Sun Solaris System Admin » solaris

GNU Tools out of the box in Solaris 11

admin — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:39:40 +0000

Leaving aside the performance improvements and re-engineering and architectural changes in Solaris 11, one of the significant and noticeable changes that comes along with Solaris 11 is the introduction of a lot of GNU tools out of the box. To make it even better, they replace the UNIX default versions.

This is my opinion is significant shift in approach from Sun (Oracle) for good reasons allowing users, admins to use more powerful features of the GNU tools that were missing from the default versions.

To mention a couple,

1. With GNU find utility, you have more control on your ability to search with features like the depth of the directories in recursive searches.

2. With GNU tar utility, you can now tar and gunzip togethor in a single command.

All the installed GNU tools are under

/usr/gnu/bin

and the following is the list of GNU tools available out of the box with the default installation:

awk

basename

captoinfo

cat

chgrp

chmod

chown

chroot

cksum

clear

cmp

comm

cp

csplit

cut

date

dd

df

diff

diff3

diffmk

dirname

du

echo

egrep

env

eqn

expand

expr

factor

false

fgrep

find

fmt

fold

grep

grn

groups

head

hostid

id

indxbib

infocmp

infotocap

join

kill

link

ln

logname

ls

make

mkdir

mkfifo

mknod

mktemp

mv

ncurses5-config

neqn

nice

nl

nohup

nroff

od

paste

patch

pathchk

pic

pr

printf

pwd

refer

reset

rm

rmdir

sdiff

sed

sh

sleep

soelim

sort

split

stty

sum

sync

tail

tar

tee

test

tic

toe

touch

tput

tr

true

tset

tsort

tty

uname

unexpand

uniq

unlink

uptime

wc

which

who

whoami

xargs

yes

BASE_CONFIG: JS_install_patchclust: Unable to locate patch

admin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:51:37 +0000

You may find the following error in your JET build install logs:

WARNING: BASE_CONFIG: JS_install_patchclust: Unable to locate patch 119545-03

Recently, when building servers using Sun JET (SUNWjet), I found that the patches from the Sun recommended Patch cluster is not installed as a part of the JET build. Digging deeper, I found the above error messages in the Jet install logs.

Further digging and found that sometime after May 2009, Sun recommended patch cluster directory structure has changed where in there is a subdirectory called “patches” has been created and all the patches are now placed into this subdirectory.

If you check the patch_cluster.conf file, the following line exists:

patches_subdir=”patches”

But, JET doesn’t seem to recognise this change and the “patches_subdir” entry in the patch_cluster.conf file.

To resolve (rather workaround) the problem, simply create symbolic links in the root directory of the patch_cluster as follows:

# cd 10_x86_Recommended

# for patches in `cat patch_order`

# do

# ln -s patches/$patches .

# done

This should create the sym links of each of the patches under th patch cluster root directory and fix the problem.

You should now the following logs instead of the warning above:

BASE_CONFIG: <<< 119545-03 (405 of 433) >>>

tcpdrop – Drop TCP connections in Solaris

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:07:33 +0000

tcpdrop is a free utility to drop an established TCP connection in Sun solaris. It is a port of the tcpdrop utility from FreeBSD and openBSD. tcpdrop doesn’t do what it says on the tin and nothing more but does it very well. tcpdrop works in Solaris 10,9,8

Let’s put it to work. tcpdrop solaris package is available for download from www.sunfreeware.com. Click one of the following links for Solaris 10 for x86 or SPARC.

tcpdrop (Solaris 10 – SPARC)

tcpdrop (Solaris 10 – x86)

Once downloaded unzip and install tcpdrop as follows:

# gunzip tcpdrop_solaris-20080516-sol10-x86-local.gz

# pkgadd -d tcpdrop_solaris-20080516-sol10-x86-local

The following packages are available:

1 SMCtcpdr tcpdrop_solaris

(x86) 20080516

Select package(s) you wish to process (or ‘all’ to process

all packages). (default: all) [?,??,q]:

Processing package instance from

tcpdrop_solaris(x86) 20080516

Ceri Davies

Using as the package base directory.

## Processing package information.

## Processing system information.

2 package pathnames are already properly installed.

## Verifying disk space requirements.

## Checking for conflicts with packages already installed.

## Checking for setuid/setgid programs.

Installing tcpdrop_solaris as

## Installing part 1 of 1.

/usr/local/bin/tcpdrop

/usr/local/doc/tcpdrop/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE

/usr/local/doc/tcpdrop/README

/usr/local/man/man8/tcpdrop.8

[ verifying class ]

Installation of was successful.

