Missed the old SunSolve where you can check and download the latest patches and fixes for Sun Solaris? We all know that SunSolve is now decommisioned by Oracle and has replaced it with Oracle Support and thanks to it’s Flash interface its one hell of sluggish support site.

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:

Managing printer is one of the least task of a Unix System Admin. But printer management is typically easy to get along with as there is just minimal commands and options that we use. Here are some of my trusted commands to manage printers:

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:

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.

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.

The latest Operating System that Oracle has in store for all of us System Administrators can now be tried out now. Oracle Solaris 11 Express is the latest OS offering that focuses on these key technologies:

Having a Mission-Critical Environment means a system downtime could mean a lot. Here comes the high availability comes in, and with clustering this give our service availability very high. In the upcoming Solaris 11, high availability is the main focus of Oracle. Solaris Cluster covers a lot of applications, zfs and virtualized zones.

The product pages for Oracle’s M-Series of SPARC servers are now online! These boxes now include the latest SPARC technology in the name of SPARC64 VII+ quad-core processor. Based from their site: