Solaris Bulletin 2003

Solaris Forums

I just got the Solaris 9 12/03 CDs from Sun, and setup the Jumpstart server before cloning a Ultra 10 box to this release. But the interesting thing is, it's running in 32bit mode, not the 64bit that I took for granted. The "isainfo -v" shows me this:
# isainfo -v
32-bit sparc applications
# cat /etc/release
Solaris 9 12/03 s9s_u5wos_08b SPARC
Copyright 2003 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 21 November 2003
# psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 02/11/2004 13:40:39
on-line since 02/10/2004 17:26:04.
The sparcv9 processor operates at 440 MHz,
and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
#

But another box with 9 12/02 installed, is running in 64bit mode:
% cat /etc/release
Solaris 9 12/02 s9s_u2wos_10 SPARC
Copyright 2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
% psrinfo -v
Status of processor 0 as of: 02/11/2004 13:43:43
Processor has been on-line since 11/14/2003 08:47:11.
The sparcv9 processor operates at 440 MHz,
and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
% isainfo -v
64-bit sparcv9 applications
32-bit sparc applications
%

Any info appreciated, thanks!

SUMMARY root disk clonning with dd

Joohyun Cha Joohyun Cha <[email protected]>
Fri, 11 Apr 2003 09:56:07 +0900

• Previous message: SUMMARY: Outgoing packet errors
• Next message: Summary : Unable to compile after patch cluster
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

---

Hi. Managers.

Thanks to all your responses from 
Steve Maher
Frangois Legal
Yakov Lerner
Espen Martinsen
Hargrave, Mark
Charles Gagnon
Homan, Charles
McCaffity, Ray
Wingfield, John
Hichael Morton

Almost every managers said that it's normal if I dd with unmounted
slice. I should first boot from cdrom and use dd command then there
are no errors. but in my case (OS disk clonning with live system)
I just can't shut it down and boot from cdrom so when I need to 
use clone disk by dd or ufsdump command I should do sync several times
before excuting command and make a system quiet as possible as I can.
And also again I should do fsck.

Espen Martinsen and Homan, Charles pointed me a good resource for this
purpose.

http://pogostick.net/~esm/ftp/ESMclon.bin
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1148/sam0107j/0107j.htm.

Freshmeat/pam_passwdqc 0.7.5  by Solar Designer - Sunday, November 2nd 2003 16:07 PDT

About: pam_passwdqc is a simple password strength checking module for PAM-aware password changing programs, such as passwd(1). In addition to checking regular passwords, it offers support for passphrases and can provide randomly generated passwords. All features are optional and can be (re-)configured without rebuilding.

Changes: The module will now assume invocation by root only if both the UID is 0 and the PAM service name is "passwd". This should fix changing expired passwords on Solaris and HP-UX and make "enforce=users" safe. The proper English explanations of requirements for strong passwords will now be generated for a wider variety of possible settings.

Sun Versus Linux The x86 Smack-down - OSNews.com

... Solaris 9 x86 uses the Unix stalwart UFS. Many people complain about the slowness of UFS, similar to the complaints about BSD's FFS until the advent of soft-updates. But, since Solaris 7, Sun has provided a remedy of this UFS slowness by the way of UFS logging which many sysadmins are surprised to learn of.

UFS with logging provides a remarkable speed boost to file systems for some types of operations, so much so that I'm surprised that Sun hasn't just turned it on by default. You can run UFS logging safely on all file systems, including /. To enable UFS logging, just add logging to the option column (it's the last column) in /etc/vfstab and reboot. The file systems will automatically come up with logging enabled. Of course be careful when editing /etc/fstab, as fudging it up can really ruin your day.

/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 / ufs 1 no logging

/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s6 /usr ufs 1 no logging

I ran a quick check to see how UFS logging helped speed, so I did an untar of the gcc-3.3.1.tar source code from ftp://www.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/ and then deleted the directory. The results are quite dramatic:

Task | Without UFS Logging | With UFS Logging

tar -xvf gcc-3.3.1.tar 4m 2s 0m 41s

rm -rf gcc-3.3.1 2m 53s 0m 4s

Going from 4 minutes to 40 seconds for the tar, and almost 3 minutes to just under 4 seconds is quite a speedup. Of course tar and rm operations are by no means a comprehensive of I/O operations in a production server environment, but you get the picture.

