Category Archives: Hardware

Change EMC Powerpath Failover Policy on UNIX Systems

As UNIX system administrators  – we need our Operating Systems running in optimal state every time. The same is what we want to our storage systems. In EMC Powerpath there are a couple of failover policies that we can enforce to our storage devices but we must always use the one that is best suitable. We have here a LUN that is currently under Basic Failover policy even though the storage is CLARiiON:

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Sun StorEdge A1000 Battery Replacement Procedure

Sun StorEdge A1000 is one of the oldest storage array from SUN but still widely used. Just recently, we received a battery expiration and we need this replaced as soon as possible to ensure optimal operation of the said Sun StorEdge A1000 array. Below are the steps that we used to replace the expired battery:

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Clearing FMA faults on Oracle / Sun Fire T1000/T2000

After replacing a defective part on a Sun Fire T1000/T2000 boxes, we need to clear the FMA Faults. There are two ways that we can achieve this task – via the System Controller (SC) or Solaris OS. I usually prefer the path because there is no downtime required but there would be times that we need to do it on the OS side.

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Install EMC PowerPath License on UNIX Systems

Today we encountered a degraded policy in EMC PowerPath disk on one of our SUN/Oracle Solaris boxes. We found out that the license for our PowerPath was not properly installed on the system. With this current issue – our disks is only running on Basic Failover policy which is not recommended for CLARiiON disks. To mitigate the issue, we need to install the license and set the policy back to CLARiiON Optimization Policy.

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Available Commands for Sun / Oracle ALOM

There are times that we really rely on the manual (man) pages when it comes to getting the right options for a certain command under UNIX boxes. But when it comes to Sun/Oracle Advanced Lights Out Manager (ALOM) we can count on with the help command. Here are the commands that you can have with Sun/Oracle Advanced Lights Out Manager.

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Restore Solaris with ufsrestore

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.

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