Mike's Solaris Blog

Anybody else noticed that the Solaris 'crypt' command isn't in common use in the Linux community?

I've been debating whether or not to post this here, as it's not strictly a unixy thing, but what the hell.. I'm ethused enough to be boring enough people locally about it, so a few more isn't going to harm the world.

We recently purchased a few drives to fit into one of our servers. I'll not say who supplied the drives, or even what kind of server, suffice to say it's not Sun, and it runs Solaris.

What arrived was a bit disturbing.

Working a particularly troublesome problem this week reminded me of two things: I realised (not for the first time in my career) that sometimes the unlikliest root cause will be there to bite you in the ass.

It also reminded me of a phrase once used by the late John Peel:

I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.

Installing a replacement drive and being unable to shrink a filesystem to fit to the smaller replacement drive. I encountered an interesting problem today - how to copy a large dataset containing many hardlinked files.

Hard links are used relatively rarely, and so don't normally cause an issue - however - there was an interesting solution using rsync..

Something strange happened here today. I'm not sure I get some of the reasons of why it happened.. partly Client company politics, I guess.

I've been pushing the use of Solaris 10 quite heavily recently, and after trying to drum up enthusaism for a while, found an ideal project to make the first production machines.

Back onto the subject of striping, here's a thought that I've harboured for a little while, but never actually gotten around to testing it formally. Perhaps sometime soon I'll find the time to give it a thorough test and analysis and report back..

Common knowledge tells us to take the average size of a read or write operation (dependant on whether an app is read- or write- mostly) and to divide it by the number of spindles that we are striping against in order to calculate the correct column width.

I'm not so sure.

I was chatting with Doug recently about disk layouts, and the conversation rolled onto disk and volume topologies and layouts.

Where I'm working at the moment, there has been a myth propogated that striping is good for data filesystems, and concats are better for redo logs.

Quite where this has come from, I'm not entirely sure. However.. whilst thinking about this I came to the conclusion that for redo logs, the layout is largely irrelevant.

"That's what's really good about the blog - mini-papers on mini-problems
without all of the palaver around a real article, as you've experienced."

Given that a formal white paper or magazine article takes a significant amount of time and effort (satisfying though it is), that makes the blog experience sound quite interesting. If I persist then I would expect this to be a fairly low-volume but technical discussion (and please feedback - if no-one is listening, I tend not to speak)

So, who am I then? - well.. I'm just this guy, y'know. I've been a Unix SysAdmin my entire career (I specialise with Solaris machines but have tinkered with many other Unices along the way). I occasionally write articles for SysAdmin magazine - in fact, I'm currently writing one for the April 2006 issue about synchronising host Operating Systems in order to achieve failover or migration. In case you're interested, I keep the previous articles archived at http://hindsight.it