Solaris

NGINX Performs Well on Solaris 10 x86

Posted Tue, 12/15/2009 - 11:07 by Justin Ellison

Just a quick posting of some simple benchmarks today.  Please note, these are not the be all, end all performance results that allow everyone to scream from atop yonder hill that Solaris performs better than Linux!  This was just me doing a little due dilligence.  I like Solaris 10, and wanted to run it on our webservers.  We're looking at using NGINX to serve up some static files, and I wanted to make sure it performed like it should on Solaris 10 before deploying it - you know, right tool for the job and all.  So, disclaimers aside, here's what I found.

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QuickTip: Make life easier with ssh-copy-id

Posted Thu, 11/12/2009 - 11:01 by Justin Ellison

How many times have you ran through this series of events?

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub
...copy output to clipboard...
$ ssh myhost
...enter password...
myhost$ vi ~./ssh/authorized_keys
...paste public key and save...
myhost$ exit

Thanks to bash's tab completion, I happened upon ssh-copy-id. Instead of all that above, just do this:

$ ssh-copy-id myhost
...enter password...

You're done!

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New in Solaris 10 Update 8 - ZFS Support in Flash Archives

Posted Wed, 10/14/2009 - 11:08 by Justin Ellison

The release of Solaris 10 10/09 (Update 8) has come and gone, and without too much fanfare from my point of view.  In my opinion, there is one new feature that will really help propel root ZFS installations into the enterprises where there was resistance before.  You see, many larger corporations have invested a lot of time and money into using Flash Archive coupled with Jumpstart to be able to deploy golden images to many machines in a small amount of time.    However, up until now, ZFS and Flash Archive were incompatible, meaning you were forced to use UFS root file systems if you wanted to use Flash Archive installs.  Some have even went to great lengths to hack solutions together, but I doubt they made many in-roads into the enterprise.  Read on for a quick overview of Flash Archive and ZFS support in the latest update of Solaris 10.

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Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Three - The Scripts

Posted Wed, 09/23/2009 - 11:24 by Justin Ellison

In part three of the series, we ended with a working Custom Jumpstart setup, but you most certainly will be left wanting to do more.  That's where the begin and finish scripts come into play -- anything you can do via /bin/sh you can do via Jumpstart. Up until now, the series has been more of a "Typical Jumpstart" tutorial -- this post is where this series of posts earns it's name. Read more for about 200 lines of shell-scripting goodness.

 

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Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Three - The Jumpstart Profile

Posted Tue, 09/22/2009 - 10:16 by Justin Ellison

In part two of the series, we left off with a non-working Custom Jumpstart setup.  By creating our Jumpstart profile file and a sysidcfg file, we'll have a basic, but working Custom Jumpstart.  The profile contains settings specific to the installation, where the sysidcfg file contains settings specific to the machine during and after installation.

 

 

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Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part Two

Posted Mon, 09/21/2009 - 09:30 by Justin Ellison

In part one of the series, we setup the ISC DHCP server. Now it's time to set up our install and config servers -- both of which will reside on the same box in this case.  Solaris Jumpstart uses standard protocols, namely TFTP and NFS to provide these services.  In this post, we'll just be setting up the framework for the real customizations that will come in parts three and four.

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Not So Typical Jumpstart: Part One

Posted Fri, 09/18/2009 - 15:48 by Justin Ellison

Only in my world do you get a RHCE one week, and then come back and work on nothing but Solaris Jumpstart for the next couple of weeks! Oh well, it's always good as long as you're learning. What started out as a simple upgrade from Apache 2.0 to 2.2 quickly turned into re-provisioning our web tier. We could have upgraded, but there ended up being so many dependencies needed I decided that it would be easier to just start fresh with Solaris 10u7 on all our webservers. Since I knew that I'd be doing this to all our webservers, it made sense to spend the time up-front on setup up a completely automated installation. This time spent on the front-end should save a huge amount of time on the back side when it comes to troubleshooting. In my case, I learned a lot of undocumented tips and tricks, and stumbled across a few "gotchas" as well. After going through an exercise like this, I now know what Puppet is for, and ordered my first book. I'll give a review once I'm done.

First of all, we already have an ISC DHCPd server running to provide Red Hat Kickstart installs, so I decided to leverage that. Sun's DHCPd works fine, but it's a completely different beast when it comes to configuration.

Part one of the series covers setting up your dhcpd.conf.

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Apache 2.2.12 - 2.2.13 and Solaris 10 Bug Nastiness

Posted Tue, 09/01/2009 - 09:55 by Justin Ellison

At work, I've been working on an upgrade from a custom-compiled version of Apache 2.0.x to the Sun-provided Glassfish Webstack 1.5.  I spent about a week troubleshooting what I thought was configuration issue, only to finally find it's a bug way upstream in Apache 2.2.12+.  This bug only affects Solaris 10, and is near-impossible to reproduce.  If you use Solaris 10 and Apache, read on so you don't waste a week of your life like I did.

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SCSA vs RHCE

Posted Wed, 08/26/2009 - 21:48 by Justin Ellison

After taking and passing both my SCSA and my RHCE exams this year, it's time to reflect.  Read on for the pros and cons of each from a student's point of view.

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Using fssnap and ufsdump to create point-in-time backups of mounted UFS partitions in Solaris 10

Posted Tue, 08/25/2009 - 12:56 by Justin Ellison

With all the (deserved) hype about ZFS, there's still a lot of systems that make use of UFS out there.  With all the things that ZFS can do, there's still some things that it can't do (incompatability with flash archives, and POSIX ACL's are examples).  I needed to basically make an image of a T1000 that had some non-global zones installed, stick it into a lab for a couple weeks, and then return it to it's previous state.  Since this server had non-global zones, using flar's was questionable. So I decided to use fssnap and ufsdump to make my backups.

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