Just a quick note that we’re postponing the 6th NEOSUG meeting due to inclement weather and low registrations. For more details see the NEOSUG forum at http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=88485&tstart=0.
Solaris
Archived Posts from this Category
January 27, 2009
October 6, 2008
My October 2008 column has been published in ;login:. This month it’s about Solaris System Analysis – detailed steps to take to determine why a system is “slow” or “busted”. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login:, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).
The wiki that started with my August 2008 column will be expanded (as soon as I get the time) to include this new content. It’s very lonely having a wiki of one, so please consider contributing your thoughts to what I’ve started. It would be a great advance in systems administration if there was a canonocal source of first-step debugging information, and hopefully you will help make this wiki that source: http://wiki.sage.org/bin/view/Main/AllThingsSun
August 19, 2008
My August 2008 column has been published in ;login:. This month it’s about Solaris System Analysis – a checklist approach to solving a system being “slow” or “busted”. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login: August 2008, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).
I hope this column will turn into a living wiki about (Solaris) system analysis. I’ve prepopulated a wiki with the contents of the column, so now it’s up to you to add your thoughts to the procedure. It would be a great advance in systems administration if there was a canonocal source of first-step debugging information, and hopefully you will help make this wiki that source: http://wiki.sage.org/bin/view/Main/AllThingsSun
August 19, 2008
Sorry for the delay in announce / posting this. My June 2008 column has been published in ;login:. This month it’s about the state of ZFS – features, functions, stability, useability, performance, production use, and so on. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login: June 2008, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).
August 13, 2008
Just Announced – 5th NEOSUG Meeting featuring Jim Mauro
Posted by pbgalvin under Solaris, Sun[3] Comments
Jim Mauro is our guest speaker, talking about DTrace and all things performance, at the next New England Open Solaris User Group (NEOSUG) meeting on Sept 10th in Burlington, MA.
Read all about it here: OpenSolaris NEOSUG.
Hope to see you there. Please register if coming so we can plan the refreshments…
July 16, 2008
Fifth NEOSUG Meeting – special guest speaker – Postponed
Posted by pbgalvin under Solaris, SunLeave a Comment
Postponed until September – You are Invited !
The New England Open Solaris User Group (NEOSUG) Meeting
Topic for this meeting: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Performance, Observability and Debugging
(The Abridged Version)
Please RSVP at : https://www.suneventreg.com//cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2337
What: New England OpenSolaris User Group Meeting (NEOSUG)
When: July 24,2008 6:30-9:30 pm (registration opens @5:30)
Where: Sun Microsystems Campus
1 Network Circle
Burlington, MA
Who should attend? : UNIX Developers, Solaris users, System Managers and System Administrators:
AGENDA:
5:30-6:30: Registration, Refreshments
6:30-6:40: Introductions, Peter Galvin
6:40-8:30: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Performance, Jim Mauro, Sun Microsystems
8:30-9:00: Questions and Discussion
TALK DESCRIPTIONS:
Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Performance, Observability and Debugging
(The Abridged Version)
The observability toolbox in Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris is loaded with
powerful tools and utilities for analyzing applications and the underlying
system. Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), allows you to connect the dots
between the process and thread-centric tools, and the system utilization
tools, and get a complete picture on what your applications are doing, how they
are interacting with the kernel, and to what extent they are consuming
hardware resources (CPU, Mem, etc).
This two hour talk walks through the tools, utilities and methods for
analyzing workloads on your Solaris systems.
NEOSUG BIOs:
Peter Galvin : Chief Technologist, Corporate Technologies Inc.
Peter Baer Galvin is the Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., a systems integrator and VAR, and was the Systems Manager for Brown University’s Computer Science Department. He has written articles for Byte and other magazines. He wrote the Pete’s Wicked World and Pete’s Super Systems columns at SunWorld Magazine. He is currently contributing editor for SysAdmin Magazine, where he managed the Solaris Corner. Peter is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts texbooks.
Blog: https://pbgalvin.wordpress.com <https://pbgalvin.wordpress.com/>
Jim Mauro: Principle Engineer in the Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Jim Mauro works on improving delivered application performance on Sun hardware and Solaris. Jim’s recent project work includes Solaris
performance as a guest operating system on Xen and VMware virtual machines, Solaris large memory page performance, and Solaris performance on large SPARC systems. Jim co-authored Solaris Internals (1st Ed, Oct 2000), Solaris Internals (2nd Ed, June 2006)
and Solaris Performance and Tools (1st Ed, June 2006).
