sysadmin

Sometimes you might want to change the “type” of a disk within Solaris. The “type” of the disk is stored on the disk itself, along with the partition table (presumably in the VTOC in the first part of the disk). For the purpose of this post, I use disk “name” and “type” interchangeably. In...
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Not sure how well known this trick is, but it is possible to figure out the vendor of a particular NIC by looking at the first few digits of the MAC address. We used to use this when I worked at Sun to figure out if the customers were using pukka Sun NICs...
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This site has a whole boat load of one-liner unix commands. You can upload and contribute your own My command line fu All command line Fu
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Here’s a weird one that I’d never seen before. We were finding that at least one of our linux binaries was becoming corrupt (verified using rpm -V) however we didn’t know how the binary was becoming corrupt – because these files should never be written to. On the off-chance that the corruption might...
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Recently we had an issue on some linux clients that would mysteriously fail to run SFS benchmarks. On closer inspection we found that the binary ‘cpp’ would exit with SIGSEGV. # cpp cc1: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault Please submit a full bug report, with preprocessed source if appropriate. See for instructions. For some reason that I didn’t...
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A simple way to convert a flexible volume to a traditional volume is to use ndmp, within the same filer. Firstly enable ndmp and turn it on. filer> options ndmpd.enable on filer> ndmpd on Next create the volume that you want to migrate the data to. In this case, I create a traditional volume with 5 disks,...
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Recently we needed to transfer an aggregate that was hosted on an external shelf to disks housed internally in our test FAS2020 and the same trick can be used to move an aggregate from one shelf to another. The trick uses the disk-replace command. It works serially, and so it is a little time...
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Set the ‘EDITOR’ variable for the user ‘oracle’. Doing so will allow you to edit your sqlplus commands using a reasonable editor. After executing a piece of SQL in sqlplus, just type ‘edit’ or ‘ed’ and you’ll be transported to your editor. In vi just type :q to get back to the...
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The CP type is displayed in the CP/ty column in the output of sysstat. The CP type column contains two pieces of data. The cause of the CP (the CP type) – the first character, and the ‘phase’. The second character. In the output below, the first row shows a...
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