NFS (Network File System) for Beginners: In this post I am trying to build a base for the beginners. This post will help to proceed further with NFS complex tasks.

What is NFS?

NFS —> Network File System —> The Network File System (NFS) is a client-server service that enables users to view, store, and update files on a remote server as though they were on the their own local server. In Simple layman language NFS provides a “Centralized File Access”.

Example: Suppose you have a 100 users in a company. Out of which 50 require complete access to 10 files/softwares etc. for there daily day to day work and other 50 require access to other commonly used 15 files/softwares etc. for there work. Now instead of placing individual files/softwares on each users server (computer) you should keep the files/softwares in a common shared place which users would have access to. Now each user can access (read/write/modify –> depending upon access provided) those commonly used files/softwares remotely without having them on his/her local server/computer. This will help to save the diskspace as well on all users server. Full Story

As part of regular System Admin task we were asked to configure new storage to an existing sybase server without disturbing the existing storage and expecting no downtime for the existing production server. All necessary storage LUNS were already allocated by the Storage team as mentioned below

LUNS allocated by storage Team

Lun 011D
Lun 011E
Lun 011F
Lun 0167
Lun 017E
Lun 01F0

DBA team requested System Admin team to create below raw volumes in an existing Volume Group named sybasevg.

Raw – Volumes To be created in SybaseVG volume Group:

data01-new-rawvol
data02-new-rawvol
data03-new-rawvol
logs01-new-rawvol
master-new-rawvol
procs-new-rawvol

In SybaseVG there are already some old volumes exist and we have to configure the new volumes without disturbing below existing volumes in Sybase VG:

data01-old-vol
data02-old-vol
data03-old-vol
data04-old-vol
data05-old-vol
data06-old-vol
data07-old-vol
log01-old-vol
master_old_vol
procs_old_vol Full Story

How to do MIRRORING under SVM (Solaris Volume Manager) in Solaris.

In this post I will be showing how to do mirroring (RAID1) in Solaris OS.

Server availabilty is one of the major requirement in any environment. To achive this we used to do Mirroing in OS which protects single disk failure and indeed our server downtime.

Here in my server I have two disks c1t3d0 & c1t1d0.

c1t3d0 —> Root disk
c1t1d0 —> Root-mirror disk
Submirrors for Root disk —> d10, d20, d50
Submirrors for Root-mirror disk —> d11, d21, d51
Mirror name would be —> d0, d1, d5

Note: Make sure that the mirror-disk should be of equal size or greater than your rootdisk, it would be preferred if both disks should have same size. Full Story

General Procedure for Kernel Patching in Solaris:

We are getting multiple requests for Solaris Kernel Patching procedure from many of your Gurkul Followers. Here we go with all the steps for all of them.

I am trying to present the simple patching procedure (when our disks are under Solaris Volume Manager Control, SVM). No zones, No clusters considered in this example. Basic procedure for Zones/Clusters will also remain the same but some additional outputs needs to be taken in that case.

1.) Download the bundle patch (Recommended Solaris Cluster Patch) from www.support.oracle.com (It need your login credentials for Oracle site).

This cluster patch will be in zip form, copy it on your server and unzip it where you have sufficient space.

2.) Take necessary backups of the server. (make one directory under /var/tmp and put the outputs in the server also).

Take backup of uname -a –>(will give your current Kernel Patch Level), df -k , metastat -p, metadb -i, netastat -nr, ifconfig -a, prtconf, prtdiag -v, metastat -ac (sol. 10), metastat -t, eeprom, echo | format etc.

[better make one script for youself and run that before proceeding with any activity on any server  --> I used to follow this as my best practice ]

Make a habbit of Running Sun Explorer before proceeding with any of the activity in Solaris. Full Story

This Video presents you the procedure to investigate various  performance bottlenecks related to Memory, CPU and IO  using the commands iostat, vmstat and prstat.

In enterprise network environment, the life time of any server will be decided by the lifetime of the application that is running on top of Operating System. In case if the application was retired / decommissioned then that server can be utilized for the different applications.

Before using the existing servers for different application, the most common task to system admin is change the hostname of the server to reflect the new application. And sometimes, the server may have to move physically to different subnet to support the new application.

Below instructions will give you quick Idea on the procedures to change Hostname and IP address of a server. Full Story