BigAdmin: BigAdmin

Think you know your stuff? OK.

Answer this:

Which command would search the man pages using a keyword?

• man -d keyword
• man -k keyword
• man -s keyword
• man -l keyword

You peeked, didn't you? Yes, it's man -k. Try this one:

Given:

fsck -y /dev/rdsk/c3t4d0s3
ls -l /export/home/lost+found
#1377

Which condition would place an entry in the lost+found directory of the filesystem being checked?

• An inode that is allocated,but unreferenced or not linked to a directory.
• A file that no longer has a valid user on the system.
• An inode that has a value that exceeds the number of files a user is allowed.
• The file contents are intact, but the inode is missing.

That question is from Part I of the Certified Solaris Sysadmin assessment. It has 48 questions. There's also a Part II. You wanna see one of the questions from Part II?

Are you sure?

OK. Here it is.

A mile long train is traveling toward a mile long tunnel with 3 Solaris sysadmins on board. If Haiduong the sysadmin has a bag with 74.6 apples, Matson the database admin is half way through his package of Oreos, and Rohit the IT manager is on page 12 of the first volume of Proust's 7-volume "In Search of Lost Time" in the original French, how long will the train take to get through the tunnel if Haiduong has spent 2/3 of her lunch money and Matson doesn't like Rohit's tie?

• 17 minutes and 14 seconds
• # coreadmin -e proce_setid prxreqset_t 'struct ssd array' | format
• Matson doesn't like Oreos
• Sun xVM Ops Center would let 6 trains get through the tunnel on the same set of rails

By the way, the first question was from the Unix Essentials assessment. It only has 42 questions.

You can take these assessments for free. And no, you don't have to register. There's a very short form to fill out, but if you are paranoid or just plain evil, you can enter your name and the email address of your girlfriend's new boyfriend. Or you can leave it empty. You'll still get to take the test. And get an immediate score. If you would like your score e-mailed to you, then enter your own email address. We are also happy to email your score to your girlfriend's new boyfriend.

What's cool about these assessments is that they'll give you an idea of which sysadmin class you might wanna take. Or whether you're ready to act like a man and just take the certification exam, already.

At this point Sun lets you test your Solaris 10 know-how at three different levels:

• UNIX Essentials Featuring the Solaris 10 Operating System
• Sun Certified System Administrator (SCSA) for the Solaris 10 OS (Part 1)
• Sun Certified System Administrator (SCSA) for the Solaris 10 OS (Part 2)

For more info about Sun's training classes and certification exams for OS, software, database, and storage sysadmins, see:

http://www.sun.com/training

Just a couple of years ago BigAdmin used to receive about 50 submissions per month from the community, and maybe one or two feature articles from inside Sun.

Over the last year the monthly submissions have averaged closer to 100 from the community and about a dozen from Sun. (That's not counting the BigAdmin wiki.) Some of the community submissions are duplicates, some we can't use, so we wind up publishing about 75% of them. That includes scripts, tech tips, command sequences, and links to useful resources.

More content is good because you have a better chance of finding what you're looking for, but it can be bad if there's too much in the way. Since we don't want BigAdmin to turn into FatAdmin, we're working on some improvements. We'll introduce them a little at a time.

One of them is a new Categories pull-down menu for our feature articles:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features

We divided our feature articles into these categories:

• Configuration
• General
• Development
• Hardware
• Interoperability
• Java Deployment
• Middleware
• Migration
• Networking
• OS
• Patches
• Performance
• Security
• Solaris
• Storage
• System Management
• Virtualization
• Web

Those are the categories we've been using for a quite a while throughout BigAdmin. We want to update and streamline them just a bit. Not yet, though. More small improvements coming down the road. If you have something in mind, don't hesitate to speak up.

- Rick and the BigAdmin Crew

Imagine lying in a hammock on the beach in Baja California listening to the surf pounding and the seagulls squawking, once in a while lifting an eyelid to check the progress of the backup you're running, idly waving a hand in the air while revisiting the memory of your Old Man's lectures about how when he was a sysadmin he had to walk up the stairs both ways to get in or out of the office, and he was always carrying a 25 lb monitor on his shoulder. His office, of course, was a windowless dungeon three stories under a landfill. No wonder he drank himself to death.

Not you. Because your office is on the playa in Baja where the bongos begin to beat before dinner and even the drinks have umbrellas. Thanks to ILOM.

ILOM, which stands for "Integrated Lights Out Manager" but really means "I Laugh On Mondays," lets you control the server room in Cleveland from your laptop in, well, you decide. Here's how...

On the server side of the wire, ILOM is a service processor with firmware that comes pre-installed on Sun's newer servers and blades. It lets you manage the server without consuming server resources and continues running on standby power even when the server has been turned off.

