Solaris articles - church1e's blog

A collection of system administration hints and tips, tricks and articles for the Solaris operating system in all its variants.

Latest posts

Installing Solaris packages directly via web

Updated 25 Feb 2011 Read time 51 sec(s) (2582 visits).

This trick isn't widely known but you can install a Solaris package directly from a HTTP source.

pfiles versus lsof

Updated 25 Feb 2011 Read time 1 min 41 sec(s) (2873 visits).

Many people install lsof on their system as they know it from Linux. But you have a similar tool in Solaris, namely pfiles.

Using SSH login without password

Published 10 Feb 2010 Read time 1 min 54 sec(s) (2893 visits).

An article outlining steps needed to be able to use the SSH to access a remote system without supplying a password each time that you connect.

How do I adjust interprocess communications (IPC) variables?

Published 1 Feb 2010 Read time 2 min(s) 45 sec(s) (3171 visits).

IPC allows information transfer or synchronization to occur between processes.

Solaris Basic Audit Reporting Tool (BART)

Published 20 Jan 2010 Read time 2 min(s) 40 sec(s) (3032 visits).

BART is a great little alternative to Tripwire or AIDE. While not so robust or full featured, it does what you need it to do with very little impact.

Clearing Password History in Solaris 10

Published 18 Jan 2010 Read time 1 min 39 sec(s) (2945 visits).

To ensure the security of passwords on Solaris systems, you need to edit the /etc/default/passwd file to enforce password length and complexity.

Troubleshooting 'too many open files'

Published 8 Jan 2010 Read time 3 min(s) 41 sec(s) (2846 visits).

Applications or servers can sometimes fail with an error indicating that there are too many open files for the current process. Most of the time.

How to change user password on Solaris/Linux

Published 27 Dec 2009 Read time 34 sec(s) (679 visits).

How to change a user password on Solaris/Linux systems and also see password policy

Using "sneep" to find/set the chassis serial number

Updated 16 Dec 2009 Read time 1 min 55 sec(s) (309 visits).

sneep is a utility that displays the chassis serial number for a given Solaris system. A handy tool to use when inventoring your data centre.

Solaris Deferred Activation Patching (DAP)

Updated 26 Nov 2009 Read time 4 min(s) 31 sec(s) (735 visits).

With DAP the reboot is deferred until all patching is completed unlike non-DAP kernel patches which forced reboot before other patches can be applied.