LUNs to another, in each case the LUNs will be different devices?

Comparison: EMC PowerPath vs. GNU/Linux dm-multipath - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:07:51 +0200

To be able to get the SCSI LUN ID--whatever is the SAN storage provider, you must know the appropriate sd devices which compose the multipath device (PowerPath, GNU/Linux dm-multipath, etc.). Then, you can identify the LUN ID using something like this:
# find /sys/devices -name "*block" -print | \
xargs \ls -l | awk -F\/ '$NF ~ /sdo$/ || $NF ~ /sdp$/ \
{print "HBA: "$7"\tscsi#:channel#:id#:lun#: "$9}'
HBA: host0 scsi#:channel#:id#:lun#: 0:0:0:9
HBA: host0 scsi#:channel#:id#:lun#: 0:0:1:9

If you are looking for more information on SCSI devices, you can also use the excellent EMC 'inq' little tool:
http://blog.thilelli.net/post/2007/...

Comparison: EMC PowerPath vs. GNU/Linux dm-multipath - Ash

Ash — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:04:04 +0200

Nice comparison, thank you.
Is there any way to get Clariion/Symmetrix LUN numbers when using dm-multipath?

RAID-1 Volume From the root File System Using SVM on x86 Platform - Julien Gabel

Julien Gabel — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:55:55 +0200

Although it may not be obvious, the VTOC layout on the first disk is assumed to be in place since the installation time. So was created the slice c1d0s4, in preparation of the later use of Solaris SVM--as a mandatory prerequisite. Please refer to the online Sun documentation (http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/81...) for more information about the creation and the sizing of State Database Replicas.

RAID-1 Volume From the root File System Using SVM on x86 Platform - cgk

cgk — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:17:42 +0200

What did you do to come up with the slice 4 info in the initial metadb initialization command? That's a bit opaque.

Upcoming IBM AIX 6 features vs. Sun Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris - Abhay

Abhay — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 17:54:18 +0200

POINT BLANK.......

POWER 6 / AIX 6.1 has turned out to be a clear winner, over performance. Hands down its value for what you pay for when you are considering a SMB segment. One IBM Power Core has default 2 CPU's in one Dye, now talk about Oracle / SAP licensing cost, you pay for one and get the performance of 2 which invariabely not in the case of SUN Processors. SUN is totally dependent on Fijitsu's R&D for all their upcoming processors on UNIX platform, IBM seems to be self sufficient.

Precompiled PHP RPMs and IBM IHS Web Server on AIX - strus

strus — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:22:21 +0100

Hi,

BULL provides for free tons of open source packages for AIX.
You can find the latest version of PHP, Apache ...