Administration

Note: This section contains various guides: articles and tutorials about Solaris OE administration: installation, monitoring, performance and observability. Before using any of the articles in real case scenarios make sure you are testing the guides under your TEST environment !!!

Contents

Administration under Solaris OE applies to: Solaris 8, 9, 10 and Solaris Nevada (Solaris Express)

Installation
Disks and Filesystems
Monitoring, Observability and Debug
Multimedia on Solaris
Web services under Solaris
Java on Solaris
Scripts
References

a short introduction how to install Solaris 10 on x86/64 computers
a collection of articles about UFS, ZFS
a section about monitoring and observability under Solaris OE
Solaris used as a a multimedia solution
various webservers under Solaris
installing and running Java applications under Solaris
several administrative scripts
other references

Installation and Upgrade Notes

Under this section there are simple guides about installing or upgrading Solaris systems. There will be as well some tutorials about Solaris on laptops, especialy AMD Ferrari and Thinkpad T43. This is work in progress !

Disks and Filesystems

A section dedicated to Solaris filesystems and how to manage disks under Solaris OE. Applies to Solaris: 7, 8, 9, 10+.

Monitoring, Observability and Debug

Observability and monitoring is a very important part of every SysAdmin's work. The way how we monitor and observe, basically understand our systems, is not an easy task. Many operating systems have different tools to accomplish these goals but Solaris has a big number of such utilities created over years to make your life easier. Some are process or system centric: mdb, ptools, kmdb, truss, sotruss, DTrace, prstat, etc.

This section will go in detail and will list several good tools which you should know to master.

Multimedia under Solaris

Darwin Streaming Server

Web services under Solaris

Java on Solaris

Administrative Scripts

Simple utilities easy to use for: process management, disk accounting.

Script	Category	Description	Date
dur	files/directory	A simple perl utility to report disk/directory usage. Uses File::Find module.	2007-05-20
pcollector	process management	process collector, a ksh utility to report process metrics: number of lwps, number of file descriptors, RSS and VSZ. Notice: needs update and most likely to be rewritten in Perl or C for speed.	2004-10-13

Files/Directories

dur is a simple Perl utility to generate disk usage reports. The program can compute total disk usage by directories or files.
A simple top 5 big files is generated by default, starting from a given directory.


$ dur
USAGE: dur [-d] [-Tn] [-s secs] directory
Options:
    -d          Report subdirectories usage only
    -Tn         Sort top n big files, default 5
    -s secs     Search for files older than number of secs
eg, 
    dur /usr                     # top 5 big files for /usr
    dur .                        # top 5 big files for . 
    dur -T20 /                   # top 20 big files for /
    dur -d /opt 2>/dev/null      # directory usage for /opt
    dur -s1200  /                # top 5 big files older than
                                 #  20 minutes for /
    dur -s86400 /                # top 5 big files older than
                                 #  1 day for /

$ dur /opt 2>/dev/null 
Processing...
    84 MB => /opt/SUNWspro/contrib/xemacs-21.4.12/xemacs_sources/xemacs-sumo-2003-02-05.tar
    51 MB => /opt/bea9/weblogic92/server/lib/weblogic.jar
    50 MB => /opt/bea9/weblogic92/samples/domains/medrec/servers/MedRecServer/data/store/diagnostics/WLS_DIAGNOSTICS000000.DAT
    47 MB => /opt/bea9/weblogic92/samples/domains/medrec/pointbase.log
    45 MB => /opt/java/jdk1.6.0_01/jre/lib/rt.jar
Elapsed: 3.83 seconds
Total files processed: 96854


$ dur -d /opt 2>/dev/null
Processing directories...
  1129 MB => SUNWspro
  1115 MB => SUNWmlib
   868 MB => csw
   499 MB => bea9
   375 MB => openoffice.org2.2
   369 MB => staroffice8
   317 MB => java
   232 MB => SUNWwbsvr
   199 MB => SUNWappserver
   186 MB => netbeans-5.5
    91 MB => sfw
    49 MB => netbeans
    38 MB => perl5.8.8
    23 MB => OSOL0chime
    12 MB => jakarta-jmeter-2.2
     6 MB => BitchX
     1 MB => SUNWits
     1 MB => DTT
     0 MB => jvmstat
     0 MB => weblogic
     0 MB => openoffice
     0 MB => perl
     0 MB => lost+found
Total directories processed: 23

Process Management

pcollector is a program used to gather several process metrics: number of lwps, number of file descriptors,
the total resident segment size and virtual memory size segment. The utility works against a pid or a list of processes.


$ pcollector

Usage:  pcollector [options] pid1 [pid2...pidn]
Options:
        -m minutes      the recording time in minutes
        -h hours        the recording time in hours
        -d days         he recording time in days
        -i interval     the time interval between samples
        -p plugin       enable collection mode
        -c CID          collection id
        -v|V            version information

If no interval is specified 10 seconds step is applied


$ pcollector -i5 6278

SunOS earth 5.11 snv_55b i386   2007/05/20

time       process name             fds    nlwp         vsz         rss
18:00:35   firefox-bin               41       7      102044       48000
18:00:40   firefox-bin               41       7      102044       48000
18:00:45   firefox-bin               41       7      102044       48000
18:00:50   firefox-bin               41       7      102044       48000

References

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Created: 2006-12-24
Last updated: 2007-05-18