unixwiz

Found out last night that our SPAM server’s database was a little corrupted.. It is a PostgreSQL DB and it was over 80 gigs in size. So today I have spent so far 3+ hours getting it rebuilt.. First deleted (moved out of the way) the entire postgres directory and reinstalled it and populated some config info back in to it. Now comes the long task of reindexing the spam queue. Right now there are 5.5 million messages (just from the last 8 days) in the queue and the reindex has been running for only about 30 minutes, and it is only 8% done. going on that, looks like I will be here for a while. but since it is pouring the rain down outside, not much I can do any ways.

PostgreSQL, Solaris, Spam Fighting, Work PostgreSQL, Solaris, Spam Fighting, Work

Forgot to mention that I have tried using TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) client on Solaris againest a ZFS file system. From what I can tell it works fine… I have backed up and restored some files with it. When looking at the TSM Server it lists the file system as “unknown”, but so far everything has been ok with it.

Technorati Tags: Solaris, ZFS, TSM, Tivoli

Solaris, Tivoli, Work, ZFS Solaris, Tivoli, Work, ZFS

Recently we setup a new Sun Ray server, and when people tried to use gaim it would keep saying that there were no protocols available. So we decided to install Gaim from blastwave.org like we did on the previous Sun Ray server. Well as Justin was installing it, (we have a local mirror), it was taking for ever and he messaged me about why it was installing firefox? I did not know so I told him to stop it and I would just look in to making the version of Gaim that comes with Solaris 10 work correctly (which happened to be making a sym link from /usr/share to /share and one form /usr/lib/gaim to /lib/gaim, and everything works, supposedly this fix will be in Solaris 10 U3?)..

Anyways tonight I took a freshly installed zone on my home server and installed Gaim on it from blastwave, 67 packages and 402 Meg later it is installed. Here is a list of the packages it installs, and the size of them in bytes:

Notice the first 2 packages, Firefox and Mozilla (quarter of the space used), now seemed to be required to run Gaim 2.0 for some reason. So back to my title for this post, is it better to compile your own software or use binaries? Well I guess it depends on what you want to do. I usually don’t like having more than one copy of a particular piece of software on a machine (for example I usually get firefox directly from mozilla since it seems to be a more up to date one than the blastwave one). And when looking through the list of what was installed most of that is already included in Solaris 10, so there is now two copies of each on the machine.

So a question to the blastwave people, any chance of building special packages just for solaris 10 that are linked againest the libraries already in solaris 10?

Interesting, Solaris, Work Interesting, Solaris, Work

The other day I showed Chris how to install a new Sun Ray server. (this one is a 10 processor domain on a E25K, running Solaris 10, ZFS and everything new). Well we switched it over to be the primary Sun Ray server last night and noticed some slowness. So we decided to install APOC Sun Desktop Manager on it to see if we could disable some stuff to make the JDS enviroment run a little faster. The install of the console and server seemed to go fine, but every time we tried to run the “svcadm enable apocd/udp” it would fail and go in to maintenance mode. It seems that when ever the install happened, the info for the apocd/udp was not populated in to the inetadm..
The first thing I did was look at the /var/adm/messages and saw this:

Interesting, we then spent a while trying to figure out what was supposed to be in there. Running “inetadm -l network/apocd/udp” produced this:

What I ended up doing was this:

So now apoc runs, but now only part of the config stuff that I set in the Desktop Manager actually works. For example, I got the splash screen not to show, but I can’t get the default terminal to be dtterm instead of gnome-terminal (dtterm uses about 7meg of ram, whereas gnome-terminal uses about 78 meg..Take that and add about 20 users with about 10 or 15 terminal windows open and you have 2gig of ram for dtterm vs 23.4 gig of ram) So now we are trying to figure out some other performance enhancements. Thinking about putting a less intensive graphical environment on it for the people to use.

Any one have some good tips for speeding up a 10 x 1.2GHz UltraIII box with 16gb of ram running Solaris 10?

Technorati Tags: Sun Ray, Solaris 10

Solaris, Sun Ray, Work Solaris, Sun Ray, Work

Spent the day with a Sun Engineer working on getting a Sun SE3510 Array installed on one of our E25K machines. Here is some background:

12 x 300gb FC drives in the array, 2 assigned as Global spares, and the rest were assigned to 2 RAID 5 arrays of 5 disks each. One array on each controller. Now comes the fun part. Because of the way that the firmware on the controllers works (we have redundent controllers in the 3510 and 2 qlogic cards in the E25K domain) we had to connect 4 links between the 3510 to our San Director. So we have something that looks sort of like this:

What this produces is 3 Luns from the primary controller and 3 luns from the secondary controller being visible on each of the qlogic cards. On the host side we are using MPxIO to handle the multipathing. So if you are trying to do the same thing, remember that you need 4 connections from the Array to the SAN Fabric, 2 to each fabric, if you have different fabric domains. Otherwise, you will end up with only seeing half of the disks on each controller and you will not be in a redundent state. If you try to directly attach the array to the host, then you still need 4 connections and will have to use dual ported cards.. Sun needs to update the firmware on this device so you can make the luns appear on each controller with out having to use 4 different connections and still be redundent.

Interesting, Solaris, Sun, Work Interesting, Solaris, Sun, Work