Doomshammer's Weblog

Da Solaris/SunOS ja per default kein "lsof" mitbringt, ich aber immer wieder mal rausfinden muss, welche Prozess auf einem bestimmten Port, hab' ich schnell mal diesen Einzeiler zusammengekleistert. Ist nicht gerade schnell und effizient- tut aber was ich benoetige... und schneller als "lsof" installieren isses allemal.

(Ich suche hier gerade, welcher Prozess auf Port 2144 rennt)

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Joerg Moellenkamp wrote a great 5-part tutorial about Solaris' Service Management Facility (SMF). Everybody who is working with SMFs but actually it not using efficiently should read Joerg's tutorial- it's absolutelly worth reading!

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Aus gegebenem Anlass frage ich mich gerade wieder, warum ich mich dafuer rechtfertigen muss, das ich $OS einsetze. Gerade wurde mal wieder darueber diskutiert wie scheisse Mac OS X ist und wie geil Linux doch ist und das ich - da ich jetzt ja "Apple Fanboy" bin- mal erklaeren solle was Mac OS X fuer einen Vorteil hat...

Mag sein- vielleicht ist Mac OS X bloatig und macht das System langsam (was mir bis jetzt noch nicht aufgefallen ist)- aber Mac OS X oder auch Windows (was ich auf einem anderen Rechner einsetze) hat fuer mich einfach folgende Vorteile:

Hardware Unterstuetzung:
Ja, ich habs getestet... saemtliche Hardware die hier bei mir rumfliegt funktioniert auf Anhieb mit Mac OS X und Windows- und ja... ich hab Teilweise sehr ausgefallene Hardware. Unter Linux hab' ich immernoch keinen weg gefunden z. B. meinen Blackberry sauber zu synchronisieren (ich meine saube, keine halbbackenen 'Kontakte syncen geht, aber der Rest nicht'-Loesungen). Mein PODxt wird nur von Windows und MacOS X unterstuetzt (klar, das liegt am Hardwarehersteller, aber darum gehts hier halt nicht). Und auch mein Multifunktionsdrucker (Scanner, Drucker, Fax) funktioniert nicht sauber unter Linux. Klar wird $LINUX-Prediger jetzt sagen: "Dann kauf Dir halt Hardware, die unterstuetzt wird"- das will ich aber nicht! Ich habe mir diese Hardware ausgesucht, weil sie das kann, was ich brauche und nicht weil $OS es unterstuezt. Ausserdem funktioniert sie ja sowohl unter MacOSX als unter Windows ohne Probleme- so what?!

Einfache Installation von Software:
Hey.. klar ich hab' schon mehr Software manuell selbst kompiliert als so manches Gentoo automatisiert, aber dennoch fehlt mir einfach die Zeit mich hinzusetzen und erstmal mein komplettes System und meine Software zu kompilieren oder irgendwelche Pakete und die passenden Libs (in der richtigen Version fuers Paket) zusammenzusuchen und zu installieren. Bei Windows lade ich 'n MSI runter, dass alle Programmdaten, Treiber und Libs enthaelt runter und installier es. Fertig! Noch einfacher bei MacOSX- Programm runterladen, entpacken, in den "Applikationen"-Ordner schieben... Fertig!

Softwareunterstuetzung:
Es tut mir ja sehr leid (Ach quatsch! Tut es ueberhaupt nicht), aber ich benoetige halt eine Menge Software in meinem Alltage, die es einfach nicht fuer Linux gibt. Dinge die ich taeglich in Benutzung habe, wie meine Dokumentverwaltung, meine Warenwirtschaftssoftware, Photoshop, Lightroom, Blackberry Sync-Software, einige Audio- und Videoschnittprodukte, etc. gibt es definitiv nicht als Linux-Version. Was jetzt? Drauf verzichten? Kann und will ich nicht. Diese Produkte machen meine taegliche Arbeit am PC effizient und effektiv. Und jetzt kommt mir bitte nicht mit irgendwelchen Alternativen zu PS und LR oder so- ich hab schon so viele Alternativen ausprobiert... keine kann mir den Leistungsumfang und den Komfort bieten, die ich von o.g. Produkten bekomme. Aber hey.. warum auch? Unter MacOSX und Windows funktionieren sie doch?

