Solaris 10 on the bin

Adventures in ZFS: Mirrored Rpool

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It always makes sense to have a mirrored rpool for your production systems, however that is not always how they are configured. This really simple procedure is also critical.

Create a Mirrored Zpool

Check the existing devices to identify the one currently in use.

 bash
 
 
zpool status rpool
 pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
 scan: none requested
config:

 NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
 rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
 c0t5000CCA0436359CCd0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Once we know which one is currently in use, we need to find a different one to mirror onto.

Solaris Networking: Datalink Multipathing Protocol

Mon, 19 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this article we are going to go over Datalink Multipathing Protocol (DLMP) available in Solaris. DLMP is similar to IPMP, however there are some key differences, the biggest being the layer at which it operates. DLMP operates at the datalink layer of the OSI model, while IPMP operates at the network layer. Due to the differences in those layers DLMP opens up a lot of possibilities that were not possible with IPMP. For example if you had a requirement for redundant networking for a service, either IPMP and DLMP would both be able to meet that requirement very well. However if you had a requirement that the service runs inside of a zone or a logical domain then the level of work in IPMP becomes much higher. This is because these hypervisors assign datalink devices to their guests. Since the redundancy for IPMP is built on a level higher we need to assign multiple non-redundant interfaces to the guests and then build the interfaces and IPMP groups inside each of the guests.

Solaris SMF: Define File Dependency

Thu, 15 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest benefits of migrating to the Service Management Framework is that we can introduce dependencies to a services, these dependencies can be other services which is very valuable, however they can also be file based. This can be used in a number of ways, say for example you have some application trees that live on some NFS mounts, in the event that the mount hasn’t been successfully mounted it will still attempt to start the service. However if we make our service dependent on the file, then if the file doesn’t exist it won’t even attempt to start the service.

Solaris SMF: Define Service Execution User

Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Frequently we want a service to execute as a non-root user, this is pretty trivial in the context of the Service Management Facility in Solaris. This article will go over exactly what goes into that. The one complexity around that is the environment, if you have environment variables that the user will depend on those, they will need to be setup inside of the SMF. I will not be going into that in this article.

Solaris SMF: Delegate Service Control

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In many of the environments that I deliver to a client we have a concept of an “environment account” this account is the credential set that the environment runs as. Over time and the maturation of the Service Management Facility (SMF) we have been able to simplify this offering and increase its capabilities. Today we are going to talk about allowing the environment user to manage a service controlled by SMF.

Solaris Networking: IP Multipathing Protocol

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In this article we are going to go over some basics of using IPMP in Solaris. We will discuss this on the latest versions of Solaris 10 and 11 on the SPARC platform, these instructions should also work on the x86 platform, but will be dependent on the listed version numbers, as the networking stack has changed alot of the past few minor versions of Solaris 10 and 11.

Solaris 11.1

Create an IPMP Group