Learning the Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) will be a big help when a System Administrator cannot login anymore to the server. ILOM can be accessed via IP network or serial console. Here are some of the most commonly used commands that could get anyone on track on managing the ILOM:

Even though cron is our usual lifesaver for redundant tasks on a Unix or Linux Systems, there are times that we really forget the syntax that is needed for our cronjobs. Here is a simple yet effective headers that we could place on top of the crontab as comments:

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

There are times that we need to do maintenance on a system and we need to connect to its hardware or system controller. With HP boxes they are called HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO).

As UNIX Systems Administrators, we want our systems up and running – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Though this could be achievable with the UNIX Operating Systems, we cannot set aside the fact that our hardware equipments is prone to wear and tear. One notable point of failure if our root or boot disks. Once it dies out – our only way is thru our backup and restore it. But there is another way that we could prevent this – if we have a spare identical disk as our root disk. We can have a redundant machine by having our root disks mirrored and make our system much reliable and omit this point of failure. Here are the step-by-step how to guide in mirroring our root/boot disk using the Solaris Volume Manager (SVM).

If in case you are new to our site, Welcome to UNIX Note! The month of May has passed and lots of How-To guides and some UNIX, AIX, Solaris Tips have been shared. Here is a quick round up of the Tips and Tricks as well as How-To guides that you might have missed:

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.

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.

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.