teardrop

add whatever current mood fits best to you

Casino Royal

sure, late for quoting the movie.
err, first things first.
i'm sleepless for nearly 2 weeks now, and everything that comes across my mind is this bond quote. kind of regular recurrent payments which suck my account every month. odd.

ok, will not withhold the line, so here it comes:
(bond is sitting in front of an female agent, his subsequent love, in a train)
bond:
you don't have to worry about me, you're not my type.
agent:
what, too smart?
bond:
no... you're single.

monmouth coffee

i was kindly asked for an insider tip on london "place of interest".
if the following declarations apply to your nature, you definitely have to give "monmouth" a go and neglect the opportunity:
- coffee geek
- don't feel hemmed in communication at all
- eager to get to know in interesting fellows

"Monmouth Coffee", located at 27 Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9EU

quick impression:

really, really worth a visit!!

xserve got hot

better get used to spending some money on fire protection, nuff said, picture says it all

SUN's Niagara 2

nice article on SUN's new Niagara 2 CPU:
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/08/suns_niagara_2.html

SMF Manifest Repository

looking for a manifest fitting your application?
you'll find 'em all here:

http://blastwave.org/smf

need more information on SMF?

FAQ:

• http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/smf-discuss/2006-June/000672.html
• http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/jsp/descFile.jsp?url=descAll/little_smf_faq
• http://opensolaris.org/os/community/smf/faq/

even more:

• http://opensolaris.org/os/community/smf/
• http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/
• http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0206/819-5150.pdf
• smf(5) :-)
• http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/smf_for_services.html

getting version information on dynamic objects (solaris)

if you want to find out the internal version of dynamic objects in solaris, such as the libc version, try this:

# pvs /usr/lib/libc.so.1 | head -5
libc.so.1;
SUNW_1.22.2;
SUNW_1.22.1;
SUNW_1.22;
SUNW_1.21.3;

recording tty sessions

i regularly use script(1) on solaris. this is really usefull to show someone else what you actually did.
but a video with timestamps would be cooler though, but eats memory and time to create.
i just saw that NetBSD's script(1) offers two nice parameters: -r and -p (record & play). while script(1) records your input, it records timestamps too, which can be played later on. solaris nor linux come up with this - bad.
here are two usefull tools for recording your tty sessions in case you want to replay them later like a video:
ttyrec
IPBT

chkbootblk.sh

i wrote a small shell script as proof of concept for checking for corrupted boot-blocks in solaris.
there you go:
#!/bin/ksh

ARCH=`uname -i`
DEV=`df -k / | awk '{ print $1 }' | tail -1`
PREDEF="/tmp/chkbootblk_predef.tmp"
CURRENT="/tmp/chkbootblk_current.tmp"

dd if=/usr/platform/$ARCH/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk \
ibs=1b count=1 | od -c | head -3 > /tmp/chkbootblk_predef.tmp

dd if=$DEV ibs=1b iseek=1 count=1 | od -c | \
head -3 > /tmp/chkbootblk_current.tmp

cmp -s $PREDEF $CURRENT
if [ $? = 0 ]
then echo "*********************************"
echo "* BOOT-BLOCK SEEMS TO BE O.K. *"
echo "*********************************";
else echo "*********************************"
echo "* WARNING: CORRUPTED BOOT-BLOCK *"
echo "*********************************";
fi

rm $PREDEF $CURRENT

short resume on ZFS

while the guys at solaris code camp glorified ZFS and its opportunities, i wanted to take a closer look.
since a filesystem/vm should be production-ready, it should at least handle hotplugged - failed drive in this case - devices correctly.
so i set up a sun enterprise 420r with a d130 storage array attached to it.
`zpool create tank raidz c1t10d0 c1t11d0 c1t12d0` (don't bother about the 3 disk raidz setup - thanks ;-)
then i physically detached a disk of the array. `zpool status` hung on giving me output. it was even not possible to login with ssh anymore.
this is a known issue by the ZFS community:
OpenSolaris Case
while speaking about just one problem of the current ZFS implementation we have to wait for proper FMA integration.
ongoing discussions can be found at eschrock's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock/

check for corrupted boot-blocks on solaris

i just wanted to check if a machines boot-block is corrupted.
i came up with checking the "pre-defined" block at /usr/platform/..../bootblk against the installed. the following procedure works on veritas volumes as well as metadevices and raw-slices. you just have to remember the 1 offset (iseek=1) on the "real" disks:

# dd if=/usr/platform/SUNW,Sun-Fire-15000/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk ibs=1b count=1 | od -c | head -3
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
0000000 375 003 J 331 \0 \0 027 0 314 022 \t / p a c k
0000020 a g e s 002 004 4 024 \0 034 022 024 C a n '
0000040 t f i n d / p a c k a g e s

# dd if=/dev/md/rdsk/d0 ibs=1b iseek=1 count=1 | od -c | head -3
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
0000000 375 003 J 331 \0 \0 027 0 314 022 \t / p a c k
0000020 a g e s 002 004 4 024 \0 034 022 024 C a n '
0000040 t f i n d / p a c k a g e s

# dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s0 ibs=1b iseek=1 count=1 | od -c | head -3
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
0000000 375 003 J 331 \0 \0 027 0 314 022 \t / p a c k
0000020 a g e s 002 004 4 024 \0 034 022 024 C a n '
0000040 t f i n d / p a c k a g e s

if there's no difference at all, the boot-block should be ok.

SF15k feature

a 15k domain came down today.
first problem was, that the domain powered off automatically every few minutes. even at ok prompt. second was, bad boot blocks on every disk out of 5.
so, we discovered a feature, which is official since 2004:
a 15k domain automatically gets a reset if the obp is not able to detect a boot block(corrupted even). this took several hours to be figured and cost time throughout the SL ;-)
...a feature, not a bug!
SunSolve #76798