Peter Baer Galvin’s Blog

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.

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

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

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).

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…

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/&gt;

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.