Migrating a Zone to a Different Machine on Solaris 10

Posted Tue, 06/30/2009 - 13:37 by Justin Ellison

Zones are one of the best features in Solaris 10 -- they're so lightweight that you can use them at almost no cost in performance. Today, I ran across a situation where one of my zones needed more RAM, and the box it was on didn't have it. Read on for how to migrate a Solaris Zone to a different machine, and an important update to Solaris 10/08 that makes the process so much easier.

5
Your rating: None Average: 5 (1 vote)

Fixing CPAN Perl Module Installation Issues on OpenSolaris

Posted Fri, 06/19/2009 - 08:04 by Justin Ellison

In OpenSolaris, if you're installing perl modules via CPAN, you might run into this error: 

cc: unrecognized option `-KPIC'
cc: language ildoff not recognized
cc: ReadKey.c: linker input file unused because linking not done

In order to fix that, edit the file /usr/perl5/5.8.4/lib/i86pc-solaris-64int/Config.pm, and make the following changes to the existing lines for 'optimize' and 'cccldflags':
UPDATE! Thanks to reader Vesta for his tip. The original tip I posted will not fix all the issues, for example Apache2::Util won't install.

0
Your rating: None

Fixing Metacity's Window Placement on Dual Head Setups on OpenSolaris

Posted Tue, 06/16/2009 - 18:04 by Justin Ellison

It took me a few minutes to get dual-head working on OpenSolaris, but once I did, I immediately found something that greatly annoyed me. Every new window I opened would launch in the middle of the two heads (half of it on one monitor, the other half on the other monitor). Also, maximizing a window made it stretch across both monitors.

0
Your rating: None

Installing the Pidgin-Encryption Plugin on OpenSolaris

Posted Tue, 06/16/2009 - 17:50 by Justin Ellison

You can install Pidgin from the OpenSolaris.org repository, but there's no package for the Pidgin-Encryption plugin. Once you point it in the right direction, it's not hard to install the plugin from source.

0
Your rating: None

Installing Synergy2 from Source on OpenSolaris 2009.06

Posted Tue, 06/16/2009 - 17:44 by Justin Ellison

At work, I can't live without Synergy, the program that allows you to share one keyboard and mouse with multiple systems across multiple systems. Here's a quick post on how to install it in OpenSolaris:

0
Your rating: None

Plunging into the Deep End: Running OpenSolaris on my Primary Workstation

Posted Tue, 06/16/2009 - 17:23 by Justin Ellison

Well, like I did with Linux ten years ago, I installed OpenSolaris 2009.06 on my primary workstation at work. There's simply no better way to learn an OS than to force yourself to run it. While I was pretty close to Ctrl-C'ing the whole project a couple of times, I'm now getting things set up pretty much the way I need them to be. Stay tuned for articles with my tips, but here's my first impressions:

2.5
Your rating: None Average: 2.5 (2 votes)

The Problem with Web-based Everything

Posted Thu, 06/11/2009 - 07:29 by Justin Ellison

So, I've been tinkering with the free version of Toodledoo - a web-based GTD task manager, and I was thinking about upgrading to a "pro" account. Unfortunately, they had a storm run through last night, which engaged the generators. When the generators kicked in, something didn't work right, and power was lost. This in turn caused a database crash, which caused it to corrupt, and they are still down now.

3
Your rating: None Average: 3 (1 vote)

Upgrading from Solaris 9 with a Root SVM Mirror to Solaris 10 with a Root ZFS Mirror with < 10 Minutes of Downtime

Posted Tue, 06/09/2009 - 12:47 by Justin Ellison

As sysadmins, many times the entire task laid out in front of us has no documentation. One of the biggest skill an admin can have is the ability to problem solve, breaking down a large task into smaller sub-tasks. Often times, you might be able to find documentation on some of those sub-tasks. A perfect example is upgrading a server from Solaris 9 with root in an SVM mirror to Solaris 10 with a ZFS mirror. Not only is this large task doable, but thanks to LiveUpgrade, it can be done with less than 10 minutes of downtime (3 reboots @ roughly 3 minutes each)!

0
Your rating: None

New and Improved check_mem.pl Nagios Plugin

Posted Fri, 06/05/2009 - 08:39 by Justin Ellison

We have always monitored RAM usage on all of boxes. Sure, there's the argument that unused RAM is money wasted, but I always like to know not just when the box is swapping, but when it's about to start swapping. There have been a few plugins over the years that I've used for this - check_ram for Solaris, check_mem for Linux, and there's also check_mem.pl. Well, migrating to Solaris 10 and ZFS started tripping the check_ram thresholds due to the ZFS ARC cache. So, I attempted to pull together a cross platform Nagios plugin that did it's best to give me what I wanted, and what do you know, it works! This graph shows the ZFS ARC cache at it's best:
cacti.png

4.5
Your rating: None Average: 4.5 (2 votes)

Adding a 2nd Disk to a ZFS Root Pool

Posted Wed, 06/03/2009 - 18:22 by Justin Ellison

So, let's say you've just completed migrating to ZFS from UFS using LiveUpgrade, and now you want use that leftover disk to make a mirror. Easily done, but there's one caveat -- you need to make the second disk bootable in case the first fails.

0
Your rating: None
Syndicate content