What is Automation?

Automation is nothing but performing system administration tasks without manual interventions, and complete the operations using specific tools/programs/scripts.

Example: Writing a script to backup the data from one server and run it using cron scheduler on every night.

Why the Automation is important for System Administrators?

My experience says ” if you ask a system admin to delete a single file from a set of 100 servers by login into each server one by one, he will be having 90% chances to make at least one human mistake during his task. And the mistake is not because of the person’s technical incompetence but it is because of natural human behavior called fatigue”.  The Sysadmins are more prone to this fatigue when they are involved in such manual repeated work during their routine job. Read Full

In this post, I’m just trying to travel with the server to know how it resolves a hostname using the DNS name resolution. Read Full

Before going to the basic understanding of the disksets let us first know the necessity for disksets in solaris there are many prime reasons people prefer for going into disksets

1. Availability
2. Redundancy
3. Efficiency

Availability: Disksets are more reliable under sun cluster environment but not limited to HA they are even highly available out of the HA concept as well (Fail over Configuration)

Redundancy: Always a first and foremost term when it comes to disk management .this can be achieved via disksets with RAID being built over the disks from the disksets

Efficiency:  This can be spoken in two terms  on the aspect of system administration ,with help of disksets we can efficiently organize the metadevices under diskgroups   ,reuse the same metadevices on the different host(metaimport) , same diskset could be reused on another node via metaimport ,provided if the disk are externally connected (storage).This sometimes happens in cases like if the RAIDs are needed to be maintained and used on a diifernt system in other words if we want to use the same LUNS on other system . So far, I have not tried but will be doing this very soon, we will share the same as soon as possible  on gurkulindia

Requirement:

If availability comes as a first choice as a sys admin then the prime requirement for an disksets to be created under solaris volume manager is this ,The disk used should be visible on two hosts with the same device number and the shared disk should always use the same device driver by this is not applicable when the disksets are not multiowned by the hosts Read Full

Below procedure explains you about ‘ booting from an alternate boot disk’

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In this post I will try to make a base which is used in Storage Migrations in Unix. I will be taking this post as a base and will post the storage migrations posts with reference to this one. Here I will be considering Solaris OS and EMC Storage (DMX). We will see how to move older storage DMX to newer EMC storage VMAX.

Before proceeding with the Storage Migrations from Storage side we have to make our OS at best acceptable level so that new storage will be completely compatible with the OS levels. Below are the steps which we have to follow in order to find our OS specifications w.r.t new storage.

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The idea behind running BIND in a chroot jail is to limit the amount of access any malicious individual could gain by exploiting vulnerabilities in BIND. It is for the same reason that we run BIND as a non-root user. This should be considered as a supplement to the normal security precautions (running the latest version, using access control, etc.), certainly not as a replacement for them. Read Full