Our server had panic and don’t have any space left on you /var partition, worry no more, there is still a way to generate the core files with the help of savecore and make Sun Support don’t wait for another panic to happen before they get their core files.

We had a hardware failure and we cannot seem to boot to our system. Our only option is to restore from our backup. The good thing is that we have foreseen this incident and took the liberty to have a backup of our OS. We will now use ufsrestore to bring our server up and running.

While the battle of the cores is underway with Intel, AMD and IBM, enterprises must also pay attention to the servers, systems and applications used to take advantage of this new processing power…

As a good old saying says – An Apple a Day keeps the Doctor away – is also applicable on having good OS backup that will always keep headaches lesser when the hard times come. Now comes ufsdump, a usefull command to help us backup our Solaris Operating System.

Our root (/) partition is nearing 100% utilization and upon further investigation the wtmpx file is the main culprit. We need to trim or flush this file but we need to have a backup of this file for audit purposes.

I have stumbled upon a great site which gives an in depth guide on the different shells that a UNIX system can have. As a fellow Systems Administrator, I would like to share this great find to everyone and hopefully could help us fully understand each shell’s pros and cons.

In response from our last post regarding splitting of large files, we will now discuss on merging these files for us to be able to use it again. We will also be discussing on checking the md5 hash and chksum.

We have a very large core file and we need this to send to our vendor for analysis. The gzip’d file of the core is 20GB and the FTP server of the vendor does not like that. Therefore we need to split our very large file to smaller chunks that the FTP server would accept.

Oracle released VirtualBox 3.1.8, a maintenance release of VirtualBox 3.1 that improves stability and fixes regressions. It also supports new platforms like Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems, including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD. See the Changelog for details on the updates. The download is available from the VirtualBox or Oracle Web sites. …

We have already discussed on how to add an EMC storage to a Solaris box. Now we have a dead path on our system where the storage team has decommisioned. Here are the steps to follow on how to remove these dead paths from our system.