SysAdmin

I've just read at Ilya Voronin's blog (blog.curthread.org), that for all the Sun Cluster fans, today is definitely a lucky day, because the new version of Sun Cluster - 3.2 - is already available for download.

By the way, looks like from this version on the clustering solution from Sun is called Solaris Cluster, and includes the following components:
- Sun Cluster
- Sun Cluster Geographic Edition
- Sun Cluster Agents

To my shame and regret, I haven't got a chance to acquire any useful experience with Sun Cluster. In my company I'm working with Veritas Cluster Server, because it's a historical thing. But I have some theoretical knowledge of Sun Cluster, and would really like to give it a try some day.

Anyway. Here are just some of the Sun Cluster 3.2 features:

New command line interface
In new Sun Cluster version, you have separate commands for each type of cluster object, and all of them try to have similar names for command line options where possible. Alsom, both short and long names for each option are supported.

SMF support
Sun Cluster is now tightly integrated with SMF, and easily supports controlling SMF-managed services as Sun Cluster resources.

Sun Cluster Quorum Server
For any scenarios requiring quorum, you no longer have to use shared storage. Sun Cluster supports using a separate Solaris server running quorum-server module. All the atomic reservations will be done over TCP/IP.

Such an approach allows you to reduce the time needed for failing over from one cluster node to another.

Extended Solaris Zones support
Sun Cluster supports now a plethora of services running within non-global zones.

ZFS support
Starting from this Sun Cluster version, ZFS is fully supported as a local highly available filesystem (HA FS).

Multi-Terabyte Disk and EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) labels
A quite traditional update for many other packages - full support of disks with capacity over 1Tb and new EFI disk labels.

Better support of Veritas products
In particular, components of Veritas Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 for SPARC are supported, as well as VxVM 4.1 for x86/x64 (in case you didn't know, Veritas products of these versions are already Solaris 10 aware).

Live Upgrade
Now you can use Live Upgrade to update your OS with Sun Cluster on top ot if. From documentation I can see that Live Upgrade supports SVM only at the moment, not VxVM.

Command Logging
You can have all the cluster management commands logged now - this is good for both diagnostics and for reproduction of your cluster environment in a new configuration.

You can download Sun Cluster 3.2 here: Sun Cluster 3.2 download.

Also, you might like reading a Sun Cluster blog - Sun Cluster Oasis. And, as always. for more information you can consult the Sun Cluster section of docs.sun.com: Sun Cluster 3.2 Documentation.

I've just learned through Lifehacker about a great page: The Linux Equivalent Project. Actually, it's a pretty impressive index of free open-source software, which will work on Solaris, Linux, or any other UNIX OS.

What I really like about this list is that you're given names of software products Windows, and they a few of open-source equivalents. Very useful, especially for all the beginners who are just switching to Solaris.

If you miss some particular software in Solaris world, please have a look: LinuxEq.com

Today I just wanted to document here the quickest and easiest way of setting your Solaris box as a DHCP client.

1) Create the /etc/hostname. file
For instance:

bash-3.00# touch /etc/hostname.skge0

2) Create the /etc/dhcp. file
It can be an empty file, but you can also use it to specify how long ifconfig should be waiting for a DHCP-server reply before giving up and continuing with Solaris boot.

bash-3.00# cat /etc/dhcp.skge0
wait 60

3) Your system name
It has to be specified in /etc/nodename. This name is going to be used as your hostname in case your DHCP-server does not return your hostname in reply to your DHCP-request.

THat's all. Reboot your system, and it all should work! Enjoy! :)

I've been using this combination on a daily basis for more than a year now, and I can't stress enough how really useful it is. I use it both at home and at work, and everything is very easy and - most importantly - absolutely free.

X11 Forwarding with ssh is a wonderful feature which allows you get windows of a remotely started applications shown on your own desktop. For Windows, there are lots of pretty good albeit expensive products like Citrix, GoGlobal and XWin32, which allow you access your remote Unix desktop sessions. But in reality, if you don't need any sessions but only want to remotely start an application and get a window from it on your desktop, you won't need any of these expensive products - the easiest will be to use X11 forwarding and Xming.

Xming is an X Windows port for Microsoft Windows. Essentially it's an X-server which starts transparently on top of your MS Windows desktop. It allows you to redirect graphical output of applications you run on remote Unix servers and therefore see these applications windows on your MS Windows desktop.

Xming is very simple and easy to use. All you have to do is download its distribution archive from the project's page on SourceForge: XMing @ SourceForge.

After you install it, I recommend you have a quickstart panel shortcut created for it, and have your command line altered to something like this:



Now that you have Xming installed, start it and it's time to take care of the ssh side of things. We have to alter the ssh daemon config file: /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Just ensure that it has the following:



If you already have similar parameters, don't do anything. But if you had to change the config file, it's time to restart ssh:



All that's left now is to download the wonderful free Putty client, that is if you're not using it yet. You can get it here: Putty: a free telnet/ssh client.

I won't go into all the Putty configuration details, I'll only mention that for X11 forwarding, you have to do the following: in the main configuration window of Putty (you get it when you start Putty), select Connection section, then SSH, then X11, and make sure you tick the Enable X11 Forwarding option.

That's it, you're good to go! Good luck!

While compiling some of the stuff I use in 64bit lately, I've had another chance to use the wonderful crle tool and to acknowledge once again just how easier it made my life.

Here's what you can read from man crle:

The crle utility provides for the creation and display of a
runtime linking configuration file. The configuration file
is read and interpreted by the runtime linker, ld.so.1(1),
during process start-up.

The tool does exactly that - it speficies where ld should look first for the necessary libraries as you start any executable.

What would we do without this tool? The answer's simple:

1) we'd have to specify libraries directories implicitly every time we compile something - using -L and -R parameters.
2) we'd probably have to use the good old LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, which again specifies where libraries should first be looked at.

Not only it's not cool because you have to waste time, but if you want someone else to use the program you'd get compiled using the tricks above, this someone would have to follow your steps and do the same - set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the same values.

But with crle it's much easier:

to look at the current list of directories used by ld just do this:



and for 64-bit objects, do it like this:




As you can see, adding more directories is quite easy. For instance, if I want to add another library directory of my own, /export/soft/lib/64, this command would help me: