Solaris Blog

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

Gleb Reys

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.

DTrace: predicates

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You don’t have conditional statements like if..then..else in DTrace, instead of them predicates are used.

Predicates are slash (/) wrapped conditions which are put right after the lines of probe definitions, defining whether DTrace should or should not executre the code of such probes.

Here’s an example. The following script will print the list of all system calls, excluding write, for all the processes currently running on our system. Since DTrace tracks events on a thread-level, you can see in this example that some PIDs are the same. This is because these lines were printed by probes fired for different threads of the same process:

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Be careful with Jumpstart miniroot

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Last few days I’m working on debugging the Solaris 10 Jumpstart install for some old desktops (Ultra 10, Ultra 60).

Among few well-known problems, I’ve noticed such an anomaly: the whole Jumpstart session happens just fine, all the packages are installed, but at the very end I see the errors and the installation fails:

SUNWspnego.......................done.    1.30 Mbytes remaining.
SUNWsra..........................done.    1.18 Mbytes remaining.
SUNWsrh..........................done.    1.00 Mbytes remaining.

Completed software installation
Solaris 10 software installation succeeded
Customizing system files

- Mount points table (/etc/vfstab)
- Unselected disk mount points (/var/sadm/system/data/vfstab.unselected)
- Network host addresses (/etc/hosts)

ERROR: Could not open file (/etc/hosts)
ERROR: Could not set up the remote host file (/etc/hosts)
ERROR: System installation failed

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