Preis/Leistung:
Klar, das MacBook ist nicht das guestigste- aber... es ist fuer das was es an Leistung bietet durchaus angemessen im Preis. Die Akkulaufzeit ist faszinierend. Ich hab jetzt schon 5 Laptops durch, aber keins von denen hatte bis jetzt eine Akkulaufzeit von >6 Std. im Normalbetrieb (kein abgeschaltetes WLAN, runtergedrosseltes Display, etc. pp.). Selbst das Dell mit dem fetten Zusatzakku schaffte nur 4.5 Std. im Normalbetrieb. Ausserdem ist das MB handlich und nicht zu schwer- verglichen mit anderen Geraeten in der Groessenklasse.

Das sind einige der Gruede warum ich Mac OS X oder Windows nutze. Ist ja nicht so, dass ich nicht Linux oder Unix nutzen wuerde. Aber fuer mich gilt halt schon seit langem, dass jedes System einen bestimmten Zweck am besten erfuellt. Auf meinem Fileserver laeuft CRUX Linux und ich liebe es, auf meiner Ultra 10 laeuft Solaris 10 und es rockt wie Sau, auf meinem Router laeuft 'n minimales Linux, auf meinen Firewalls OpenBSD, auf meinen Mail- und Webservern laeuft Linux... achso unter der Haube von Mac OS X werkelt ja auch 'n abgewandeltes BSD... und nun? Ich arbeite jetzt seit knapp 13 Jahre mit Linux und Unix und seit knapp 22 Jahren mit Computern... ich denke ich kann einschaetzen welches System fuer mich gut arbeitet und welches nicht. Auf 'nem Desktop habe ich fuer mich festgestellt, dass ich mit Windows und Mac OS X am besten und effizientesten arbeiten kann. Warum also muss ich mich vor euch Predigern mit euer linuxzentristischen Weltsicht anmachen lassen, dass ich $OS fuer $ZWECK einsetze?!

Dieser Blogeintrag bezieht sich btw. nur auf meine pers. Anforderungen an Systeme und OS. Ob sie sich verallgemeinern lassen, geht mir am Arsch vorbei- aber fuer mich stehen sie fest. Ich werde diesen Blog-Eintrag auch auf "moderated" stellen und sinnfreie Kommentare die nichts zum Eintrag beitragen kommentarlos zensieren und loeschen- also versucht es erst garnicht.

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I am currently monitoring all my servers with Nagios and I use Cacti to make some fancy graphs of these hosts. As I soon have to disable the server, from which I do the monitoring, I was looking for a new solution. I already read some good articles about Zabbix, so I installed Zabbix on a new server.

The installation was fairly simple. Apache + PHP5 + PostgreSQL - quickly compiled and setup. Now download the Zabbix sources from the Zabbix website and compile the server. Copy the frontend into your webroot and perform the rest of the installtion steps - that's it.

The concept of Zabbix is a bit different from Nagios. It it mainly based on it's own agent daemon (which has to be installed on every host that you wanna monitor), where nagios is rather based on some checking tools that are run against the host over snmp or other service ports (check_http for tcp/80/443, check_ftp for tcp/21, and so on).

At the first glance Zabbix is a bit confusing, but after some reading in the manual you quickly get the point about triggers, actions and stuff. What I like about Zabbix is, that it combines Nagios + Cacti + Content Validation. So I can easily montitor all my hosts (Windows, Linux, Solaris ...), generate some graphs and perform website validation. The frontend concept of Zabbix is very mature. I'll show you some brief screenshots to get some overview of it.