October 2, 2007
Just announced: the Fourth NEOSUG meeting. It will be on Nov 1 starting at 6:30 at the Sun campus in Burlington, MA. This month’s meeting has two great topics and some fun.
Talk 1: The Solaris 8 Migration Assistant is a software technology that enables a Solaris 10 Container to behave like a Solaris 8 system. Most applications that run on Solaris 8 will run in a Solaris 8 Container without recompilation or other modification. S8MA enables a consolidated platform to run both Solaris 10 and Solaris 8 applications, and both can benefit from the innovative features of Solaris 10. This session will describe and demonstrate the S8MA technology, and will discuss the types of situations for which S8MA is an appropriate technology. Jeff Victor will present this talk.
Talk 2: Project Indiana. This meeting is scheduled to coincide with the first preview release of Indiana. Dave Miner, one of the leads on Indiana, will give a talk about the project and then we’ll have an “install fest” where NEOSUG attendees can try out this new distribution of Solaris. Dave will have live CDs to allow exploration without installation. We are also planning on having VMware images, so VMware-happy laptops are welcome as well.
The meeting should run until 9:30 or so. Snacks will be served. Hope to see you there!
Here are some useful links:
OpenSolaris Indiana project
NEOSUG discussion forum
NEOSUG homepage
September 7, 2007
Sun, rather quietly, has released Solaris 10 update 4. It’s available here. Note that it’s currently only available for download. Media kits are not yet available.
June 3, 2007
Update – the participation of Usenix at SANs conferences was postponed so I won’t me making this conference.
——–
I’ll be teaching my Solaris 10 Administration Workshop and Solaris 10 Security Workshop at the SANSFIRE conference – the major SANS event. It’s in Washington D.C. this year. USENIX and SANS are working together to provide more training on varying topics at their conferences and my classes are part of that cross-polination. I’ll be there July 28th through 30th (at least).
http://www.sans.org/sansfire07/
June 3, 2007
Just a couple of weeks until Usenix ’07 in Santa Clara, CA. Hope to see some of you there. I’m teaching two courses there and taking some vacation time as well. Solaris 10 Admin and Solaris 10 Security.
From the Usenix Ad:
2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
June 17-22, 2007, Santa Clara, CA
Early Bird Registration Deadline: June 1, 2007
http://www.usenix.org/usenix07/progm
———————————————————–
USENIX ’07 is coming to Santa Clara, CA, June 17-22, 2007. As always,
the breadth and quality of this year’s tutorials, refereed papers, invited talks, and
participants is excellent. Some highlights:
The 6-day training program at USENIX ’07 provides in-depth and
immediately useful training on the latest techniques, effective tools,
and best strategies, including:
— Richard Bejtlich on TCP/IP Weapons School, Layers 2-3
— Peter Baer Galvin on Solaris 10 Security Features
— AEleen Frisch on Administering Linux in Production Environments
— Steve VanDevender on High-Capacity Email System Design
— And more . . .
The full training program can be found at
http://www.usenix.org/usenix07/training/
In addition to the training, 3 days of technical sessions include
top-notch refereed papers, informative invited talks, expert Guru Is In
sessions, and a Poster Session.
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix07/tech/
* Our invited talks feature our most impressive slate of speakers to
date. They include:
— Keynote: “The Impact of Virtualization on Computing Systems,“ by
Mendel Rosenblum of Stanford University
— Plenary Closing by Mary Lou Jepsen, One Laptop per Child,
“Crossing the Digital Divide: The Latest Efforts from One Laptop per
Child“
— Rob Lanphier, Linden Lab, “Second Life“
— Luis Von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University, “Human Computation“
— Werner Vogels, VP and CTO, Amazon.com, “Life Is Not a State-
Machine: The Long Road from Research to Production“
* The Refereed Papers track provides a look into current research and
practices on in-demand topics.
For complete program information and to register, see
http://www.usenix.org/usenix07/progm
USENIX ’07 promises to be an exciting showcase for the latest in
innovative systems research and cutting-edge practices in technology.
We look forward to seeing you in Santa Clara in June.