On the hammock side of the wire, ILOM is a user interface that lets you monitor and control the performance of server components, including environmental conditions, voltage, power, and signals. It also lets you apply firmware patches, manage faults, inventory, and more.

It's actually not one user interface, but several: command-line (hoo-rah!), web browser, SNMP, and IPMI, which you can run independently or integrated within management platforms from our friends at IBM, Microsoft, HP, Computer Associates, and BMC.

To find out more, check out the latest article by the Doc team shivering in Sun's Burlington, Massachusetts campus (well, those who haven't been logging in from Baja since November):

Overview of Integrated Lights Out Manager (pdf)

If you'd like to comment on the article, be sure to check out the wiki

Now I know how The President feels. Peter Fernandez, director of Information Products for our middleware, which includes Java Enterprise System (JES), pointed out something pretty cool that's been happening on BigAdmin for several months. We dropped a bomb on who? Why didn't you tell me?!

According to Peter, for the past few months the Java ES SysAdmin Hub has provided a listing (updated monthly) of SWI documents published or updated on docs.sun.com in the preceding 3 months. The listing is divided across hub pages by language, which has made some of our Japanese customers very happy.

The work going on in the Java ES SysAdmin Hub is particularly cool because for the past year we've been slowly making BigAdmin more international. Beneath the Message of the Day (MOTD) box, for instance, just below the link to the MOTD archive, you'll see a small box with three languages. Clicking on it will take you to BigAdmin's Multilingual (ML) Hub. The ML hub provides articles in these languages:

• Japanese
• Simplified Chinese
• Spanish
• Korean
• French
• Traditional Chinese

And, we just received a tech tip in Portuguese!

These are just the first steps in what we hope will be a gradual transformation of BigAdmin into a fully multi-lingual site. They're only the first steps, but already they've been well received. Last quarter, thanks to the efforts of Michael Monaghan, Kimm Yeo, Christoff Pintaske and their crew, plus BigAdmin's very own Robert Weeks, the Multilingual Hub won the People's Choice Award at Sun. (No cash, no Fiji, no trophies. Just glory.) We'll make the transformation gradual so you don't lose your landmarks, but little by little it should help out sysadmins who prefer to cronjob in their native tongue.

?Que te parece, Panchito?

Getting back to the JES hub, the February update (covering docs published in Nov, Dec, and Jan) has just been posted. Check it out:

February Update to JES Documentation in Multiple Languages

It took us a while, but we upgraded the 128 meg memory sticks you can order with your BigAdmin Bucks to the more attractive 2 gig size. Now you can walk around with the collected works of William Shakespeare in 17 different languages hanging off your keychain. Just imagine how good it will feel to let "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow" roll off your tongue when your boss wants to know when you'll be done tuning the database.

There's probably enough room in there to include a picture of every Corvette ever made. In every color. And the entire McMaster-Carr bolt catalog.

Here's the number of bucks you get for each contribution to BigAdmin:

• Link (1 buck)
• Script (5 bucks)
• Short Tech Tip - 1 page or less (10 bucks)
• Regular-Length Tech Tip - 2 to 4 pages (20 Bucks)
• Long Tech Tip/Article - 5+ pages (30 Bucks)
• Long Article - 8 or more pages (40 Bucks)

These rewards apply to contributions to both the hub and the wiki. By the way, don't send us any more excerpts from Sun documentation. We may have fooled us once or twice before, but we memorized it all, so you won't get away with that again.

We are wicked sorry it took so long to improve our goodies. To make up for our delay, we're reducing the number of bucks it takes to get a stick. For a limited time, instead of 20 bucks, they will cost 12 bucks.

photo of '63 Corvette Stingray courtesy of Flickr

Keeping up with your questions on the recent BigAdmin XPerts session on patching left our expert, Enda O'Connor, exhausted, and no doubt contributed to the birth of his first child a few weeks later.

Since Enda put his wife through all that trouble, you might want to make him feel better by checking out the rest of the work done by our team of stalwart and dedicated patching engineers:

Patch Resource Center

The Patch Corner Blog

By the way, this content was gathered, organized, and written by a group of people who came from different parts of Sun but were embarrassed by how painful the patching experience is for our sysadmins. So we got together and decided to do something about it. We didn't have the budget to create better tools and besides, somebody else is working on that, but we figured we could help by putting all the instructions and lore in one place.