I’m testing on Solaris 10 9/10 (x86).

# cat /etc/release
Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 s10x_u9wos_14a X86
Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Assembled 11 August 2010

I’ve established two ssh connections to the server.

# netstat -an|grep EST
192.168.1.66.22 192.168.1.65.49980 15872 51 49640 0 ESTABLISHED
192.168.1.66.22 192.168.1.65.50050 16640 0 49640 0 ESTABLISHED

Add /usr/local/bin to the PATH environment variable if it isn’t already there.

To drop a connection, the syntax for tcpdrop is

# tcpdrop

In our case, to disconnect the 2nd connection,

# tcpdrop 192.168.1.66 22 192.168.1.65 50050
192.168.1.66:22 <-> 192.168.1.65:50050: dropped

where

192.168.1.66 is the local server IP

22 is the TCP port SSH server that we are listening for a connection

192.168.1.65 is the client IP

50050 is the source port of the clients ssh connection.

Let’s check netstat now:

# netstat -an|grep EST
192.168.1.66.22 192.168.1.65.49980 16896 67 49640 0 ESTABLISHED

There it is the connection is dropped!

Configure Link based IPMP in Solaris

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:05:23 +0000

For long we used Tracking IP basd IPMP wherein we track the availability of a gateway on the network using ICMP Echo request. When the gateway IP fails to respond it is considered link is unavailable and NIC fails over to the standby NIC in the IPMP group.

The biggest disadvantage here is that we use 3 IP addresses:

1 for the Virtual IP

1 for the active NIC

1 for the Standby NIC

and ofcourse the overhead of the ICMP echo requests sent every seconds.

This can be overcome using the Link based IPMP configuration where you only need only IP Address and there is no overhead of ICMP messages and the failover delay is lot lesser than that of the tracking method. And the added advantage of a very simple configuration.

To configure Link based IPMP, create the hostname. files for the Active NIC and the standby NIC. For instance here, we use the bge0 and bge3 NICs as the IPMP pair where bge0 is active and bge3 is standby and hence the files hostname.bge0 and hostname.bge3.

root@solaris10:/etc # ls -l hostname*

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 55 May 6 11:23 hostname.bge0

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 23 May 6 11:23 hostname.bge3

Edit the hostname.bge0 file and enter the following:

root@solaris10:/etc # vi hostname.bge0

solaris10 netmask + broadcast + group sol10-ipmp up

where,

“solaris10” is the hostname which should have a corresponding host entry in the /etc/hosts file.

sol10-ipmp is the name of the IPMP group.

Edit the hostname.bge3 and the following

root@solaris10:/etc # vi hostname.bge3

group sol10-ipmp up

Here as you can see the standby NIC only has IPMP group configuration. This is all is needed to setup Link based IPMP. When the server is rebooted this configuration should take effect

To do this on the fly, we can use the ifconfig command:

NIC bge0

root@solaris10:/etc # ifconfig bge0 plumb

root@solaris10:/etc # ifconfig bge0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 group sol10-ipmp up

NIC bge3

root@solaris10:/etc # ifconfig bge3 plumb

root@solaris10:/etc # ifconfig bge3 group sol10-ipmp up

root@solaris10:/etc # ifconfig -a

lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1

inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000

bge0: flags=1000843 mtu 1500 index 2

inet 192.168.0.1 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255

groupname sol10-ipmp

ether 0:a:1d:ee:ab:cd

bge3: flags=1000843 mtu 1500 index 5

inet 0.0.0.0 netmask ff000000 broadcast 0.255.255.255

groupname sol10-ipmp

ether 0:a:1d:ee:ab:d2

This should do.

To test failover, you can do the hard way of pulling the cables or use if_mpadm command as follows:

To failover:

root@solaris10:/etc # if_mpadm -d bge0

To failback

root@solaris10:/etc # if_mpadm -r bge0

Error ‘shmget’ call failed with error number 22 (Invalid argument)

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:16:04 +0000

The following error on the Sybase ASE intalled on Sun Solaris can occur if the Maximum shared memory allocated is max’d out or if none is allocated, it takes the default value which is “Total Physical Memory /4″.

Backup Server: 4.142.2.58: [0] The ‘shmget’ call failed with error number 22 (Invalid argument). Refer to your operating system documentation for further details.

To confirm, if maximum shared memory has been manually set,

# projects -l

user.asetest
projid : 101
comment: “Sybase ASE”
users : (none)
groups : (none)
attribs: project.max-shm-memory=(privileged,4294967296,deny)

For instance, here we have set the Maximum Shared memory to 4GB to the user account which owns and runs the Sybase ASE. And, the last line “attribs: project.max-shm-memory=(privileged,4294967296,deny)” basically, sets the maximum shared memory for the user processes to 4GB (4294967296).

