Solaris boot sequence chart

I found this boot chart for opensolaris at EREMIN blog, for sure has a worth to read.


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Fix! FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled

When i was trying to login through Serial Port on our RAC test machines to boot them in single user mode, i got following error i.e.

Err:

FATAL: system is not bootable, boot command is disabled

Cause:

I broke in console prompt before memory initialization completed !

Solution:

{1} ok printenv auto-boot?
auto-boot? = true
{1} ok setenv auto-boot? false
auto-boot? = false
{1} ok reset-all

cheers

Fix, /opt/iplanet/ldap/slapd-hostname/start-slapd: not found

Eric reported me slow login on Solaris 10 machines, i started my investigation from name resolution & i found that the machine was unable to resolve hostname(s) from DNS. initially i was expecting some kind of misconfiguration of resolv.conf but lately i found that DNS server of that environment was down!

So i simply shoot

#svcadm -v restart network/iplanetldap

but found that service did'nt started :(

anyhow with further investigation i found following,

Symptoms:

when you will run svcadm -v restart network/iplanetldap you will get following error in log file i.e.

Error:

# cat /var/svc/log/network-iplanetldap:default.log

[ Oct 18 23:02:34 Executing start method ("/opt/iplanet/ldap/slapd-hostname/start-slapd") ]
/sbin/sh: /opt/iplanet/ldap/slapd-hostname/start-slapd: not found

Hint:

HOSTNAME in error was wrong! so i found the cause, that somehow ldap daemon startup script is not getting correct hostname of the machine.

Fix:

Run following command to check store configuration for ldap daemon.

Step 01: #svccfg export network/iplanetldap > /tmp/ldap-old-config.xml

this will create a file “/tmp/ldap-old-config.xml” you should vi/edit this file & correct hostname inside.

Output of the file is:

bash-3.00# vi /tmp/ldap-old-config.xml

edit following lines:

name='start' type='method' exec='/opt/iplanet/ldap/slapd-hostname/start-slapd' timeout_seconds='60'
name='stop' type='method' exec='/opt/iplanet/ldap/slapd-hostname/stop-slapd' timeout_seconds='60'


Step 02: svccfg import /tmp/ldap-old.xml

Step 03: svcadm -v restart network/iplanetldap

Step 04: svcadm -v clear network/iplanetldap

Step 05: svcs -l network/iplanetldap

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System Administration Best Practices for System Admin Team

After joining System Administrator team, i found that we lack a lot of best practices & then started my research on what could be the best practice guidelines for system administrators... unfortunately i was unable to get any serious & well written sysadmin best practice guide. So finally i decided to write my own :)

this document is not final word from sysadmin world, there may be some best practice points missing, i would appreciate, if you can come up with your suggestions for improvement of this document.

Download:

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Confidence!

sometimes when i am surfing through blogs, i get inspired by people who share their small yet heavily weighted thoughts...same happen when i read Vin Diesel facebook blog post!

"Confidence is the most important thing you can teach someone... if you can teach them confidence, you don't have to teach them anything else."

i agree with his father!

cheers

gunzip, uncompress file.gz to another/different directory

Ariel asked me to help him in unzipping his file.gz which is on a directory/disk that has no space to unzip, he wanted unzip to another directory/disk which had enough space to house unzipped files.

initially i was checking gunzip manual but didn't found any option to do this kind of task, though at freenode someone told me to use zcat instead of gunzip! e.g.

$zcat filename.gz > /path/to/unzipped/file

so sometimes instead of reading command's manual we need to check command's capabilities ;)

cheers