Table of Contents

[Sept 24, 2003] InformationWeek Servers Dell And Sun Offer Different Visions September 17, 2003

Wednesday launched its latest Unix-based server. The V440 runs four UltraSparc IIIi processors, which are designed to be a low-cost, low-power alternative to Sun's UltraSparc III processor line.

"It's not about cheaper hardware, that's only part of it," says Souheil Saliba, Sun's VP of volume systems products marketing. "We designed the V440 product and supply chain to target a certain cost." The starting price for the V440 is $10,000. Sun expects this price to make the V440 competitive with both Windows- and Unix-based four-way servers, which the company sees as in strong demand. "There are quite a few types of apps, including business intelligence and databases, that are being moved to four-way servers," Saliba says.

[Sept 24, 2003] Sun Solaris Solaris Boasts Improved Security, Peformance And Virtualization Storage Pipeline

Sun Microsystems is planning some upgrades to its Solaris operating system designed to increase speed and flexibility.

Mark Tolliver, executive vice president of marketing and strategy and chief strategy officer at Sun, used his keynote presentation at the SunNetwork Conference, held this week in San Francisco, to tell a crowd of corporate users and channel partners about some of changes they should expected.

Tolliver touted Solaris as the most stable operating system on the market, especially with its binary compatibility across platforms and between version numbers. For instance, when Sun upgraded from version 8 to version 9 of Solaris, the company had to migrate 233 applications to the new operating system, he said. "Two-hundred thirty-two applications had no problem," he said. "We fixed Solaris, not the application, so now we're 233 for 233."

For the next version of Solaris, dubbed Solaris Next by Tolliver, Sun will incorporate most of the security features of Trusted Solaris, the company's security-hardened version of the operating system, said Tolliver.

Sun is also planning to add a new feature--Advanced Tracing--which Tolliver said will allow administrators to monitor the network across the entire network environment and across all processes.

Also coming in the near future is Network Performance, which gives Solaris wire-speed performance over TCP/IP networks, Tolliver said, adding that the feature should increase Solaris performance over such networks by a factor of 10.

In addition, Sun is planning to bring Trusted Containers to Solaris. Trusted Containers allow servers to be virtualized into larger servers, with each server set up in a secure "container" as a way to consolidate a data center's server environment, said Tolliver. Up to 4,000 such containers can be configured on a single server, he said.

Andy Tucker, distinguished engineer and architect for Trusted Containers, said the containers are completely isolated from each others, so each container cannot see applications outside of its own secure bounders. At the same time, the file system is virtualized so that each container, or "zone," can have its own virtual file system, he said.

Tolliver said to expect the Network Performance module to be available in October, with Trusted Containers to be available in the first quarter of 2004.

All of the upcoming Solaris features will also be available on Solaris x86 version as well, Tolliver said.

During Tolliver's keynote, he brought out Neil Knox, Sun's executive vice president of volume systems products, to discuss low-cost servers. Knox, in response to canned questions from Tolliver, hinted that Sun may introduce a four-way, x86-based server at the company's next quarterly SunNetwork Conference.

Knox also said to expect technology changes that will increase the performance of Sun Fire V440 servers in the "not too distant future."

Tolliver also introduced Daniel Jackson, president and COO of DeepNines Technologies, which is developing security products for the Solaris environment. In response to Tolliver's question of why DeepNines is developing for Solaris only, Jackson took a jab at Microsoft by answering, "We can't call ourselves a security company if we build on an insecure OS."

Solaris Hints and Tips Usage of True Type fonts in Solaris

Copy and zip your favourite MS fonts  from the nearest Windows box, a good start would be Arial, and Verdana, this will improve the look of most websites considerably.

On  the Solaris box unzip the fonts into a temporary directory, using the -L switch ensures that the font names are lower case.

#unzip -L arial.zip

in the same directory run

#sdtfontadm

This is a GUI tool, so just select the new fonts and click Install, the fonts will be installed in $HOME/fontadm_fonts. Earlier versions of this tool were reported to be unreliable, but the Sol9 version has worked everytime for me.
 

BigAdmin - Hardware Compatibility List for Solatis 9 Intel

[Jul 30, 2003] Solaris version 9 8/03, is the latest on the Solaris "release train.",  of a  quarterly update process, which Sun also plans to bring to its Project Orion server software collection. 

The new version features Gnome as an installation option, a reworked file system that can accommodate as many as 16 terabytes of capacity, though Sun doesn't support the use of individual files larger than 1 terabyte. It also includes version 2.1 of Solaris Live Upgrade, which adds ways to update the operating system with minimum interruption of a running machine.

