unixwiz

Got an email tonight from our operations group that one of our mail servers was not responding… So I looked at the /var/adm/messages and see this in it..

Did a search on sunsolve and found the references to the CONN_DEC_REF, but most just say “see comments” but there is nothing there. Guess I will look at debuging the crash file tomorrow.. Looks like it is in the IP stack, and the load on the machine was sort of high when it happened… The machine does handle a ton of mail. In fact since July 11, 2006, it has handled 34,469,007 messages and 327,542,184K of email.

Solaris, Work Solaris, Work

One little draw back I have noticed about using zones on solaris 10 is the amount of time it takes to patch a machine. Right now I am waiting on a SunFire 890 with 8 processors and 16gb of ram with 12 zones (counting the global) to finish patching. I started it at around 8:54 this morning and it is now 11:16 and there are still 2 or 3 patches left to go. Since all the zones are basicly sparse zones, I wonder why it takes so much longer to do the patching? I also hope all this patching fixes my Power supply problem We have replaced the power supplies a couple of times, and the power distribution bored. I put the latest OBP on it this morning and it did not seem to fix it either. So hopefully after this set of patches are done, I will have a better idea whether it is a hardware or software problem.

Solaris, Sun, Work, Zones/Containers Solaris, Sun, Work, Zones/Containers

I got called the other night by our operations group because the keyboard and mouse would not work on their 3 head group of Sun Ray 150′s. So I went in and killed their session and had them restart it, did not work. So I went looking in the log files and saw this:

Well that could not be good. So I ended up going in to the office. Tried unplugging the Sun Ray and plugging it back in. This is when I saw the 9 D error icon. Nice little icon with a picture of a USB connector and a yellow triangle. So I unplugged it and disconnected the keyboard and mouse and then plugged it back in. Still got the same error. The funny thing about the error is, it is listed as this in the docs:

This is an over current condition on the USB bus, i.e., the total number of devices draws too much current . Consider using a powered hub.

So now I ended up swaping it out with one that was in my office and rebuilding the multi-head group, and they were all set. The interesting thing about it is that the status LED stayed green, instead of turning amber. So the next morning I tried it on a different server (the original server it was attached to is running SRSS 2.0 still) that was running SRSS 3.1, this time nothing showed up in the log files, but the Sun Ray still showed the USB 9 icon and the keyboard and mouse did not work. So I ended up calling it in for replacement. It is nice that the Sun Ray’s have a long warrenty period. This one was bought 2 or 3 years ago.

In an unrelated note, I have to go in early to get a power backplane replaced in one of our V890′s because we have went through three power supplies in the PS0 slot in under a month. The bad part about this is the 890 has 11 zones on it and 1TB of disk, so we are going to have some services out while Sun replaces the backplane and power supply. Hopefully this will fix it though.

Computer Hardware, Interesting, Solaris, Sun, Sun Ray, Thin Clients, Work, Zones/Containers Computer Hardware, Interesting, Solaris, Sun, Sun Ray, Thin Clients, Work, Zones/Containers

This afternoon, Justin and I decided to take a fresh installation of Windows XP and see if we could “junk” it up like some students do with tool bars, spyware, and ad ware. To say the least, we found it hard to find some of the stuff we wanted to install, but we did get a lot installed. (The whole point for this exercise was to test our student portal system because we have had reports from students that stuff does not work right. So we decided to put everything we could on a machine to see what all would break it.) So here is a screen shot of our Windows XP machine with some tool bars installed (click on it to get the bigger version).

We only found one so far that actually prevented us from doing stuff. It was the one that has the “CleanMyPC” line. Once we disabled it’s popup blocker everything worked fine.

As for what we installed, here is a list not in any particular order:

• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo Toolbar
• Alexa Toolbar
• Viewpoint Toolbar
• AOL Toolbar
• Dogpile Toolbar
• Search Hippo Toolbar
• Norton Internet Security (30 day trial from Yahoo)
• Weatherbug
• The Weather Channel toolbar and desktop
• Hotbar
• Newest AOL IM client
• SideStep Side bar (not in this picture)

Needless to say after we installed SideStep and went to Travelocity to do a search, Internet Explorer just went away. No error messages, No “send this bug to MS” messages, just vanished. We also had it at one point where the actual viewable web portion of the screen was about only 1 inch high. So now we are looking for what the students have actually installed so we can see if we can reproduce what is on their machines.

Funny, Interesting, M$ Winders, Work Funny, Interesting, M$ Winders, Work

We installed some new UltraSparc IV+ boards in our E25K yesterday, and to “test” the new boards, we decided to make one huge domain. (it is not every day I get to play with a large domain like this, usually they are 8 or 16 way). Well the domain has 24 cores, and 98GB of ram, and 1.1 TeraBytes of disk. What better way to test it then install Solaris 10 and create as many zones as I can. I started the process this morning, and each zone took about 3.5 minutes to create. (I was doing one at a time, assigning 254 zones per ethernet card, and with 12 ethernet cards, I figured I could get about 3048 zones on the machine. After 7 hours I have 120 zones on the machine, but unfortunatly I have to shut the domain down as it appears one of our System Controllers (SC1) fried it self, and we can’t turn it off or on, so Sun will be in tonight and we are going to shut the whole box down and replace the bad SC and then boot it back up. I think once that is done, I will start the script back up again and let it run all night, 3 of them at a time. Needless to say this box “spanked” my v890 with 8 x 1.2GHZ UltraVI cores with 16 gig of ram. I created a zone on it today and it took about 30 minutes to do on that machine.

Output from creating one zone on the E25K:

Interesting, Solaris, Work, Zones/Containers Interesting, Solaris, Work, Zones/Containers