Under the Solaris 10 system – or the open Solaris as well,
the service management have been upgraded, and there are great new tools to handle the sysadmin
work on the services.

The long detailed explanation can be found here:
Solaris Service Management Facility – Quickstart Guide

But for the fast paced sysadmin – here is the short version

To see the detailed boot sequence with all the services notices use:

boot -m verbose

Stopping and starting services

stop a running service as well as make sure it wont come back after booting the server:

svcadm disable service_name

Bring the service back up and make sure it starts after boot as well:

svcadm enable service_name

The new and improved services system will also watch over the service, and restart it if it suddenly stop.
but don’t worry – if the service loops and can’t start, after a couple of time the SMF will stop trying to bring it up, and will send you an error for the service.

To stop or start the service temporarily without impacting the startup status of the service use:

svcadm -t enable/disable service_name

Getting information about the services

List all active services:

svcs

List all available services:

svcs -a

List all failing services:

svcs -x

to get more details on a specific failing service, use:

svcs -x service_name

to add verbosity to the svcs commands just add “-v”

the services logs are located at:
/var/svc/log
or:
/etc/svc/volatile

List all the processes this service is running, even if they have a different name:

svcs -p service_name

Viewing Dependencies

List all the services this service is depended upon, if any of these services fails, our service will fail too:

svcs -d service_name

List all the services that depend on our service, if our service fails, they will fail too:

svcs -D service_name

Service Names

the explanation for the service names im taking straight from the SUN bigadmin site:

Solaris uses a URI string called an FMRI (Fault Managed Resource Identifier) to identify system objects for which advanced fault and resource management capabilities are provided. Services managed by SMF are assigned FMRI strings prefixed with the scheme name “svc“, as shown in the following examples for the Solaris service syslogd(1M):

• svc://localhost/system/system-log:default
• svc:/system/system-log:default
• system/system-log:default

Notice that these service FMRIs used by SMF can be expressed in three ways: first as an absolute path including a location path such as “localhost“; second as a path relative to the local machine; and third as simply the service identifier with the string prefixes implied. The SMF administrator tools described in the rest of this document typically describe services using the third form, as they are assumed to be operating on local services. Other management tools that operate on multiple types of resources or across machine boundaries may use one of the other forms to describe services. The SMF tools in the current release of Solaris can only manage services on the local host.

Solaris RunLevel

There are no longer run levels setting on the Solaris server, now this is called milestones.
Milestones are a group of services, which defines a state the server is in – just like single user, or multi user.
you can bring the server into a specific milestone with:

svcadm milestone milestone/single-user:default

to permanently set the server in a specific mile stone , use:

svcadm milestone -d milestone/single-user:default

and again – to list what services should be running to reach a specific milestone, use:

svcs -d milestone_name

and that’s the short explanation

next time ill explain how to add a service of your own to the system.

xkcd cartoons got me at least twice that i can think of,
I’m hearing a lot these days about uptime, and this cartoon just hits the spot:

devotion to duty

and another one that i went around with for months, couldn’t get it out of my head:

exploits of a mom

Technorati Tags: books, funny

In this age when all our information is exposed to the world,
our images are floating everywhere and you don’t know anymore where and what is written about us,
the good people at HoHli have created a new search page that will gather all your information at one place,
showing you details about yourself or anyone else from many social networks and search engines at once.

output comes from:

• Blogger
• Myspace
• Google Images and search
• Yahoo Images and search
• Digg
• Twitter
• and more …

Searching for yonitg information:

A little scary seeing all that information out there.

Go ahead, search for your name at:  http://analyser.hohli.com/people

put a comment here with how much details you found about yourselves that you didn’t know was out there

Technorati Tags: Online Tools, statistics

The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content.

Yup, I know this blog is about Linux and WordPress and other technical stuff,
but sometimes we just have to stop and take a look at it all and ask why and for how long
I’ve read this book in the last 2 weeks,
and to tell the truth,
It is really doing a change in my life.

I’ve been running around lately, working, working hard, raising my kids (which is hard work as well),
raising my husband
(which has his 36 years birthday today, Mazal Tov baby!!! )

And the work part is the main time consumer of all.

wouldn’t it be amazing, if we could get up in the morning,
eat a lazy breakfast, take the kids to school while taking our time with them -
they are amazing in the morning…..

maybe go to the gym afterwords, maybe visit friends,
and work when we feel most productive and creative?

