Life is a State of Mind » UNIX

Grumbles about Solaris

snolan — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:27:18 +0000

Grumble, the fact that modern day and currently patched Solaris 10 does not support the -maxdepth option in it’s included find command is a real pain. So I spent this morning grabbing the findutils package, which meant grabbing the libintl package (it is one of several dependencies) and checking to make sure our already installed gcc, libiconv, libgcc, and coreutils packages were installed and up to date.

Of course, we manage our server deployments from a build repository, so once these packages are built we can deploy them to dozens of servers with very little effort, and that means doing the build, and setting everything up in the deployment; so I spent several hours getting the silly -maxdepth option working on our Solaris farm of servers. It just works in Linux; so why do we do Solaris again?

Thank you Sunfreeware.com for making all these packages easy to search, dependency check, and grab. As BobP is fond of saying: “Naked UNIX is an ugly thing!”

Moved an Oracle Database Today

snolan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:26:59 +0000

Yesterday and today my co-workers and I moved a big Oracle database from one old Sun V440 (anyone want to buy some Sun gear?) to a newer Sun T2000. I love my work, it’s fascinating to plan minimal downtime, and try to get all the details right on the new server so the users and customers notice very little change other than everything just works faster.

Sadly, this time, we managed to miss a lot of custom configuration that had never been documented before; but it is now… and we are exhausted, and very happy to have production running on our new box. We’ll save 15 amps of power (those old Sun V440 and StorEdge 3500 trays burn lots of electricity).

I love my job…. Now if I could just figure out why Sun changes pooladm, pset, and zonecfg syntax with every patch bundle….

Good Day at Work

snolan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:51:41 +0000

Got to help an old friend get set up at work today, as he is starting as a contractor.

Also got to use the rpcinfo, fuser, umount, killall, and mount commands again for the first time in nearly a decade… I love me some UNIX-foo, but NFS still sucks (though it fills the void).

Built more Xen virtualized opensuse 11 servers on top of opensuse 11 on HP Blade servers; fun, fun, fun.
Did I mention how much I loath MSIE and HP for making certain iLO features only work in MSIE? At least that part is short and most of the work can be done from command line and Firefox.