This is equivalent to doing

# cat /etc/projects

If something similar doesn’t exist then the ASE is using the system defaults.

In any case, we need to increase the Maximum Shared memory. In our case increasing it to 7GB fixed the problem.

To add a new Project entry,

# projadd -p 101 -U asetest -c “Sybase ASE” -K “max-shm-memory=(privileged,7GB,deny)” user.asetest

This would create a new project with ID 101, name user.asetest for user asetest and set the Maximum Shared Memory to 7GB.

To modify an existing Project entry,

# projmod -sK “project.max-shm-memory=(privileged,7GB,deny)” user.asetest

This should help!

How to find System Serial Number in x86 using ipmitool

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:10:17 +0000

As we discussed earlier here, you can find the serial number of a Sun Hardware using the utility “sneep”. However, in Sun X86 systems, you can use the pre-installed tool “ipmitool” to find the system serial number. It is not as straight forward as sneep but still is simpl procedure.

Run the command

# ipmitool fru | grep “Product Serial”

where “FRU” is a Field Replaceable Unit. The problem here is it’s going to output too many serial numbers to confuse. The one we are interested is a 10 digit alpha-numeric number.

However, extending the command as

# ipmitool fru print |egrep “Mainboard|/SYS” | awk ‘{print $7}’
91)

Would give you the ID number of the “/SYS” or “Mainboard” (91 here) which mostly has the serial number of the system. We then run the “ipmitool” as follows with that ID number to find the system serial number.

# ipmitool fru print 91 |grep “Product Serial” | awk ‘{print $4}’

where “91″ was the ID number.

Install Sybase Perl module in Solaris 10

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:01:53 +0000

Installing Perl modules in Sun Solaris is not as straight forward but is not very difficult as well. Perl module installations in Sun Solaris needs GNU Make rather than the default make tool installed. And, requires using perlgcc to build the Makefile.PL than the default perl binary.

Installing Sybase Perl Module requires the following preinstalled

1. Sybase Server/Client already installed on your server
2. GNU Make

Install GNU Make

Assuming you have already installed Sybase Server/Client on your system, lets download and install GNU Make.

GNU Make package can be downloaded from sunfreeware.com website. At the time of writing, the version available for download is Make 3.81

Download GNU Make for Solaris 10 (SPARC)

Download Make for Solaris 10 (x86)

Unzip and Install GNU Make

From the directory where the file is downloaded

# gunzip make-3.81-sol10-x86-local.gz
# pkgadd -d make-3.81-sol10-x86-local

This should install “make” under /usr/local/bin

# which make
/usr/local/bin/make

Download Perl Modules from www.cpan.org. The modules we are interested in are

1. DBI (Database Independent Interface for Perl)

2. DBD::Sybase (Sybase database Driver for the DBI module)

NOTE: I find in Solaris 10 Update 6, DBI module is already installed which means we only need to install DBD::Sybase module.

To verify either of the modules is already installed on the system,

For DBI, file DBI.pm should exist under

x86

/usr/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.4/i86pc-solaris-64int/DBI.pm

SPARC

/usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4/sun4-solaris-64int/DBI.pm

For DBD::Sybase

x86

/usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4/i86pc-solaris-64int/DBD/Sybase.pm

SPARC

/usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4/sun4-solaris-64int/DBD/Sybase.pm

Now, assuming both these modules are not installed

Install Perl DBI Module

Download the DBI Module from here

From the download directory,

# gunzip DBI-1.609.tar.gz
# tar -xvf DBI-1.609.tar
# cd DBI-1.609

The above steps should (g)unzip, untar the downloaded source files.

Export $SYBASE & $LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables. We have the Sybase client installed under

/opt/sybase/oc15.0-EBF16084/OCS-15_0

which means the libraries exist under

/opt/sybase/oc15.0-EBF16084/OCS-15_0/lib

# export SYBASE=/opt/sybase/oc15.0-EBF16084/OCS-15_0
# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/sybase/oc15.0-EBF16084/OCS-15_0/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

If this step is skipped, the following error comes up in the next step:

Can’t find the lib directory under /export/home/sybase! at Makefile.PL line 118, line 44.

Now comes the tricky bit, use /usr/perl5/bin/perlgcc instead of default perl as follows:

# /usr/perl5/bin/perlgcc Makefile.PL

Let’s now compile and install using GNU Make from source directory

# /usr/local/bin/make
# /usr/local/bin/make test
# /usr/local/bin/make install

To make sure the install compelted successfully. Check if the DBI.pm file exists as shown earlier.

