Changing hostname in Solaris
I had to change the host name in one of Solaris zones today, and just out of curiousity looked into /etc/init.d/network script. That’s how I learned a new (to me) option of the uname command, which seems to be specific to Solaris: uname -S <newhostname>.
So here’s a very simple procedure for updating the hostname of your Solaris 10 server.
Solaris 10 patch return codes
Now that some of the systems I have to regularly patch are Solaris 10 ones, I have to get used to the new patch return codes which one can see when applying one of the Sun’s recommended patchsets. It’s similar to the Solaris 8/9 patchset installation codes, but there are more codes added to the list.
Read more
Shared-IP and Exclusive-IP in Non-Global Solaris Zones
Just a few days ago I’ve been busy configuring one of the Solaris 10 zones on a DMZ server, and sure enough I hit one of the most common IP-related issues with non-global zones.
Shared IP configuration for non-global Solaris zones
By default, non-global zones will be configured with a shared IP functionality. What this means is that IP layer configuration and state is shared between the zone you’re creating and the global zone. This usually implies both zones being on the same IP subnet for each given NIC.
Shared IP mode is defined by the following statement in zone configuration:
set ip-type=shared
inetadm – intro
inetadm command is used for observing and managing inetd services in Solaris 10.
If you run this command without any parameters, you’ll simply get a list of all the services it manages along with their current status:
solaris# inetadm ENABLED STATE FMRI enabled online svc:/application/x11/xfs:default enabled online svc:/application/font/stfsloader:default enabled offline svc:/application/print/rfc1179:default enabled online svc:/network/rpc/gss:default disabled disabled svc:/network/rpc/mdcomm:default disabled disabled svc:/network/rpc/meta:default disabled disabled svc:/network/rpc/metamed:default disabled disabled svc:/network/rpc/metamh:default ...
Interesting Solaris blogs
I wonder if someone would be kind enough to share his most interesting Solaris blogs with me?
Here is a partial list of what I regularly read, maybe you’ll like some of it:
Solaris blogs in Russian
- Ruslan Valiev – Designerus
- Unix Pin
- SunHelp.Ru
Solaris blogs In English
- Bryan Cantrill – The Observation Deck
- Ilya Voronin – CurThread.org
- Robert Milkowski – Milek’s Blog
- James Dickens – Unix Admin Corner
- Blog O’ Matty
- Bill Rushmore – Developer’s Quarterdeck Log
- Ben Rockwood – Cuddletech: use UNIX or die
- Derek Crudgington – A look into Solaris
Well, that seems to be all I read. Surely, there are hundreds more on blogs.sun.com and OpenSolaris.org blogs, so I enjoy opening main pages of these resources now and then just to selectively read the most interesting posts (I also find weekly lists of posts on OpenSolaris to be particularly useful).
If you know an interesting Solaris blog, please share it with me and I’ll update the list above.
OpenSolaris: BFU archive anatomy
I think I’ve covered the basics of updating your OpenSolaris using BFU before. This is the post: OpenSolaris BFU. Back then I’ve explained the basics of BFUing.
Today I simply would like to tell a bit more about the contents of a BFU archive, using the latest available one as an example: ON b41.
After you download and unpack the archive, you will get a directory like this:
bash-3.00$ cd /export/dist/archives-b41 bash-3.00$ ls BINARYLICENSE.txt THIRDPARTYLICENSE.BFU-ARCHIVES README.BFU-ARCHIVES.i386 i386
ZFS: managing filesystems
It’s been quite a while since I’ve cleared one of internal disks in my Netra t105 to bring it under ZFS control. As a result, I now have a 33Gb zfs-pool to experiment with. Today I had some spare time, so I decided to share with you the very basics of managing ZFS filesystems.
So this is the ZFS pool I have:
solaris# zpool list NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT stock 33.8G 2.40G 31.4G 7% ONLINE -
DTrace: mod_auth_pam and apache2
One of our users has asked me to help with PAM authentication for Apache 2 on one of our remote servers.
Note: going with mod_auth_pam was decision made without me, and I was only asked to help get the chosen solution work. This being said, the recommended way to do external authentication for Apache 2 now is to use the mod_authz_external module and pwauth password authenticator.
It did seem like a rather trivial task – download mod_auth_pam, compile it for Apache 2, make sure everything works. The remote server uses NIS, I could freely log onto it.
And you know what? It didn’t work!
Debugging PHP with DTrace, part 2
Your next step in observing PHP with DTrace could easily be the following script. It times how much time (in nanoseconds) each Apache process has spent running a particular PHP function.
This script generates a table of Apache PIDs and PHP scripts started within, and later you’ll get a table of all the functions with PIDs which ran them and the time spent.
Basic ZFS example
I just couldn’t wait any longer, and decided to try something with ZFS. And what do you know? I’ve found a very useful advice from Ben Rockwood, which allows us use regular files created with mkfile as virtual disks for ZFS. VERY useful, especially when you really want to play with such a great technology and maybe try various configurations, but there are no spare physical disks for such experiments.
I will, of course, read and understand all the inner workings of ZFS later, but the first impression of it is this – too easy to be true! 
Unix Tutorial- Passwordless SSH with encrypted homedir in Ubuntu
- Welcome to 2012!
- Using dig command to confirm TTL for a DNS zone entry
- Upgrading Ubuntu with do-release-upgrade
- Mounting NFS shares on Mac OS X
- Suggest a topic for the Operating Systems Basics
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- How To Disable IPv6 in Red Hat Linux
- Climate Change: How You Can Help Prevent It
- Ask me a Unix question on Twitter