Book Project

I am compiling the information from the web site into a book. If you would like to be a technical reviewer for the book, please let me know, and I will send you a copy of the current draft. People who provide me with comments will be thanked on the acknowledgment page; I'm afraid I'm not in a position to offer anything more than that.

You can contact me through the email address listed for this blog, or by adding a comment to this blog posting. The folks at Princeton are not involved in this project, so please don't direct any inquiries there.

--Scott

inittab update

I updated the inittab page to correct the error that Todd pointed out. Thanks for the help! Please let me know if you find other errors or pages that need better explanation.

The LOPSA conference in Cherry Hill was great! If you didn't make it this year, make sure to put it on your calendars for next year.

--Scott

Solaris Multipathing, System Bus pages updated

I updated the Solaris Multipathing and System Bus pages. We tripped over an issue with editing the scsi_vhci.conf for a third party storage device. The syntax is incredibly picky and wants new entries to be padded out with spaces, as I describe in the updated page.

--Scott

p-Commands page

The long-promised P-Commands page has been posted.

--Scott

Updated Presentation and Lecture Notes

I updated the Impress presentation and lecture notes documents and moved them to the Troubleshooting Essentials share.

--Scott

August SysAdmin

The August SysAdmin has an article based on the Troubleshooting Methodology page.

--Scott

Upcoming Class

I'll be teaching a Solaris Troubleshooting class at the upcoming Sysadmin Days conference in Cherry Hill, NJ in August.



Class Description:

Troubleshooting is where the rubber meets the road for system administrators. Our employers need us to identify and fix the root cause of our problems with a minimum of disruption and cost. Our technical chops are important, but we also need to work collaboratively with our coworkers and customers to resolve the problem for once and for all. This course covers several techniques and tools for organizing a successful, collaborative troubleshooting process.

But this is not just a touchy-feely class! Solaris 10 includes a raft of tools for getting to the bottom of performance, hardware and software environments. We'll review several key tools for looking at different aspects of system and application functioning. Some of the tools and techniques we'll look at include:

* Error messages--how to collect and interpret them
* Fault profiles--handy rules of thumb
* Getting at the system's guts with DTrace
* Examining a crash dump
* Using the p-tools and the /proc pseudo-filesystem
* Cool free tools from the Web

Scott Cromar

Scott Cromar has been a fan of Solaris since using a Sun workstation to investigate the sex life of sea grasses while an undergraduate. He is currently a Unix Technical Lead with more than a dozen years of experience supporting Solaris and Linux systems in academic and financial services production environments. Along the way, he created Princeton University's Solaris Troubleshooting web site and the companion Solaris Troubleshooting Blog. Besides technical articles exposing the seamy side of life on the seabed, he has published articles for SANS and SysAdmin Magazine.

LOPSA-NJ Presentation

I'll be presenting some troubleshooting tips to the LOPSA NJ meeting on May 3 at the Lawrence Public Library at 7pm. My Impress presentation is included below. (Impress is part of the OpenOffice suite.):

(I moved the presentation's share to the top of the page.)

Date: Thursday, May 3, 2007, 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)

Topic: An overview of some of the different ways to troubleshoot
problems in a Solaris 10 environment, with emphasis on the tools that
are specific to Solaris

Speaker: Scott Cromar

Description: The talk will be a discussion of a general
troubleshooting approach including the use of Ishikawa and
Interrelationship diagrams in troubleshooting. With a brief overview of
some of the tools available in Solaris 10 and a brief introduction to
DTrace.

Location: Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library,
Community Room 2

Service Management Facility Page Update

The SMF Page has been updated with information about how to find the scripts that run stops and starts.

Resource Management article

The April SysAdmin Magazine carries an article based on the Resource Management page.

ZFS Management Page Updates

I updated the ZFS Management and Troubleshooting page with information from the OpenSolaris documentation pages for ZFS.

Zones Page

I just submitted some updates for the Zones page.

Service Management Facility and Fault Management Updates

I submitted updates for the Service Management Facility and Fault Management Architecture pages. They will probably be available early next week.

Resource Management and Scheduling Corrections

I've corrected some minor errors on the Resource Management and Scheduling pages.

SysAdmin Magazine confirms that they will be publishing my Solaris Resource Management article in their April issue.

--Scott

Updates to Error, RAM and DiskIO Pages

I've just submitted an expanded Error Messages page as well as corrections to the Memory and Disk I/O page.

Thanks in particular to Brian for pointing out the error on the Memory page!

If you see things that need correcting or clarifying, please post them as comments; I have the blog set up to forward them to me as email. (If you know me and my email address, feel free to send them to me directly, but I've had to pull my email off of the web to try to get my spam levels under control.)

--Scott

Error Messages

The Error Messages page has gotten a major facelift. In particular, it now sports a list of common error messages as well as a corrected link to the Solaris 8 Common Messages manual.

Thanks to Bill and Laurie at Princeton for resolving a problem with the index page over the weekend.

--Scott