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April 16, 2013 – 12:39 pm |

Imagine you have an HPC cluster with a hundred compute nodes named node001-node100. The two commands below will help you generate a list of node names – either all name on one line or one name per …

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Articles in Disks and Volumes

Solaris 10 SVM/SDS Mirrored Root Disk Replacement

September 25, 2012 – 3:08 pm | 8 Comments
Solaris 10 SVM/SDS Mirrored Root Disk Replacement

The following is a standard process for replacing a failed boot disk mirrored with SVM on a Solaris 10 Sun server. Your hardware must support hot-swappable disks for this process to be performed without booting into single-user mode.

Linux LVM: Reduce Filesystem and Logical Volume

March 14, 2012 – 5:07 pm | 7 Comments
Linux LVM: Reduce Filesystem and Logical Volume

The following example shows how to reduce the size of a filesystem mounted on an LVM logical volume. The instructions below are only for non-root filesystems. No reboot is required, but the filesystem will need to be unmounted. So, if there are any user applications using this filesystem, they will need to be stopped and the users will need to log out.

Adding LUNs to VXVM on Linux

September 6, 2011 – 2:03 pm | 4 Comments
Adding LUNs to VXVM on Linux

The following is a brief overview of the process for adding LUNs to VXVM under Linux. In our example we have an RHEL 5 server with existing LUNs and VXVM volume groups. Two new LUNs with multipathing were allocated from SAN and need to be added to the system to grow one of the volumes and the corresponding filesystem.

Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7

January 27, 2010 – 10:45 pm | 8 Comments
Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7

Recently I upgraded a client’s Vista computer (Toshiba Qosmio, 4Gb, Intel Core Duo P7350, 7200-RPM 200-Gb disk) from Vista Ultimate 64-bit to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Being a Unix sysadmin this is not something I usually do. How did the experience compare to upgrading HP-UX, Solaris or SLES? In a nutshell: I’d rather walk around all day in wet underwear than attempt to upgrade Vista ever again.

Testing Filesystem Performance with Bonnie++

July 10, 2009 – 4:33 pm | 18 Comments
Testing Filesystem Performance with Bonnie++

Bonnie++ is a benchmark utility designed to test performance of hard drives and filesystems by simulating various types of disk I/O. Bonnie++ may be used to test local disks as well as network-mounted filesystems. It …

Partitioning System Disk

July 24, 2008 – 8:25 pm | 3 Comments
Partitioning System Disk

When performing a new Unix OS installation you are usually presented with a choice of accepting the default partitioning layout or going into advanced settings and defining your own partitions. The default layout will normally …

VxVM Recovery Cheatsheet for Solaris

May 15, 2008 – 6:22 pm | 9 Comments
VxVM Recovery Cheatsheet for Solaris

This is a quick-and-dirty guide to recovering VxVM volumes and filesystems on a Solaris server. These instructions are not intended to be an in-depth troubleshooting guide for the Veritas Volume Manager. This is just something …

Highly redundant array configuration

May 8, 2008 – 3:58 pm | 2 Comments
Highly redundant array configuration

The cost of storage arrays is falling along with the quality of their manufacture. To quote Lev Andropov from the “Armageddon”: “Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!” What in the nineties used …

ReiserFS Filesystem Recovery

March 21, 2008 – 3:55 pm | One Comment
ReiserFS Filesystem Recovery

The this is a description of a method for recovering ReiserFS filesystems from failed disks with bad blocks, when other recovery methods (reiserfsck) will not work. For this example, the failed server is called node1 …

Informix database migration on HP-UX

May 1, 2006 – 10:51 am | 4 Comments
Informix database migration on HP-UX

Rather than rebuilding an Informix database on the new HP-UX server, it possible to migrate the existing installation from the old server. The database resides on raw disks with transparent volumes that are not visible …

Monitoring Veritas VM problems on Solaris

April 20, 2006 – 4:41 pm | 6 Comments
Monitoring Veritas VM problems on Solaris

Several Veritas VM and system logs can be used to monitor and diagnose problems with the Volume Manager. An automated script can be used to grab the last few lines from these logs whenever a …

Veritas Enterprise Administrator GUI

December 9, 2005 – 11:27 am | 3 Comments
Veritas Enterprise Administrator GUI

The following is an overview of the GUI for Veritas Enterprise Administrator 3.2

Uninstalling Solaris 10 from a multi-boot system

November 27, 2005 – 2:39 am | 5 Comments
Uninstalling Solaris 10 from a multi-boot system

Boot into one of the operating systems you would like to keep (i.e. Windows, Linux, etc.) and set its partition as “Active”. Reboot your system. If the system boots into the OS of your choice …

Multi-booting Windows XP and Solaris 10

November 25, 2005 – 5:09 pm | 6 Comments
Multi-booting Windows XP and Solaris 10

When creating a multiboot system with Windows XP and Solaris 10 you need to install Windows XP first. If Windows is already installed, repartition the hard drive to allocate sufficient space for your Solaris installation. …

Create boot block on Solaris disk

November 22, 2005 – 11:29 pm | 4 Comments
Create boot block on Solaris disk

To make a Solaris disk bootable you need to install the boot block on the disk. This should be done, for example, after copying the primary boot disk to the secondary disk.

Solaris boot disk copy

November 20, 2005 – 2:24 am | 2 Comments
Solaris boot disk copy

A sample procedure for installing PHP, MySQL and Apache2 on Solaris 8.

Increase swap space

November 19, 2005 – 11:15 pm | 2 Comments
Increase swap space

Instructions for adding swap space on the fly for a Solaris system. Adding swap space via a swap file degrades system perfomance. However, this is a useful method for quickly adding swap space without interrupting …

Remotely mount cdrom

November 19, 2005 – 10:39 pm | 3 Comments
Remotely mount cdrom

Here’s an example of how to mount a cdrom on Solaris from a remote ISO image via NFS.

Fsck operations

November 19, 2005 – 10:36 pm | 4 Comments
Fsck operations

The following is a collection of examples using fsck command. It is important to unmount VXFS before running fsck on Veritas filesystem.