The overview page. It lists all configured hosts (currently only 3 as I didn't had the time last night to add all of them). It shows all configured triggers together with a little status box for each host. If the status box is green, everything is fine- is it red... go ahead and check your host


The web content validation screen. You can configure content validation suites for every host. You can even go through a i. e. complete order process on a website and if one of the steps fails, you'll get informed by Zabbix.


The latest data screen. Thanks to the agent that is running on every host, you can easily access lots of host informations w/o having to configure ugly SNMP suites. The client provides lots of data about the host like performance, OS, cpu, network, and so on.


On-the-fly graphs. For nearly every data you can create graphs - on-the-fly. You can define the time period, you can define the look of the graph. You can also create graph-suites which a building graphs automatically. With this tools you can easily graph the cpu load of your hosts, the network traffic and so one.

There are lots of more features with Zabbix. If you want an easy to use but powerful distributed monitoring system, you should give Zabbix a try.

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I need your help (again) I am currently searching for a new PCI SATA II controller. It needs to fit the following requirements:

- Needs to work with Solaris 10 w/o issues
- Needs to have at least 4 ports
- Needs work with a standard PCI 33/66MHz slot
- Needs to work with Seagate SATA II 320 GiB disks

Any recommendation for a controller that fits the above requirments would be very appreciated! I've ogled with the Promise SATA300 TX4, but I haven't found any hit, that it works with Solaris 10 (yes, I've read the Solaris forums and found the thread about this controller and that it works in ATA mode, but there is no indication if it works in it's default mode as well - I am not going to buy expensive 3Gb/s hard disks to work with them in ATA mode)

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This weekend I had to build a server for a customer. The hardware was given by the customer- I only had to set it up. Unfortunately I ran into a bunch of troubles, as Dell shipped the wrong hardware (sadly I noticed this much to late).

Given hardware was a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with Quad Core CPU and 4 GiB RAM. The server has 2 x73 GiB internal hard disks (SAS) and (currently) 4 x 500 GiB disks in a Dell PowerVault MD1000 (SAS) storage array. So far, so good... When I booted the machine the first time, I wondered why the systems disks were connected to a RAID controller (a PERC 5/i) - but I simply went on. The Solaris installer started and everything worked fine - at least until the installer reached the point where it wanted to partition the disks... "No disks found" was the message, the installer showed.

I rebooted and tried to disable the RAID-support of the controller, so that it only acts as SAS controller and passes the single drives through, but the PERC 5/i doesn't have a option for JBOD. So I looked up the chipset on the controller (LSISAS1068), downloaded the Solaris x86 driver from the LSI homepage and burned it on CD. Again the Solaris installer started and I chose "5" for "apply driver update", followed by "c" for CD. The installer recognized the driver on the CD, installed it, but when I executed "format", the disks still weren't found.

After some research in the internet I figured out, that the LSI 1068 controllers, that are shipped with Dell hardware, are confiugred with another firmware - which isn't supported by the LSI driver ... and of course Dell doesn't provide and Solaris driver.

Luckily, after some further research in tons of internet forums, I found an thread about Dell 2950 in the SUN forum. In this discussion, someone announced that he has written a driver for the LSI MegaRaid and Dell Perc 5 controllers for Solaris 10. The driver can be found here. I first tried to update the driver directly in the Solaris 10 installation DVD (or more specificly within the x86.miniroot) but this very annoying if you only have a VMWare with the correct Solaris version, so that you can build the driver. Additionally the driver would be only available during the installation - I would have needed to install it manually after the installation as well. What a luck that someone built an ITU image, which can be used for the Solaris 10 installer. I made a mirror of the package with the driver and the ITU images (as I don't know, how long the site will life).

Finally - with the ITU image - I was able to install solaris on the RAID-1 that I built on the 2 system disks. The installation worked w/o any problems... business as usual. But the next shock came quickly. The next task I wanted to do, was installing the MD1000 disks as one RAID-Z ZFS pool. But guess what... Dell again shipped the wrong hardware. The ordered SAS controller wasn't installed... therefor a PERC 5/E was installed - and of course this RAID controller isn't able to pass the disks through as JBOD neither. Well, what should I do? I set up a RAID-5 on the PERC controller, so that Solaris at least sees the disk(s).

