Solaris Blog

Tips and tricks on DTrace, ZFS, Zones and Solaris administration

General Solaris topics

Zones in Solaris 10: part two – types of resources

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Now that we know how to create non-global zones in Solaris, it’s probably time to learn some basics of zones configuration. Most work is done with zonecfg which has been mentioned in my Solaris zones: a working example post.

Example of fully configuring a Solaris 10 zone

For starters, let’s have a look at the full configuration of our zone. You’ve probably guessed by now, that we only specified the minimal number of parameters when creating our zone. Now I’ll show you how to get a full view of our zone’s configuration, and I’ll also talk a bit about types of resources you can allocate to a non-global zone.

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Asus A8N-SLI NIC drivers for Solaris

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Finally, I’ve found some time to finish off the on-board network adapters configuration in Solaris 10 for my Asus A8N-SLI motherboard.

As I’ve already told before, this motherboard comes equipped with 2 network adapters:nForce4 and Yukon Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter. Both adapters are based on Marvell chips – they are Marvell 88E8001-LKJ1 (PCI Gigabit Ethernet) and Marvell 88E1111-RCJ (PHY) respectively.

So, the first one of these adapters is properly found and supported in Solaris 10 out of the box. In fact, Solaris 10 even finds and attempts to configure nge0 during the initial OS install.

To make the Yukon Gigabit (Marvell) adapter work, you should go to the SysKonnect website and navigate to the drivers downloads page (skge is there as well). What’s REALLY cool is that there is a 64bit driver already! So I’ve got myself this file: skgesol_x64v8.12.1.3.tar.Z

After you unpack the archive, you should install the SKGEsolx, and that’s it – the pre-install script even allows you to configure skge0 adapter – set its IP and network mask.
This is where my two network adapters are found (taken from /etc/path_to_inst):

"/pci@0,0/pci10de,5c@9/pci1043,811a@c" 0 "skge"
"/pci@0,0/pci1043,8141@a" 0 "nge"

Attention: due to unknown reasons, prtconf -vp clearly shows only one of the adapters – skge. That’s the one represented by the “Ethernet controller” model name. Don’t know why, but nge is called “Bridge device” there.

ZFS: commands emulation

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I’m considering getting myself an x86 server with Solaris for home use, and today I’ve decided to play around with ZFS on my old Sparc-box.

I believe those of you who are just getting started with ZFS will really like the -n command line option for zfs and zpool, which allows you to see what result would a certain command yield, while there is nothing actually done to your disks.

So, if you’re thinking of creating a new storage pool, you don’t have to actually create it just to see how it will look – you can use -n option instead:

solaris# zpool create -n mypool raidz /export/vdev/d1 /export/vdev/d2 /export/vdev/d3 /export/vdev/d4

Books on Solaris

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Thanks to links I’ve got from Robert Milkowski’s Solaris Internals blog entry, I went to the Pearson Education website and ordered myself a book on Solaris 10, which every active Solaris user or administrator should definitely read: Solaris™ Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris.

You can order another great book – Solaris™ Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture, 2nd edition there as well.

I should mention that the prices are much lower than those of the Amazon. Also, the credit card number checking script of their website is too strict. After none of my credit cards worked, I ended up writing an email to the support team, and they have placed my order manually.

Update: here are direct links to these books on the website of Pearson Education:

SMF: offline or disabled services

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When something doesn’t work like expected, one of the first commands to find what’s wrong is svcs -a. But there are other ways to use this command.

For instance, the following command will show only disabled and offline services, which quite often is exactly what we want. Particularly useful is the fact that such a variant of using svcs shows you impact of each offline service – you can quickly see what other things may not be working as the result of it.

solaris# svcs -xv
svc:/application/print/server:default (LP print server)
 State: disabled since Wed Jan 26 11:23:32 2005
Reason: Disabled by an administrator.
   See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-05
   See: man -M /usr/share/man -s 1M lpsched
Impact: 2 dependent services are not running:
        svc:/application/print/rfc1179:default
        svc:/application/print/ipp-listener:default
svc:/milestone/multi-user-server:default (multi-user plus exports milestone)
 State: offline since Wed Jan 26 11:54:58 2005
Reason: Start method is running.
   See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-C4
   See: man -M /usr/share/man -s 1M init
   See: /var/svc/log/milestone-multi-user-server:default.log
Impact: 1 dependent service is not running:
        svc:/system/zones:default

As you can see, offline service svc:/application/print/server:default renders two its dependants useless as well, namely they are svc:/application/print/rfc1179:default and svc:/application/print/ipp-listener:default.