church1e's blog

If problems with starting services occur, sometimes a system hangs during the boot process. This procedure shows how to troubleshoot this problem.

The following is a simple example of creating a ZFS filesystem and using it to hold a newly-created Solaris Zone (Solaris Container)

A brief howto article on the best practice to install DNI8.0 on a Solaris system

A brief overview of the various backup and restore utilities available under the Solaris operating system.

Having a large number of disks can be a challange for sysadmins. By giving each disk a volume name may make it easier.

There are a number of utilities and files that come into play with tape drives in Solaris, and it is helpful to know how all the pieces fit together.

This document explains how to use Oracle Solaris to users who have experience operating systems in a Linux environment.

Like Oracle Enterprise Linux 6, Solaris has runlevels 0 through 6. However, the meanings are somewhat different. In OEL 7 runlevel is target.

UFS is the primary file system for the Solaris OS. UFS is extremely mature, very stable, and for most applications, is the file system of choice.

For every hard drive known to Solaris, there is a file in the /dev/dsk that is used to access that drive.

The OBDiag utility is an OpenBoot program designed to help the system administrator run extensive hardware diagnostics on a Sun SPARC system.

This article provides a list of the important files that have changed between SunOS 4.1.x and Solaris 2.x (SunOS 5.x) based systems

This article provides a summary of the SunOS administrative command differences between SunOS 4.1.x and Solaris 2.x (SunOS 5.x) based systems

This page assumes you want an oracle install on a single disk, with minimum memory, to just play around with oracle and learn the basics.

The purpose of this document series is to introduce the system and network administration features of Red Hat Linux for Solaris Administrators.

The following sections detail the differences between the Solaris 9 OS and Red Hat Linux with respect to network administration tasks

The following sections detail the differences between the Solaris 9 OS and Red Hat Linux with respect to advanced system administration tasks

The following sections detail the differences between the Solaris 9 OS and Red Hat Linux with respect to system administration tasks.

The following sections detail the differences between the Solaris 9 OS and Red Hat Linux with respect to basic tasks and component

To gain authorisation to change NIS+ databases you need to create your security credentials for the NIS+ principals

This post provides brief differences in the log files used for System Logging of the most common versions of UNIX.

This post provides brief differences in the commands used for Software Installation and Patch management of the most common versions of UNIX.

A Solaris FLAR image can be used for reinstalling the OS one the original host and other systems.

If you remove the LDOM before restoring the factory default configuration, you can restore the factory default configuration from the service processor

Over the years I have seen some of the most common NFS Error/Issues which occurs in very common now and then to most of Solaris system admins.

xargs command are unlike most other Unix commands in that its function is not so much to do something on its own, but to construct other commands

Depending on the programming interface used, an application may not be able to reach the file descriptor limit.

IPC allows information transfer or synchronization to occur between processes.

These commands work whether or not the file system is mounted.

This post is a quick start guide to getting the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Simulator up and running on your desktop

The uadmin command is tightly coupled to the system administration procedures and is not intended for general use

To solve this problem, try one or more of following commands at global zone until the zone state changes to Installed

The following procedures show how to set up and use the NTP service.

Using dsh (distributed shell) to run commands in parallel on multiple servers

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.

This article provides the steps necessary to check the status of the OEM agent on any given Solaris system

This post provides the simple steps necessary to install the Oracle Enterprise Manager agent on a given Solaris system.

For security purposes, administrators may wish to disable ftp on a given Solaris system.

For security purposes, administrators may wish to disable telnet on a given Solaris system.

This article provides the simple steps to enable SNMP on Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 systems.

The version of sed running on Solaris is not capable of saving files so a workaround using perl is possible.

When enabled, all changes to file system meta-data are written to an intent log prior to being written out to the file system itself.

Branded zones are Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 containers created in a Solaris 10 global zone with BrandZ framework to extend the Solaris zones.

This article provides a series of examples of adding different file systems, raw and disk devices to a non-global zone.

With Solaris 9, the volume Management daemon (vold) was changed so that it automatically attempts to manage all removable media devices.

This post provides an example of how to remove VxVM from a Solaris root disk. The operating system is mirrored between the two devices.

Using the tunesfs command you can modify certain parameters after creating the original file system without rebuilding the entire file system.

When you create a UFS file system, the disk slice is divided into cylinder groups.

A link is a pointer to another file or directory. Links provide a mechanism for multiple file names to reference the same data on disk.

SunOS is the core operating system and Solaris is the broader environment comprising SunOS, OpenWindows and networking support

Sometime hostname need to be changed especially when your customer want to make some list of server more orderly and correctly identify your machine

Using the ramdiskadm command we can create a ramdisk pseudo device in the Solaris OS

So you have a fresh install of Solaris 11 and you cannot login directly as root because it is a role...