The system is now up and running in the DC but it is really annoying that:
- Dell isn't able to ship the ordered hardware
- Dell needs it's fucking own firmware on standard LSI hardware
- Dell doesn't provide Solaris drivers for their own hardware
- The crappy PERC controllers don't provide JBOD-support

Conclusion: Solaris on a Dell 1950 with a MD1000 works, but it's really hard to get it working when a PERC controller is installed. I recommend to either not order a PERC controller but a standard SAS controller or to buy your own controllers.

Update: Yesterday the re-ordered SAS 5/E controller (original LSI SAS1068 chipset) arrived and I mounted it into the Dell 1950. The 4 x 500GB disks in the MD1000 were directly recognized by the controller and the controller was automatically initialized by Solaris 10's mpt driver. All 4 disks were found by "devfsadm" and I could quickly rebuild my ZFS pool. Now I'm happy with the box. So here again my advise- be very accurate with the hardware that you order in your Dell 1950. If you want to add a MD1000 and want ZFS to take care of the RAID, then be careful not to order a PERC 5/i or PERC 5/E controller but to take the SAS version (SAS 5/i and SAS 5/E) which passes the MD1000 through as JBOD to the Solaris operating system and which works out-of-the-box with Solaris' mpt driver.

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For one of my customers, I need to copy big data files from an external USB drive to a Solaris 10 server. Problem is, as the files are bigger than 4GiB, the FS on the hard disk of the USB drive needed to be NTFS formated (the customer uses Windows). So I searched for a solution to read NTFS file systems with a Solaris 10 box.

I found the FSWfsmisc package from the BeleniX project. It holds some tools to access ext2, ext3 as well as ntfs partitions. Simply download the package from this location, extract it and install it via pkgadd.

Now one can do a:

and my NTFS partition has been mounted to /mnt. Awesome! Copy speed via USB 2.0 to ZFS is really fast as well (18 to 25MB/Sek. As the partition seems to be mounted like a NFS share, one can't really access much informations from "mount" or "df". Therefor the package ships "xlsmounts" which shows detailed informations about the mounted drive.

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Yay! Finally Solaris 10 8/07 (aka Update 4) has been released. Read about what's new in 8/07 here. Download the release here.

My hint: Do not download the "WINDOWS ONLY" .exe Image. Though this file is only half as big as the two DVD-Image files, it takes up to 1.5h to extract the image file from the .exe.

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Today I played around with BrandZ. BrandZ makes it possible to install another brand of OS inside of a Solaris Zone. My target was a CentOS installation inside of my zone.

The configuration of the zone works pretty much straight forward. A simple:

is enough, to have a basic linux-branded zone. To make the zone avail. via network, you could add a quick:

to get a network interface assigned to the zone.

Now the zone is ready for installation. To make things easy, I took the CentOS tarbar that is avail. here. The installation is done by this command:


After some minutes (depending on your machine speed and the typ of installation you've choosen) the installtion is complete and you are ready to boot up your linux zone:


Now enter the linux via SSH or local console (zlogin -C) and there we are:


A linux installation couldn't be easier

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As I am still running a very old version of Solaris 10 on one of my boxes, I wanted to verify if an upgrade to one of the current builds works w/o issues. So I downloaded Solaris Nevada build 64 and burned on DVD.

As expected the installer directly noticed that there is already Solaris installed on my disk, so it asked if I wanna upgrade. I selected "Upgrade" and the installer started working. It took about 2.5 hours, but no problem occured. The system rebooted and finally snv b64 started booting. I was very surprised that even the RAID-1 on the two root disks was still intact and that the system bootet from it - awesome

After logging in, I noticed that the zpool (where my home directory lifes) was broken. All drives were unavailable and so I wasn't able to take it online again - probably as the ZFS pool was legacy version 3 and the current version of b64 is v6. Anyhow, as ZFS is pretty smart it was very easy to recover it...



