[1] Mounting NFS on Solaris 10 and later
With a relevant entry in /etc/vfstab, the general expectation is that Solaris automatically mounts the NFS shares upon a system reboot. However users may find that NFS shares are not being auto-mounted on some of the systems running the latest update of Solaris 10 or 11. One reason for this behavior could be the use of the Secure By Default network profile, which was introduced in Solaris 10 11/06. When this networking profile is in use, numerous services including the NFS client service are disabled. For the automounting of NFS shares, we will need the NFS client service running.
The fix is to enable NFS client service along with its dependencies.
# svcs -a | grep nfs\/client
disabled Jan_17 svc:/network/nfs/client:default
# svcadm enable -r svc:/network/nfs/client
# svcs -a | grep nfs\/client
online Jan_20 svc:/network/nfs/client:default
On a similar note, if you want all default services to be enabled as they were in previous Solaris releases, run the following command as privileged user. Then use svcadm(1M) to disable unwanted services.
# netservices open
To switch back to the secure by default profile, run:
# netservices limited
[2] Utility to manage Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe card(s) .. ddcli
The Sun Flash Accelerator F40 PCIe Card has two sets of firmware -- NAND flash controller firmware, and SAS controller firmware (host PCIe to SAS controller). Both firmware sets are updated as a single F40 firmware package using the ddcli utility. This utility can be used to locate and display information about the cards in the system, format the cards, monitor the health and extract smart logs (to assist Oracle support in debugging and resolution) for a selected F40 card.
If ddcli utility is not available on systems where the P40 PCIe cards are installed, install patch "16005846: F40 (AURA 2) SW1.1 Release fw (08.05.01.00) and cli utility update" or later version, if available. This patch can be downloaded from support.oracle.com
Note that ddcli utility can be used to service and monitor the health of Sun Flash Accelerator F80 PCIe cards too. Install patch "Patch 17860600: SW1.0 for Sun Flash Acccelerator F80" to get access to the F80 card software package.
[3] Permission denied error when changing a password
An attempt to change the password for a local user 'XYZ' fails with Permission denied error.
# passwd XYZ
New Password: ********
Re-enter new Password: ********
Permission denied
# grep passwd /etc/nsswitch.conf
passwd: files ldap
It is possible to include and access password information in multiple repositories, such as files and nis or ldap. Per the man page of passwd(1), when a user has a password stored in one of the name services as well as a local files entry, the passwd command tries to update both. It is possible to have different passwords in the name service and local files entry. Use passwd -r to change a specific password repository.
Hence the fix is to use the -r option in this case to ignore the nsswitch.conf file sequence and update the password information in local /etc files -- /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files.
# passwd -r files XYZ
New Password: ********
Re-enter new Password: ********
passwd: password successfully changed for oracle
[4] Microstate statistics for any process
ptime -m shows the full set of microstate accounting statistics for the lifetime of a given process. prstat -m also reports the microstate process accounting information, but the displayed statistics are accumulated since last display every interval seconds.
# prstat -p 39235
PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
39235 psft 3585M 3320M sleep 59 0 2:23:11 0.0% java/257
# prstat -mp 39235
PID USERNAME USR SYS TRP TFL DFL LCK SLP LAT VCX ICX SCL SIG PROCESS/NLWP
39235 psft 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 87 13 0.0 0 0 1 0 java/257
# ptime -mp 39235
real 428:31:25.902644700
user 2:06:32.283801209
sys 16:37.056999418
trap 2.250539737
tflt 0.000000000
dflt 2.018347218
kflt 0.000000000
lock 96013:52:37.184929717
slp 14349:50:02.286168683
lat 3:11.510473038
stop 0.002468763
In the above example, the java process with pid 39235 spent most of its time sleeping waiting to acquire locks in user space (ref: 'lock' field). It also spent a lot of time in just sleeping waiting for some work (ref: 'slp' field). User CPU time is the next major one (ref: 'user' field). The process spent a little bit of time in system space (ref: 'sys' field), waiting for CPU (ref: 'lat' field) and almost negligible amount of time in processing system traps (ref: 'trap' field) and in servicing data page faults (ref: 'dflt' field).
[5] ZFS : metaslab utilization
ZFS divides the space on each device (virtual or physical) into a number of smaller, manageable regions called metaslabs. Each metaslab is associated with a space map that holds information about the free space in that region by keeping tracking of space allocations and deallocations.
The following sample outputs show that a virtual device, u01, made up of two physical disks has 139 metaslabs. The number of segments and free/available space in each metaslab is also shown in those outputs.
# zpool list u01
NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
u01 1.09T 133G 979G 11% 1.00x ONLINE -
# zpool status u01
pool: u01
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
u01 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000CCA01D1DD4A4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000CCA01D1DCE88d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
# zdb -m u01
Metaslabs:
vdev 0 ms_array 27
metaslabs 139 offset spacemap free
--------------- ------------------- --------------- -------------
metaslab 0 offset 0 spacemap 30 free 4.65M
metaslab 1 offset 200000000 spacemap 32 free 698K
metaslab 2 offset 400000000 spacemap 33 free 1.25M
metaslab 3 offset 600000000 spacemap 35 free 588K
..
..
metaslab 62 offset 7c00000000 spacemap 0 free 8G
metaslab 63 offset 7e00000000 spacemap 45 free 8.00G
metaslab 64 offset 8000000000 spacemap 0 free 8G
...
