So you have used SVM to mirror your disk, and one of the two drives fails. Aren’t you glad you mirrored them! You don’t have to do a restore from tape, but you are going have to replace the failed drive.
Many modern RAID arrays just require you to take out the bad drive and plug [...]
At least in RHEL 4, the fdisk command does not support the creation of filesystems larger than 2TB. In order to get around it, you have to use the parted command. I found the basic info here, but this is the long and short of how to cut off a big ol’ slice of disk [...]
Getting Solaris 8 to light up a Qlogic QLA2310 Fibre Channel card using the SUNWqlc and SUNWqlcx drivers can be frustrating enough, but the headaches are only beginning if you want to connect it to a SAN and you don’t have all the right packages installed.
Last week, I installed the QLA2310 in a Sun Fire [...]
When you install RHEL, the filesystems are labeled for you. Usually you won’t have to mess with it anymore, but on occasion, you may want to change them to more accurately represent the data that is stored on that partition. If, for instance, you used to have all of your database files on a partition [...]
If you manage a UNIX system with a large number of directories that vary in size, chances are that you’ve needed to figure out which ones are using up the most disk space. Of course if the directories are user accounts, the best way to do this is to enable quotas and use the “repquota” [...]
Kids… DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! If this is not done exactly right, you will render your system unbootable and corrupt your data. That being said, under some circumstances you can take some space from your swap partition and add it to an unused one without initializing your entire disk. This is particularly useful [...]
For some reason RHEL 3 comes out of the box configured to see only the first Lun on a SCSI channel. This is usually not a problem, as the first Lun is all you care about, but in some instances, you will need to configure the SCSI module to see multiple Luns.
In this case [...]
There is a convention of thought amongst Oracle DBA’s that databases should never be installed on disks that are configured into a RAID 5 array. The argument goes, that since Oracle accesses and writes to random points within relatively large files, the overhead of constantly calculating block-level parity on these files is substantial, resulting in [...]
This summer we have been migrating a bunch of data to our shiny new InfoTrend EonStor A12F-G2221. With 1G battery backed cache, it’s a screaming box of disk, and it looks cool to boot. There is a gotcha though if you want to direct connect it to QLogic QLA2340 card on a REL 3 server. [...]
If you ever shift around any bootable drives within a Sun Solaris box, you may find that either the device names (cxtxd0sx) do not follow the disk position within the server, or, the system just fails to boot because it can’t mount the other disk slices.
Let’s assume you are booting off of target 8 (c1t8d0s0), [...]
Earlier this month, a company came along and asked for a RAID 10 array. Understanding that RAID 10 is a cooler sounding way of saying RAID 1+0, I understood it as a mirror set that is striped across another mirror set. Simple enough… Just concatenate a couple of mirrors, and you’ve got RAID 10.
Indeed, RAID [...]
Every time I have to spec a solution using Solaris, I always have to answer a bunch of questions in meetings about why Sun is so costly compared to Dell servers. Usually the reason for the higher price is not the servers (especially with X86 sun), but rather the storage. Since Sun does not offer [...]