ZFS uses the concept of storage pools to manage physical storage. Historically, file systems were constructed on top of a single physical device.

The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) identifies hardware that is compatible with Solaris and provides information about available software support.

We have many utilities like iostat, fsstat, sar, etc. in Solaris to identify disk I/O performance issues.

setuid and setgid are unix access rights flags that allow users to run an executable with permissions of the executables owner and group respectively

Once completed, clients can use this repository server to get updates over the local network instead of via the internet.

How to mount and unmount an ISO CD-ROM image as a local file system on various UNIX platforms.

This post provides the necessary steps in creating a fully automated jumpstart for Solaris 10

Solaris 8 and 9 Extended (a.k.a Vintage) Support finished at the end of Oct 2014.

You can set time values in non-global zones that are different from the value in the global zone.

Identifying a ethernet MAC address in Solaris as a non-root user is not as difficult as people think. arp, netstat and prtpicl are your friends.

A short tip on how to increate the size of swap online for a given Solaris system under zfs.

Every sysadmin that has upgraded or patched a system running multiples zones will tell it, the upgrade was an undefinably long process.

To disable a service under Solaris 10 we use the svcadm command.

Changing a users password without user input is easy under Linux using the chpasswd command. On Solaris this does not exist.

With later releases of Solaris, if you want to, you can manually lock down your system using the netstat, svcs and svcadm commands.

The beauty of zones under Solaris for me is the ability to clone any zone and then easily adapt it for it's new resources and function.

Max Bruning wrote an excellent paper on how to examine the internals of a ZFS data structure.

A ZFS owned disk may be promoted to be a quorum disk on current Sun Cluster versions

savecore under solaris 2.6 fails with 2GB or larger swap partitions

ping or not to ping that is a solaris quirk

Whatever the cause, the crash dump itself provides invaluable information to a support engineer to aid in diagnosing the problem.

Using the executable maps feature in Solaris automounter we can create an authenticated users home directory automatically if it does not exist.

To check your software to see if they meet minimum version requirements for installation you can use the uname comand, however...

For testing purpose you can use the release repository but production environments must use oracle support repository.

need proxy settings to update IPS packages for Solaris 11 zones

Have you ever got into a situation where you can't install a new system as you forgot to change the disk label from EFI prior to install?

Solaris pseudo file systems look like an ordinary file system but are actually a method whereby various system and process data can be accessed.

Solaris supports a number of different file systems some out of the box, others by ways of additional software.

Ever needed to get Solaris to detect disks; the method depends on the version of Solaris. This article provides a how to

The traditional method of changing the hostname of a given solaris system was to use sys-unconfig utility.

This post is an introduction to the new virtual technology introduced from Sun Microsystems, namely Solaris Zones (not containers)

A full discussion is beyond the scope of this article, so we will focus on the most common cases, how to set them up, manage them and maintain them.

To overide the ALOM password on the Sun Fire (V210, V240, V250 or V440) system you will need to perform the following tasks.

Not only does PCA generate a list of patches and downloads them, it also resolves dependencies between patches and installs them in the correct order

ZFS uses the concept of storage pools to manage physical storage. Historically, file systems were constructed on top of a single physical device.

The automounter has built in debugging, which can be used to examine exactly what the automounter is doing.

With Solaris 9 and later, comes an extremly nice mdb command for checking how much memory is used in kernel, and how much is used in user space.

EMC PowerPath for Solaris automates data path management, failover and recovery, and optimizes load balancing to ensure application availability.

A short article providing common troubleshooting reference between Solaris 8 and AIX 4.3.3 operating systems.

A short article providing common troubleshooting reference between Solaris 8 and AIX 4.3.3 operating systems.

how to perform a LiveUpgrade of a Solaris system with ZFS

how to setup acls on files in a directory

I thought I'd try out the new role based action control (RBAC) on the Solaris systems as an alternative to sudo.

Using the usermod command on Solaris allows a sysadmin to unexpier/unlock a users login account

In a nutshell users will be tied-down to a specific directory which they will not be able to move from, thus prevention from seeing you entire system

fixing a prtdiag hang under solaris

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

Under Solaris 10 the default sendmail config doesn't forward mail which can't be delivered locally to mailhost.

Using fssnap we can quickly take a temporary snapshot of any UFS file system and then use that snapshot for backup operations.

RTFM is often used as a response to technical questions. Unfortunately, some folks do not even know how to find the manual, let alone understand it.