It has been a while that I’m gone but the wait is over. Expect more relevant posts and (hopefully) frequent updates from your friendly UNIX SysAdmin from UNIX Note.

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.

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.