Interview with Solaris Kernel Engineer Andy Tucker - OSNews.com

No Business Like SCO Business I am slightly suspicious about his claims about "Linux 9.0", but still...

Looking at processes with prstat. By Sandra Henry-Stocker

While many people view prstat merely as a replacement for top (the great little tool for ranking and viewing process resources), this versatile command which has come of age in Solaris 8 provides a wide variety of information about processes - much of which might surprise you if you have only used prstat in its simplest form. If you use the command with no arguments, the prstat output does look a lot like top output without some of the lines at the top of the display (e.g., memory and swap usage). The displayed fields include the process ID, username, size, resident set size (size in memory), run state, priority, niceness, accumulated CPU time and process name along with the thread count. All of these fields are undoubtedly familiar to you if you've relied on top as much as I have. When the -Tv <interval> argument is added, an entirely new set of data fields is included in the display. These are per process statistics such as how much time each process has spent in usr, sys and sleep modes (keep in mind that idle time only has meaning to a CPU, not to a process). The prstat -Tv command also includes a number of fields (currently only appearing with hyphens in the data fields) that, even those of us who have been issuing ps -aux and ps -elf commands for decades might not often think about -- such things as: TRP -- the percentage of time that each process has spent handling system traps TFL and DFL -- the percentage of the time that each process has spent processing text and data page faults LCK -- the percentage of time that each process has spent waiting for user locks Each of these fields will provide some insights on how each process is spending its time. It helps, of course, to understand what traps, page faults and locks are. The best place to begin is with an understanding of the word "exception". An exception is a situation causing an interruption in the normal flow of execution in a program. The word "exception" is linked to its use in the phrase "exceptional circumstances". When something happens in a program that can't be handled by the normal flow of control, control is passed to an exception handler - special code prepared to deal with these unusual circumstances. A trap is an exception caused by an instruction that then executes an OS routine. Page faults are simply "events" that occur when a process tries to access a virtual address that isn't in memory. They're not unlike reaching out for a wad of toilet paper and finding out that the roll is bare. Oops! You need to invoke a special routine to obtain the needed resources from somewhere else in the system. Locking is a method used to maintain the integrity of resources by granting access to a single process and denying access to others. If a process is spending a lot of its time waiting for locks, there is some degree of resource contention on the system. The SLP column tells us what percentage of time each process is spending sleeping - waiting for some resource or another before it can continue processing. Processes give up the CPU and go to sleep when they need a resource such as data from the disk or a response from the user sitting at the console. Most processes spend the bulk of their time sleeping. The VCX abd ICX columns report voluntary and involuntary context switching - the same type of data as we see with mpstat except on a per process rather than a per processor basis. Any process with a higher ICX than VCX value is getting kicked off the CPU -- a clear sign of CPU contention. The prstat -Tv command also displays system calls (SCL) and the number of signals received by each process (SIG). The rightmost column shows the process name and the number of threads or "lightweight processes" (LWPs). All of these extra columns that have been mentioned are included because of the v in the -Tv argument string. The T portion of the command gives us something of a split-screen display in which the bottom portion of the display provides information not on processes but on tasks. Tasks are groupings of processes that are related to each other with respect to resource allocation. As you will note in the sample output below, the Solaris 8 system under observation has 4 tasks, one of which claims nearly a gigabyte of size, 40% of memory, 28% of the CPU and more than 320 hours of run time. Note, however, that this particular task includes 58 processes. For many sysadmins, prstat might come to be not so much a replacement for top but a replacement for their favorite ps command. I can see how this very informative command with the wide variety of information that it provides on processes might easily become my favorite way to view the processes on my system. prstat -Tv 10

