Work

Some times you just have to make do with what you have. So I considered this morning why is it as IT professional we are often told what tool we need to use to do our job. I mean does a carpenter get told what type of saw he need to use? My tool of the trade is a Mac, not because I’m an Apple fan boy ,far from it, but as a functional computer it really does just work. Has access to the tools I need due to it’s Unix heritage, and provides and usable graphical interface for the less technical in the family. ...

A recent post Solaris Packages for Puppet 3.0.0-rc7, Facter 1.6.0 and Hiera 1.0.0 on a puppet mailing list caught my eye. While gems has a nifty little package management system of it’s own, it is possible be that your machines do not have direct access to the interent so having a local IPS repo is handy. I’ll demonstrate how to add these packages to you own repository. This assumes you have already setup your own local repo. ...

Linux kickstart for Solaris Admin’sSo sometimes Solaris Admins need to turn their hand at another OS for various reasons, especial in this day and age of mass production of virtual environments. Solaris Admins will be well versed with jumpstart a tried and truly tested system of automated builds for over a decade now. While recently this system has been thrown out with the bath water for AI in Solaris 11 and while the jury is still out on that one that’s a conversation for another time. ...

This exercise for me is to replace my current single disk rpool, the second disk was removed for another project, on to two slightly smaller disks. Doing so restores my root mirror but as the disks are slightly smaller some work is required. For reference my current root pool name is rpool, the current disk in this pool is c5t1d0, the first replacement disk is install at c5t0d0 and is empty. ...

First Video as part of a presentation MSOSUG in April 2011 showing how to create a Solaris 11 zone

Second Video as part of a presentation MSOSUG in April 2011 showing how to create a Solaris 10 branded container in Solaris 11

So I’ve been tracking the Solaris 11 Express Support repo updates for a while. I had issue today where I couldn’t make a network connection to my virtual box guests. They would ping but no ssh and no http connection. The later being important as my VB guest is running a local mirror repo. while I could connect to the guest from other machines on the network I could connect to them from the the machine hosting the guests. ...

Okay , not entirely sure why yet but I though I’d like to get VNC server configured on my Solaris machines, perhaps it’s with the arrival of the AppleTV 2 in the house freeing up the trusty mac mini workhorse to go back to desktop duties after the last 3+ year as a Plex app media player, anyway on to the task at hand.

Jim Mauro’s Dtrace tut