...
metaslab 136 offset 11000000000 spacemap 0 free 8G
metaslab 137 offset 11200000000 spacemap 0 free 8G
metaslab 138 offset 11400000000 spacemap 0 free 8G
# zdb -mm u01
Metaslabs:
vdev 0 ms_array 27
metaslabs 139 offset spacemap free
--------------- ------------------- --------------- -------------
metaslab 0 offset 0 spacemap 30 free 4.65M
segments 1136 maxsize 103K freepct 0%
metaslab 1 offset 200000000 spacemap 32 free 698K
segments 64 maxsize 118K freepct 0%
metaslab 2 offset 400000000 spacemap 33 free 1.25M
segments 113 maxsize 104K freepct 0%
metaslab 3 offset 600000000 spacemap 35 free 588K
segments 109 maxsize 28.5K freepct 0%
...
...
What is the purpose of this topic? Just to introduce the ZFS debugger, zdb (check the man page zdb(1M)) to the power-users who would like to dig a little deep to find answers to tough questions such as if a ZFS filesystem is fragmented.
Keywords: ZFS zdb metaslab "space map"
[6] Roles can not login directly error on Solaris 11 and later
The root account in Solaris 11 is a role. A role is just like any other user account with the exception that users with roles cannot login directly. Here is an example that shows the failure when attempted to connect directly.
login: root
Password: ********
Roles can not login directly
In this example, connecting as a normal user (who have no roles assigned) and then using su to connect as root user would succeed. This additional step is to prevent malevolent users from getting away with no accountability. Check Bart's blog post SPOTD: The Guide Book to Solaris Role-Based Access Control for some relevant information.
If security is not a primary concern, and if connecting directly as root user is desirable, simply change the root role into a user.
# rolemod -K type=normal root
This change does not affect all the users who are currently in the root role -- they retain the root role. Other users who have root access can su to root or log in to the system as the root user. To remove the root role assignment from other local users, set the role to an empty string using usermod command as shown in the following example.
/* assign root role to user 'giri' */
# usermod -R root giri
# roles giri
root
/* remove the role from user 'giri' */
# usermod -R "" giri
#
Keywords: RBAC, roles
[7] Large volume sizes (> 2 TB), and maximum size of UFS filesystem
As per the Solaris System Administration Guide, the maximum size of a UFS filesystem is ~16 TB.
To create a UFS file system greater than 2 TB, use EFI disk label. The EFI label provides support for physical disks and virtual disk volumes that are greater than 2 TB in size. Refer to the disk management section in Solaris System Administration Guide to find out the advantages and limitations of EFI.
Note that ZFS labels disks with an EFI label when creating a ZFS storage pool (zpool). And users in general need not be too concerned about the maximum size of a ZFS filesystem as it is several times larger than the maximum size supported by the UFS filesystem.
[8] powertop to observe the CPU power management
Although powertop was ported to Solaris and available as an add-on package from unofficial sources for the past few years, recent releases of Solaris bundled this tool with the core distribution. powertop can be used to monitor the effectiveness of CPU power management features on systems running Solaris. It also displays the clock frequently at which the CPU is operating along with the top events that are causing the CPU to wake up and use more energy.
Be aware that when the CPU power management is enabled with the elastic policy in effect (default on Solaris 11 and later), the CPUs on the system are susceptible to CPU throttling under certain conditions either to conserve power or to reduce the amount of heat generated by the chip. In other words, based on the load on the system, the frequency of a microprocessor can be automatically adjusted on the fly. This is referred as "CPU dynamic voltage and frequency scaling" (DVFS). Monitoring the output of powertop is one way to monitor the frequency levels of the processor on a busy system in order to minimize any performance related surprises.
The following sample is gathered from an idle SPARC T5-8 server where the CPU power management was disabled.
Solaris PowerTOP version 1.3
Idle Power States Avg Residency Frequency Levels
C0 (cpu running) (0.1%) 500 Mhz 0.0%
C1 4.7ms (99.9%) 800 Mhz 0.0%
933 Mhz 0.0%
1067 Mhz 0.0%
1200 Mhz 0.0%
..
..
3200 Mhz 0.0%
3333 Mhz 0.0%
3467 Mhz 0.0%
3600 Mhz 100.0%
Wakeups-from-idle per second: 109818.7 interval: 5.0s
no power usage estimate available
Top causes for wakeups:
94.4% (103630.7) sched : <xcalls> unix`dtrace_sync_func
3.1% (3352.8) OPMNPing : <xcalls> unix`setsoftint_tl1
1.1% (1155.6) sched : <xcalls> unix`setsoftint_tl1
0.4% (401.2) <kernel> : genunix`pm_timer
0.3% (317.0) sched : <xcalls>
0.2% (251.8) <kernel> : genunix`lwp_timer_timeout
0.2% (204.4) sched : <xcalls> unix`null_xcall
0.1% (100.2) <kernel> : genunix`clock
0.1% ( 65.6) <kernel> : genunix`cv_wakeup
0.0% ( 50.2) <kernel> : SDC`sysdc_update
0.0% ( 46.8) <interrupt> : mcxnex#0
0.0% ( 39.6) opmn : <xcalls> unix`setsoftint_tl1
0.0% ( 36.6) opmn : <xcalls>
0.0% ( 36.4) opmn : <xcalls> unix`vtag_flushrange_group_tl1
0.0% ( 21.6) <interrupt> : ixgbe#0
...
...
Suggestion: enable CPU power management using poweradm(1m)
Q - Quit R - Refresh (CPU PM is disabled)