I booted into single user mode (-m milestone=single) and removed the ZFS cache file (/etc/zfs/zfs.cache). Then I continued the boot sequence by running svcadm milestone all, to get into the multi-user milestone. A 'zpool status' confirmed that there was no zpool available anymore. Now I simply executed 'zpool import pool1' and my pool was online and healthy again - followed by 'zpool upgrade pool1' my pool was upgraded to v6 and that's it!



Love it! Now i'm safe to upgrade my old system, as my test-system upgrade worked better than expected

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Some days ago I downloaded the latest Solaris Express Community Release (build 70) as I wanted to try out booting from a ZFS root. But after the installation was done, I ran into some troubles.

The installer automatically rebooted after the installation was done, GRUB came up as expected, but when I selected the corresponding SXCR b70 kernel, I ended up in an error I haven't seen before.



I asked in #opensolaris on Freenode, but nobody was able to provide help. So I tried figuring out what's wrong. I checked bootenv.rc if bootpath was set correctly, I added root(hd0,0,a) to the menu.lst of GRUB, reinstalled GRUB and mboot to the MBR but all I did, didn't help. Finally after re-reading the error message several times, I finally noticed the "reading beyond end of ramdisk". Sounded somehow odd to me - why should the bootload read beyond the ramdisk?

So I booted into failsafe again, mounted c1t0d0s0 to /a and started rebuilding the ramdisk:

Followed by init 6 which directly updated boot_archive (which is good, as this means that the system noticed, that the ramdisk with the boot image has changed).

Indeed the rebuild of the ramdisk helped, as - after the box has been rebooted - the system came up as expected.

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I finally had some time for playing with Solaris again - especially with ZFS. As I don't want to have another box standing in my living room and making noise, I decided to use a VMWare for playing instead. So I set up a VMWare with 11 hard drives and installed Solaris 10 11/06. Installation went smooth as usual.

First task was to set up a two-way UFS mirror between the first two disks, so that I have a failover when the first disk breaks (of cours, in a vmware this is stupid, as these are only vritual devices - but who cares... it's just for fun ). While creating the mirror, I ran into slight troubles caused by the virtual drives of VMWare. As I didn't choose to allocate the whole disk space during the setup, the disks weren't really touched when I mirrored the partition table with prtvtoc/fmthard. So the created metadb was lost after reboot and caused a OS panic. Deleting the metadb on the 2nd (not yet allocated disk) solved the panic. So I created a filesystem on the 2nd disk, so that disc space got allocated. This finally helped to resolve the metadb/metainit problem.

After that I created a Raid-Z to see how it performs within a VMWare - and though these are virtual drives, it performs like hell. All disk access is nicely striped over all 9 discs in the pool. Putting full I/O on the pool gave me this performance results:



I think these are very good results. Going to play a bit more now

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As one never completes training on Solaris (and OpenSolaris), I upgraded my bookshelf with the following three books to get some deeper insight into some new techniques:

#1: OpenSolaris fuer Anwender, Administratoren und Rechenzentren
#2: Veritas Storage Foundation
#3: Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques




I think I have enough input for the next month now Maybe I'll write a review here as well.

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Today two new "toys" arrived

1.) Canon RC-5 IR remote control - works great
2.) OpenSolaris Startkit

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The SUN Solaris 10 Media Kit, which I ordered (for free) about one ago, arrived today. A nice DVD jewel case with 3 DVDs in it.

- 1 x Solaris 10 11/06 SPARC architecture
- 1 x Solaris 10 11/06 x86/x64 architecture
- 1 x SUN Studio 11 / Java Studio / Net Beans

Pretty cool. Thanks a lot SUN! I'll find some good places to use these DVDs

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