I’ve just published a (brief) account of the history of Sun Microsystems. Yes, a big part of my business revolves around Sun, Solaris, and related technologies – but the reason I got involved in the first place is because Sun itself is such an interesting company.
Have a read of The History of Sun Microsystems and let me know what you think.
In June 2001 I wrote an article for SysAdmin Magazine showing how to script NIC failover in Solaris. IPMP wasn’t introduced until the 10/00 release of Solaris 8 (or MU2 if you’re keeping score that way). At the time the environments being managed were Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 7 – the site upgrade to 8 was a long way off.
So I came up with some scripts to enable NIC failover between two ethernet interfaces on the same VLAN. The script itself was pretty basic and relied on ndd and ping – a bit belt and braces, but as the article explains, there were no other cost-free options at the time.
You can find the original article on the SysAdmin Magazine website at http://www.samag.com/documents/s=9368/sam0106j/0106j.htm
One of the problems using big disk arrays is the difficulty in getting meaningful reporting out of them. All the vendors’ tools are closed source, and in many cases the expertise from the vendor is often missing or seriously lacking when it comes plotting performance trends.
“Just add more cache” is the same tired refrain vendors always give. No. I’m not going to recommend to clients that they spend a huge sum of money buying more SAN cache until I can prove the SAN actually needs it.
In March 2004 I wrote an article for SysAdmin Magazine showing how to use the symcli command line tools in conjunction with Orca to plot some nice historic performance graphs, showing the host’s view of performance of the Symmetrix array.
You can find the original article, complete with diagrams and code, on SysAdmin Magazine’s website at http://www.samag.com/documents/s=9364/sam0403f/0403f.htm