BigAdmin: BigAdmin

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.

Not long ago Sun bought me a new laptop so I could work while on the road. I haven't owned a laptop in years because I use a SunRay at home and, when I fly into another Sun office, I just log into a local SunRay and pick up where I left off. But lately I've been finding the need to work in places that don't have SunRays. Ergo my HP (Compaq) nc6320. (Shhhhh. I love this thing.)

Being a loyal Sun employee, the first thing I did was partition my hard drive and install Solaris. Not. First thing I did was install the Thunder-Max ECM tuning software from Zippers so I could fine-tune my Harley without having to lug my big ol' PC from inside the house to the garage, only to lug it back when I was done.

That there is what you call a win-win situation.

Unfortunately, my hopes and dreams were dashed when I was unable to locate the mini-CD with the driver for the USB-to-serial cable that I used to connect the laptop to the bike's engine control module (ECM).

Curses.

So I went online. And searched. And googled. And searched some more. Drove me freakin nuts. I must have spent two hours trying to find a device driver for a simple cable connector. Nothing doing.

So I got in the car and drove to Radio Shack and bought a whole new freakin cable -$35.00 bucks' worth-- just so I'd have the driver. Can you believe that?

You can imagine how anxious I now was to install Solaris, a whole new OS, on my PC. Installation would take a few minutes, and hunting down the device drivers would take the rest of my life. Well, as it turns out, BigAdmin has just released version 2.0 of the wicked cool Device Detection Tool. I've been told that in just a couple of minutes this tool can figure out which drivers Solaris 10 needs to support the devices installed on my x86/x64 system. It ouputs a table that indicates which drivers are available for each device, and whether they are built into the Solaris OS, available in OpenSolaris.org or provided by a third party.

Well, you know what that means. I gotta try it out. OK. I will. I promise. Just as soon as I finish tuning my Harley. Here's some more info about the tool, in case you want to try it first.

The Device Detection Tool 2.0 will search through devices installed on these versions of Solaris, Windows, and Linux:

Solaris 10

• Solaris 10 x86/x64 updates
• Solaris Express, Developer Edition x86/x64 updates

Linux OS:

• All Linux 2.6 kernel x86/x86_64 distributions

Windows

• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows 2000

You can access the tool here:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.html

By the way, in case you're curious, I was able to improve the base performance numbers on my 07 Road King Classic:

HP: 66.26 --> 75.22
TQ: 80.31 lb-ft --> 87.41 lb-ft

Did that with the Crossroads Mali air cleaner and breather, and a set of quiet Fullsac slip-ons that I got wicked cheap because they were blems.



--Rick --

The BigAdmin hub now has content in Chinese and Japanese. You can read and contribute content in either language. We will soon provide the same capability with Spanish. Other languages to follow.

Also be sure to visit the multilingual pages of the BigAdmin wiki:

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

There you can add your own tech tips and comments in your favorite language. Just be sure to add links to two places:

1. The BigAdmin hub
2. The New and Recently Updated page of the BigAdmin wiki.

-Rick