$ prstat -Tv 10

PID USERNAME USR SYS TRP TFL DFL LCK SLP LAT VCX ICX SCL SIG

PROCESS/NLWP

5898 root 0.0 36 - - - - 72 - 0 0 11K 0

updtsysdatax/1

12028 root 21 4.0 - - - - 75 - 2 101 .1M 0

DeployApps/1

5896 root 0.0 17 - - - - 85 - 0 0 5K 0

updtsysdatax/1

5892 root 9.8 0.0 - - - - 98 - 0 0 3K 0

updtsysdatax/1

5871 root 2.6 2.6 - - - - 95 - 0 52 1K 26

updtsysdatax/1

5881 root 0.0 3.4 - - - - 99 - 0 0 923 0

updtsysdatax/1

5879 root 0.0 3.3 - - - - 96 - 0 0 898 0

updtsysdatax/1

5877 root 3.1 0.0 - - - - 100 - 0 0 839 0

updtsysdatax/1

5875 root 0.0 2.9 - - - - 97 - 0 0 792 0

updtsysdatax/1

23257 root 0.2 0.5 - - - - 99 - 30 3 575 21

updtsysdatax/1

19039 root 0.2 0.4 - - - - 99 - 32 4 539 19

updtsysdatax/1

18975 root 0.1 0.4 - - - - 100 - 30 3 560 20

updtsysdatax/1

19012 root 0.3 0.1 - - - - 100 - 30 1 560 20

updtsysdatax/1

19046 root 0.0 0.4 - - - - 100 - 30 2 565 21

installpxb.s/1

19020 root 0.1 0.3 - - - - 100 - 30 2 535 19

installpxb.s/1

TASKID NPROC SIZE RSS MEMORY TIME CPU PROJECT

1 58 975M 795M 40% 321:08.51 29% system

0 12 0K 0K 0.0% 0:00.00 0.0% system

724 2 2216K 1776K 0.1% 0:00.00 0.0% user.root

725 6 9008K 7168K 0.4% 0:00.00 0.0% user.roo

The Army's Desktop Jockeys - Can information technology help the military win the war By Paul Boutin

The home page for the U.S. Army's 4^th Infantry Division, part of a 30,000-strong force currently on its way to Iraq, touts the 4ID as "the Army's first digital division." A name like that suggests that the rest of the military moves at less than Internet speed, but the gear the 4ID will carry into battle includes an impressive adaptation of off-the-shelf PC parts into battle-ready boxes. The idea is to bring the benefits of office IT to the world's most hostile work environment.

The division's tanks, Bradleys, Humvees, Paladin howitzers, and helicopters are equipped with Pentium-powered Appliqué+ computers that talk to one another on a wireless network using the same TCP/IP protocols as the rest of us. (The Army calls the network that links the 4ID's vehicles the Tactical Internet. Technically, it's a private intranet, but that's good enough for government work.) Dubbed FBCB2 in Pentagon speak, the $800 million project is the centerpiece of the military's new digital battlefield. Officers and soldiers in each of the 4ID's five brigades will be able to share a common, up-to-date picture, marking the GPS-plotted locations of both friendlies and hostile forces in the battle zone.

For reliability, Appliqué software runs on the Solaris operating system rather than Windows. In addition to downloadable maps and video gamelike updates of everyone's location, Appliqué includes both long- and short-form text message systems (think e-mail and instant messaging) to augment voice radio commands that can be missed, misheard, or forgotten. Commanders can send encrypted orders individually or to groups. Individual soldiers can message one another. Updates of troop locations come into the command post, and new maps and plans whoosh back out, without the need for the white boards and sticky pens soldiers used to scribble with during battle.

Sun Drops Its Linux Distribution -- that's good. This was a stupid move anyway, because they would weaken their Solaris brand without offsetting the costs of development and maintenance.  RH 8 scheduling is bad enough for people to wish to switch to Solaris,  anyway :-).

"In a major strategy shift, Sun Microsystems Inc. officials said it will stop offering its own customized version of Linux and will instead turn to several other standard Linux distributions.

"Enterprises now realize that they are writing to a distribution, not to Linux in general. What works on Red Hat Advanced Server will not work on SuSE Linux," Schwartz said.

Loiacono said Sun is committed to ensuring that its customers could run their Linux applications entirely unmodified on Solaris under its Project Orion initiative.

Internet Week Software Licensing Sun Executive Details New Utility-Based Pricing Model For Solaris February 25, 2003 By Elizabeth Montalbano, CRN

Sun Microsystems' software chief on Tuesday unveiled details of Project Orion, the company's utility-based pricing model for its Solaris operating system.

Slated for rollout in June, Orion will build all of Sun's software into the Solaris OS and offer a yearly subscription for Solaris, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said at the vendor's Worldwide Analyst Conference here.

"This pricing is far more predictable. In the long run, we can get to metered billing," Schwartz said.

Sun also plans to deliver a similar software configuration for Linux and update Solaris quarterly, Schwartz added. Those quarterly updates will comprise updates to all of the software built in to the OS as well, he said.

... Sun also will continue to offer its traditional per-CPU pricing model for its Sun ONE stack and Solaris, Schwartz said.

This article appears courtesy of CRN, the newspaper for builders of technology solutions.

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.

Last modified: March 12, 2019