Archives for December 2013

Solaris 10 boot process : SPARC In the last post we saw the boot process in solaris 10 on SPARC platform. The boot process on x86/x64 hardware is bit different than the SPARC hardware. The x86/x64 hardware also involves the 5 step boot process, same as the SPARC hardware. Refer the flow diagram below. Boot PROM phase 1. The BIOS (Basic Input Output System) ROM runs the power on self test (POST) to test the hardware. 2. BIOS tries to boot from the device mentioned in the boot sequence. … [Read more...] about Solaris 10 boot process : x86/x64

The solaris boot command when used with various optional parameters will change the booting behavior. Syntax The common syntax of boot command is solaris SPARC system is : ok> boot [device-specifier] [arguments] The Common Boot [device-specifier]s are : 1. Disk 2. cdrom 3. net (network boot image) 4. url (jumpstart) Example 1 : Normal Boot The boot command without any arguments will boot the system into multi-user mode by default. ok> boot Example 2 : The -a option … [Read more...] about 17 Examples of using Solaris boot command

How to configure Solaris 10 Probe based IPMP How to configure Solaris 10 Link Based IPMP Solaris IP multipathing provides the high availability and load balancing capability to the networking stack. It makes sure to avoid any single point of failure on network side. We may face issues while configuring and even after configuring IPMP. Below are some tips and tricks to troubleshoot issues in solaris IPMP configuration. Testing IPMP failover We can check the failure and repair of an … [Read more...] about Troubleshooting Solaris IPMP

An I/O performance bottleneck can be due to a disk or even due to a HBA or a HBA driver. The command iostat (Input output statistics) help us to get started with analyzing a disk I/O bottleneck issue. A standard iostat output would look like : # iostat -xn 1 5 extended device statistics r/s w/s kr/s kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t %w %b device 293.1 0.0 37510.5 0.0 0.0 31.7 0.0 108.3 1 100 c0t0d0 294.0 0.0 37632.9 0.0 0.0 31.9 0.0 108.6 0 100 c0t0d0 293.0 … [Read more...] about Solaris Performance troubleshooting : Disk (I/O) performance issues

Iostat is one of the most useful command when troubleshooting a disk I/O performance issue. It can also be used to troubleshoot a CPU performance issue as well. The iostat command can be run in various ways. Summary since boot By default if you run iostat without any options it will show the summary since boot which is very useful to compare the system performance in a bottleneck vs average system performance. Example 1 # iostat tty sd0 sd1 sd2 sd3 … [Read more...] about 12 iostat examples for Solaris performance troubleshooting

Many times it is required to know which process is running on a specific port. The application which you are installing may be giving an error such as "can not bind the port" or "the port is already in use". In these cases we can determine which process has blocked the port. There are also audit requirements sometimes, for finding out all the port and associated processes. To solve this issue, there is a simple script available (credits to oracle). The script does the following : 1. Loops … [Read more...] about Script for finding the process using a specific port in Solaris

Static Vs Dynamic routes Static routes are added using the route command either by a script or by using command line. Dynamic routes are added by some routing daemon. Daemons that are responsible for adding dynamic routes that are currently bundled/supported with Solaris are /usr/sbin/in.routed (Routing Information Protocol(RIP)) and /usr/sbin/in.rdisc (Router Network Discovery Protocol). Using command line To add a non-persistent route we just simple use route add command without the … [Read more...] about Examples of adding static routes in Solaris