————————————————————————
WHAT: USENIX ’07: 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
WHEN: June 17-22, 2007
WHERE: Santa Clara, CA
WHO: Anyone interested in state-of-the-art computing issues
WHY: To get to and stay on the leading edge of practical and actionable research and tools
HOW: http://www.usenix.org/usenix07/progm
February 27, 2007
My Latest Column at SysAdmin Magazine
Posted by pbgalvin under Corporate Technologies, Solaris, SunLeave a Comment
Just released at SysAdmin Magazine (both in print and on the web) is my latest column. This being part one of a two parter on virtualization. Here is the link. Also in this same issue of SysAdmin is an article by my colleague, Chris Page, about the cluster technology that is part of Oracle’s RAC product. Well worth a read.
February 12, 2007
SANS has reported a verifiable zero-day exploit for Solaris 10 and beyond (Nevada et al). There is a vulnerability in telnetd that can allow attackers to login without a proper account and password.
Note that in recent releases of Solaris Nevada which are “Secure by default”, telnetd is disabled during installation. Earlier releases have telnet enabled and it should be disabled in almost all circumstances. The command to disable is
# svcadm disable telnet
Here is the Information Week article describing the problem and linking to SANS.
January 26, 2007
This is rather esoteric, but I’ve seen posts asking for a solution to this problem so thought I’d document my experience here.
Problem – Trying to install Nexenta (Elatte) Alpha 6 within Parallels on the Mac. Nexenta is an open source distribution of Solaris that has the Solaris Nevada kernel and the Debian userland. It installs cleanly in Parallels beta RC1, but X fails to start cleanly. It appears that the xorg.conf is missing and the default Xorg is not sufficient.
Solution – I ran Xorg -configure to generate a new /root/xorg.conf.new
Then I followed some advice from the parallels forums as to changes to make and saved the file as /etc/X11/xorg.conf
I changed the Monitor section to be:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 31.5-100
VertRefresh 59.0-75.0
Modeline "1440x900" 108.84 1440 1472 1800 1912 900 918 927 946
EndSection
And the Screen section:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Finally I changed parallels via the “configuration” section to allow a custom resolution of 1440×900.
Net result is Nexenta is up and being graphical on my MacBook Pro. Very nice.
January 25, 2007
My Course Handout for the Solaris 10 Administration Workshop Course
Posted by pbgalvin under Solaris, Sun[4] Comments
Pardon the large .pdf file, here are the course materials that I hand out to the students of my Solaris 10 Administration Workshop course. This year I’m teaching this course for both USENIX and the SANS 2007 conference. This particular handout is from the Dec 2006 USENIX LISA conference. Feedback welcome.
January 25, 2007
My Course Handout for the Solaris 10 Security Workshop Course
Posted by pbgalvin under Solaris, SunLeave a Comment
Also, here are the course materials that I hand out to the students of my Solaris 10 Security Workshop course. I’m teaching this course for both USENIX and the SANS 2007 conference. This particular handout is from the Dec 2006 USENIX LISA conference. Feedback welcome.
January 24, 2007
Sun Microsystems has evolved from a company based on a closed-source proprietary operating system to one based on an open source operating system with a burgeoning community. These operating systems are one-in-the-same – Solaris. OpenSolaris is the non-commercial, open source distribution of Solaris. (Of course Sun still has its commercial Solaris for those wanting support.)
In the olden-days (in the 1990s), there used to be the Sun User Group (SUG). At one point I was even on the board of directors of SUG. But for various reasons, especially Sun’s lack of interest in having a user group, SUG fell apart.
Fast forward to the current century and Sun is encouraging user groups to form around the OpenSolaris banner. I’m a big fan of Solaris (in all flavors) and my company sells and supports Sun systems, so we’re doing our part and starting up the North East (U.S.) OpenSolaris User Group. Fortunately those initials give the new group the cool moniker NEOSUG.
The inaugural meeting of NEOSUG is Jan 31st, 2007 at Sun’s campus in Burlington Mass. All are welcome. This meeting will feature talks by Simon Phipps, Dave Miner, and myself. The purpose of this meeting is to give an overview of OpenSolaris, and then to have a discussion about what the attends want from NEOSUG (and what they can contribute). Everything is open for debate – how often to meet, where, what to cover, leadership, who to invite to talk, and so on.
So if you’re interested in OpenSolaris and if you are in the area, please make it a point to join us. There will be pizza and beverages (provided by Sun for this first meeting), and I have it on good authority that trinkets will be distributed.
Laura Ramsey is coordinating the meeting. Here blog and NEOSUG meeting details are here. You can register here.
For more information have a look at the NEOSUG web page. Hope to see you there!
Peter Baer Galvin's Blog 