For more on the art of creating sensationalist headlines, see your favorite news source and mine, The Onion. My favorite among their recent headlines:

Shak Terrified Of Phoenix Suns After Reading About Supernovas

If you search through BigAdmin for virtualization topics, you get 5 pages of hits with 64 entries:

Virtualization search results on BigAdmin

Most of the articles published in, or linked to, from BigAdmin focus on Solaris containers, with some mentions of zones and logical domains (LDOMS). This one, published back in the day (2006), is one of my favorites:

The Sun Blueprints Guide to Solaris Containers

For those of us who have been living on the beach in Fiji for the last couple of years, the guide starts with the benefits and basic concepts of virtualization. Then it takes an old-fashioned deep dive into the topic. If you need to understand the whys and hows of virtualization before you make some important decisions, this blueprint is an excellent place to start.

A deep dive is good, really good, but sometimes you need a walk around the pool first, just to make sure the water's warm. So the BigAdmin crew decided to put together a virtualization resource center for our favorite people:

BigAdmin's Most Excellent Virtualization Resource Center for Sysadmins

Best of all, it's got four (4) tabs:

• Overview - with Robert's wicked cool "Most Recent Blogs" window (wait for it)
• Sun Virtualization Resources
• Third Party Virtualization Resources
• Types of Virtualization

Of course we left out Microsoft's virtualization page. Because we're just plain mean. Actually, it's because we heard about it after we were done. We feel terrible. So here it is:

Microsoft's Virtualization Resource Center

LOL. OK. Here's the real one. Honest. I swear:

Microsoft's Real Virtualization Resource Center

In case you hadn't heard, Sun announced the End-of-life (EOL) of the Sun Fire V125, V215, V245 and V445 servers earlier this month. These are the last general-purpose servers based on UltraSPARC IIIi processor that run Solaris 8 or 9.

The last date that you can order these servers is April 11, 2008, and the last date they will ship is July 11, 2008.

Sun is offering several upgrade specials that include Sun support:

• Save 25% on New Eco-Efficient Servers - See more at http://www.sun.com/tradeins/offerings/entry.jsp
• Solaris 8 Migration Assistant - Move your Solaris 8 application to a container running natively on a Solaris 10 system, without application modification or emulation.
• Sun Enterprise Migration Suite - Upgrade both your servers and Solaris OS with Sun Enterprise Migration Suite

As more details become available, I'll try to post them here. For now, if you need more information, contact your authorized Sun representative or partner.

by Karen Perkins

Some of you have been checking out the BigAdmin wiki and posting comments. Some of you have even posted your own content, either on existing wiki pages or on new pages you added. Here’s how to make sure you get your BigAdmin goodies after you post content to the wiki…

1. After posting your content, go to the New and Recently Updated page on the BigAdmin wiki and add a link back to the page where your content lives. Here's how to add that link.
1. If you aren’t logged in, click Log In. (If you are logged in, you'll see "Welcome on the upper right.)
2. Select the Edit tab.
3. Copy the line for an existing link. Link lines start with an asterisk, for example:

   * Oct 26, 2007 - [Conditional Function Definitions in ksh|Conditional function definitions in ksh]

4. Paste the copied link at the top of the list for the current month.
5. Modify the date so it is today’s date.
6. Modify the info between the square brackets ([ and ]) so the name of the page that contains your content appears before and after the “|” symbol.
7. Select the Preview tab to see how your changes look and test your link.
8. When you are done, click Save.
2. Go to the Submit Content page on BigAdmin and fill in the form.

   We can’t give you BigAdmin Bucks until you do this step!

1. Fill in the fields as follows:
   Title of Submission = title of the page that contains your content
   Location = “Use the following URL” and the URL for the page that contains your content
   Language = appropriate language (usually English)
   Resource Contact = your name or email address if you wrote the content; otherwise, contact info (e.g., email address or URL) for whoever wrote the content
   Description = sentence or two describing your new content
   Section = Tech Tips
   Category = appropriate choice (General is often appropriate)
   Collections = one or more of the options, if appropriate, or else leave blank
   Task = appropriate choice (if known)
   Technology = appropriate choice (if known)
   Name = your name
   Email Address = your email address
   Confirm Email Address = your email address
   Company = your company
   
2. Accept the terms and click Submit.
3. Sign up to receive notification about changes made to the page that contains your content.
1. Go to the page that contains your content.
2. Click the Envelope icon (Watch This Page) at the top right next to the Star icon. You then receive email whenever a reader posts a comment at the bottom of your page.
3. To reply to a reader's comment, follow the "How to Leave Comments or Tag Pages" instructions on the wiki home page.

As of today we have two experts in Patching manning a single BigAdmin XPerts session.

• Enda O'Connor, a senior engineer in the Solaris Patch System Test team
• Arindam Sarkar, a senior engineer in the Solaris Sustaining organization.

Enda and Arindam have extensive experience with Solaris patching mechanisms and tools, and how to make them work with Solaris zones, JumpStart, LiveUpgrade, and other sysadmin tools. You can find out more about Enda, Arindam, and patching at the Patches Session.