Tips from the Trenches
A collection of hints and tips for the Solaris Systems Administrator.
- Thoughts on ZFS
- Some comments on aspects of ZFS such as compression
and deduplication.
- Managing Zones and containers
-
- Simple
Zone Architecture
- A brief discussion of how to build zones for ease of deployment,
backup, and cloning.
- Limiting
cpu usage by a zone.
- A brief discussion of using the dedicated-cpu and capped-cpu settings.
- Solaris Containers and Shared Memory
- Want to configure shared memory settings in Solaris containers?
Here's how.
- Preconfiguring Containers with sysidcfg
- The extra steps you'll need to be able to configure Solaris 8 and 9
containers automatically.
- Zones, multiple interfaces, and routing
- How to set up routing on a Solaris 10 system with zones on different
subnets.
- Controlling
the Install Footprint
- Rather than minimizing the installed files, perhaps you ought to
think about minimizing installed services instead.
- Vendor
Stack vs build your own
- Should you use the software components provided by your OS vendor,
or take control of the process and build your own?
- Building
current gcc on Solaris 10
- While Solaris 10 comes with a copy of gcc, it's quite old. It's
quite useful to have a newer version around, and this explains how to
get it installed.
- A bigger hammer than svcadm
- Or, how to kill off all the processes associated with an SMF
service when svcadm refuses to cooperate.
- The Oracle Hardware Management Pack
- An extremely useful, but largely unknown, utility that's very
useful on modern Oracle servers.
- Cache batteries on Sun 25xx arrays
- You don't need to actually replace cache batteries just because
you've owned them for a year or two.
- Compressing Backup Catalogs
- Forget about getting NetBackup to compress its catalog, and get ZFS
(or any other compressing filesystem) to do the job instead.
- Solaris Link Aggregation
- A simple walkthrough on using dladm to aggregate several physical
network links.
- Making scp go a little quicker
- A little hint to make your scp file transfers go quicker.
Old tips
The following tips are getting old - they may refer to old versions,
no longer be necessary, or to hardware that's no longer
available. However, they may still be relevant if you have to deal with
old hardware or software.
- 22 July 2009
- Some notes on installing
Xfce on Solaris 10 (refers to Xfce 4.6, which is old).
- 17 Jan 2006
- Some notes on availability
- 16 Jan 2006
- Some raid notes
- 13 Jan 2006
- 3320 quickstart
- 12 Jan 2006
- mpxio quickstart
- 11 Jan 2006
- 3510 quickstart
- 28 Nov 2005
- A brief intro to Projects and Resource
Pools.
- 12 Jun 2005
- Setting up an install server from iso images
- 21 Mar 2005
- Moving up from installation minimalism
- 18 Mar 2005
- Installation minimalism updated
- 10 Feb 2005
- Setting up Postfix under SMF
- 1 Dec 2004
- Some performance notes
- 23 Nov 2004
- Zone minimalism
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