Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

The ramblings of an Australian SaND TSC* Principal Field Technologist

* Solaris and Network Domain Technology Support Centre - The group I work for

Tags

(update 1) acoustic bind birthday blues bugs cec cec2007 cec2008 china cmt contention cringley debugging dogs dtrace earthquake encumbered-binaries extra flash funny google guitar halloween huron install kids linux liveupgrade locking mdb music mysql newyear niagra openjava opensolaris oracle patches patents percussion performance redhat secondlife security solaris sru sun support sxcr t2 t2000 timeslider ufs upgrade virtualbox windows youtube zfs
« Previous day (Apr 9, 2005) | Main | Next day (Apr 11, 2005) »
pageicon Monday Apr 11, 2005

The Latest Brew

I noted back here about what I did with my latest brew, but didn't comment any further.

OK, It took some time to get the Specific Gravity down to something reasonable to bottle, but it finally got there. I cracked open the first bottle about two weeks ago.

Definitely interesting. It's certainly got a strong flavour. I find I like it best if I take a large mouthful at the beginning. I certainly like it.

My neighbour just let me try one of his latest that was very differeent. Along with the 1.7kg kit mix, he added the 1kg of sugar and 500g of honey. The taste is nothing short of amazing. Scarily drinkable. I think, I might throw some into my next brew :)

Technorati Tag:

Posted at 06:36PM Apr 11, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Brewing  |  Comments[1]

Pseudo-Terminal Allocation Before Solaris 8

My brother was having some problems with his Solaris 7 systems running out of pty's. We managed another workaround that enabled him to login and sort things out (which I might discuss later), but he'd been searching the web for information on this and turned up www.xegypt.net/articles/os/ptys.txt. I'm going to quote part of the page, but before I do, Let me say this right now, ...

DO NOT DO THIS. IT IS RISKY, WRONG AND YOU COULD PANIC YOUR SYSTEM.

The riskier way, and which I have personally confirmed to be working is done on-the-fly by writing symbols in the kernel image. Advantage? You don't have to reboot. As root, type this:

#adb -k -w /dev/ksyms /dev/mem
pt_cnt/W80
npty/W80 
$q

The problem with doing this is that Solaris uses the boot-time values to allocate various structures associated with ptys, including a number of arrays (ptms_tty[] and pty_softc[]). If we change pt_cnt and/or npty on the fly, we risk working with memory beyond what was allocated to these arrays.

At best it will write over some data that we aren't using. At worst we could panic the box by writing to unmapped memory, or worse again, we could silently modify data associated with another part of the kernel.

The only way to increase the number of ptys on Solaris 7 and earlier involves a reboot and is the first method that he recommended.

The more reliable way to do this is to append the following two lines in /etc/system and rebooting:

set npty=128
set pt_cnt=128

The issue went away with Solaris 8, at that point pty allocation became dynamic.

Technorati Tag:

Posted at 12:24PM Apr 11, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[2]