Install Perl DBD::Sybase module

Download DBD::Sybase perl module from here.

From the downloaded directory:

# gunzip DBD-Sybase-1.09.tar.gz
# tar -xvf DBD-Sybase-1.09.tar
# cd DBD-Sybase-1.09

The above should (g)unzip, untar the downloaded file and change into the source directory.

Export the $SYBASE & $LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables if you have already not done so.

# export SYBASE=/opt/sybase/oc15.0-EBF16084/OCS-15_0
# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/sybase/oc15.0-EBF16084/OCS-15_0/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Run perlgcc against the Makefile.PL as follows:

# /usr/perl5/bin/perlgcc Makefile.PL

Select the default CHAIN mode or modify as required, then enter the Sybase Server, a Sybase Username and password and a Database as and when promted. This will allow the installation test connection. Make sure this DB connection is updated in the Sybase “interfaces” file.

NOTE: Once the installation is completed. Either the PWD file created by this procedure or the entire Source directory should be deleted as the PWD file will contain these DB access details. Also, it is advisable to provide a test DB access detail rather than a live environment.

Let’s now compile and install using GNU Make from source directory

# /usr/local/bin/make

Now, re-export $SYBASE as follows:

# export SYBASE=/opt/sybase/oc15.0-EBF16084

[NOTE: This may vary in your environment]

# /usr/local/bin/make test
# /usr/local/bin/make install

This should install the Sybase Perl module. To confirm the installation was successful, look for Sybase.pm as explained earlier.

How to find list of files installed by a package

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:20:32 +0000

“pkginfo” command can be useful in Solaris to give a detailed listing of a package including the details of number of installed files, pathnames, directories and executables as follows:

# pkginfo -l SUNWlibgcrypt
PKGINST: SUNWlibgcrypt
NAME: Libgcrypt – Cryptographic Library
CATEGORY: EVO146,application,JDS3
ARCH: sparc
VERSION: 1.1.12,REV=10.0.3.2004.12.15.17.57
BASEDIR: /usr
VENDOR: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
DESC: Libgcrypt – Cryptographic Library
PSTAMP: fire420041215175708
INSTDATE: Sep 15 2008 12:08
HOTLINE: Please contact your local service provider
STATUS: completely installed
FILES: 6 installed pathnames
2 shared pathnames
2 directories
2 executables
595 blocks used (approx)

But, if you want to see what those files and directories are then “pkgchk” should be your toy. The following should show the list of files and pathnames installed by the package:

# pkgchk -l SUNWlibgcrypt|egrep “Pathname|Type”
Pathname: /usr/bin
Type: directory
Pathname: /usr/bin/libgcrypt-config
Type: regular file
Pathname: /usr/lib
Type: directory
Pathname: /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so
Type: symbolic link
Pathname: /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.1
Type: symbolic link
Pathname: /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.1.5.1
Type: regular file

OBP Error: FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:03:32 +0000

When you run any boot command like “boot net” or “boot -s” from the OK prompt (OBP), you may end up with the error

FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled

Don’t panic!!!

This error indicates that interrupted the boot process prematurely, most likely when the memory checks were run with “STOP + A” or a break from console.

To resolve this problem simply Power OFF and power ON the system. Alternatively, you can perform a “reset-all” from the OK prompt.

This should help!

How to remove ^M characters from file in Unix/Solaris

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:12:43 +0000

When you sometimes copy a file from Windows to UNIX/Solaris or even Linux systems, you can find these anooying ^M characters everywhere. This is because, the file from Windows is in DOS (ASCII) format and needs to be converted to ISO format.

There are many ways to do this. Let’s start with the easy one look at each of them

1. Use dos2unix utility

Solaris pre-installs dos2unix utility into the system to do this job for you. As the name says, it converts the file from DOS format to UNIX format. To do this the syntax is

# dos2unix

for instance

# dos2unix test.txt test2.txt

Where the test.txt is the file you want the ^M characters removed and test2.txt is the file stripped of the ^M characters.

You may also overwrite the existing file by mentioning the source and destination files as same:

# dos2unix test.txt test.txt

2. Using VI

Open the file with “vi” editor and type the following:

:%s/^M//g

NOTE: To get the ^M in there, you should type CTRL+V+M

3. Using “tr” utility

“tr” utility is used to translate characters. Using with “-d” deletes a listed string.

# tr -d ‘\r’ >

Alternatively, use its octel representation as follows:

# tr -d ‘\015′