Tips and tricks on DTrace, ZFS, Zones and Solaris administration
I can see quite a few visitors come to my blog asking this question shown in the title of this post. I believe this blog entry will be useful specifically for those of you who only started getting to know Solaris.
Solaris Express is the first publicly available part of the new concept of Sun Microsystems, called Sun Software Express Program. The idea is to give an early public access to the latest software from Sun.
There is quite a number of ZFS filesystems properties, and I will cover most useful ones today.
I’ll begin with refreshing your knowledge a bit. As I’ve told before, I’m going to create a number of ZFS filesystems on my server for the next few blog entires on ZFS. So, right now I have the following:
solaris# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
stock 2.40G 31.1G 8.50K /stock
stock/oracle 2.32G 693M 2.32G /stock/oracle
stock/try 8K 512M 8K /tryQuite ofter we’d like to know what happens to a particular process on a system, and if we’re using DTrace for our investigation, we’d probably use the $target variable (I’ve already spoken about it in the past) or simply specify the process identifier (pid) in some predicates of our probes, thus pointing to DTrace that we’re after only a certain process. $target variable still can and should be used when creating our probes with pid provider.
For DTrace beginners it’s quite a common and good practice. But there is a better way: using the pid provider.
As it’s explained in the official DTrace guide, pid provider isn’t just a provider, but in fact is a whole class of providers. And, as the name suggests, it provides us with probes related to a certain process.
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:
[Read more…] about Sun Cluster 3.2 is available for download
The last few days I’ve been busy patching our Solaris boxes, and that’s why I had to dig this old trusty table up. It shows all the patches installation error codes which usually appear in a form of:
Installation of 'patch_number' failed. Return code N.
I think the most common errors are 2 and 8, but I’ve seen some others too:
0 No error
1 Usage error
2 Attempt to apply a patch that's already been applied
3 Effective UID is not root
4 Attempt to save original files failed
5 pkgadd failed
6 Patch is obsoleted
7 Invalid package directory
8 Attempting to patch a package that is not installed
9 Cannot access /usr/sbin/pkgadd (client problem)
10 Package validation errors
11 Error adding patch to root template
12 Patch script terminated due to signal
13 Symbolic link included in patch
14 NOT USED
15 The prepatch script had a return code other than 0.
16 The postpatch script had a return code other than 0.
17 Mismatch of the -d option between a previous patch install and the current one.
18 Not enough space in the file systems that are targets of the patch.
19 $SOFTINFO/INST_RELEASE file not found
20 A direct instance patch was required but not found
21 The required patches have not been installed on the manager
22 A progressive instance patch was required but not found
23 A restricted patch is already applied to the package
24 An incompatible patch is applied
25 A required patch is not applied
26 The user specified backout data can't be found
27 The relative directory supplied can't be found
28 A pkginfo file is corrupt or missing
29 Bad patch ID format
30 Dryrun failure(s)
31 Path given for -C option is invalid
32 Must be running Solaris 2.6 or greater
33 Bad formatted patch file or patch file not found