This book:  The 4-Hour Workweek, Is all about it,
about how to make your work more efficient that your done with it in a couple of hours instead of a whole day,
that you concentrate on the stuff the produce the 80% income and takes 20% of your time, instead of the other way around.

This book is about brining freedom into your life instead of waiting for the promised vacation at the end.

I heartily recommend reading it.

Technorati Tags: amazon, books, funny

Network File System (NFS) is a network file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a network in a manner similar to how local storage is accessed.

So basically its a network share, it allows you to share files between remote computers
in the most easy and seamless way, once it was specifically for UNIX servers,
but today NFS is supported over MS servers as well.

Like everything else in Sysadmin life,
when its working its working well, and nobody hears about it,
but what to do when its not working?
Samba debugging for example is easier from that aspect since it has extensive logs for the sysadmin,
NFS doesn’t keep logs, and NFS issues doesn’t show up in the syslog/messages file as well.

But there are tools that allow you to get extensive information about the running NFS process,
shares, statistics, users connected etc :

Technorati Tags: Command line, NFS, samba, Solaris

I’m going over the data at the site and its amazing stuff,
the main page has lots of statistics which is shown in a new way,
the gapminder app shows the data at what i think is a 4 dimension way,
it shows x and y axis stats, and another axis represented as the size of the balls in the demo,
and how they grow over the 4th dimension – time.

Amazing stuff.

Gapminder

This is the main stats app:

you can see the advance of the bubbles over the x and y axis,
the z axis is represented with the balls size,
and its all advancing in time.
this default presentation shows Life expectancy over income per person, over population size.

wonderful demo.

Marriage Statistics

This great demo shows you the connection between women age at marriage and the amount of kids they have,
on of the things this tool does best is break myths.
I was under the impression that in Europe – Sweden for example, the marriage age went down,
and with it the number of kids in the family,
but from this graph you can simply see that the number of kids in a family went drastically down over the last 100 years, but the marriage age went drastically up only in the last 30 years,
ans the same behavior can be seen for the US as well.

Now for the good news.
you cannot upload your own stats to the gapminder app directly,
but Google supplies a very similar tool through its Google documents apps.
Its called motion chart and on the gapminder site you can read the short or the long explanation to how to use the tool, after testing it the outcome can be inserted into any web page and it looks something like this:

I’m still exploring this Google motion chart app,
and my main concern is that it can only be embedded in a live web page,
I still need to find a way to have this presentation as a file on my laptop, to show even if I’m not connected to the net -
If anybody knows how to do that – leave a comment here please

Technorati Tags: google, statistics

These are some of the questions bothering web masters and site owners all the time,
here are some tools and readme’s that will:

• test your site
• find bottle necks
• measure performance from the outside
• get tips for fixing the problem areas in your site
• and knows list of issues every site is suffering from

so lets start with online freeware tools and external web site test tools.

Check if your Google Analytics is working well in your site

Who is watching the watchman?

first thing to check – are you getting the accurate statistics from your site?
is your Analytics account configured well?
are you even really using one?

SiteScan™ is a diagnostic tool from EpikOne that verifies if your Google Analytics (GA)
Tracking Code is installed properly on your website.

This scan will go over each page and verify that the Google Analytics code is embedded correctly to each of your page, this can help you diagnose if your bounce rate is high because the Analytics cant see their next click,
or maybe you should really work on your site design.

How does my code looks like from the browser?

From the firebug download page:

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page..

This is the basic tool to verify your code as it seen from the browser side,
you can click a specific element on your page, and get a list on the right pane window of firebug,
of all the css code that is effecting this element, even if the code span multiple css files.

Why is my page so slow?

the yslow tool from yahoo will go through the elements of your page,
and by using a preset list of rules, it will tell you which parts of the website you should fix,
and what to fix.

The yslow firefox plugin needs the firefox firebug installed first.

If you want to learn more deeply on the reasons behind each of the testing rules yahoo though about you can read the very informative document from yahoo about “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site”

Feed Validator

Get your rss feed validated

AOL webpagetest

from the AOL web page test:

Pagetest allows you to provide the URL of a webpage to be tested. The test will be conducted from the location specified and you will be provided a waterfall of your page load performance as well as a comparison against an optimization checklist.

Technorati Tags: apache, google, php, wordpress

In my post about implementing wiki I have given some samples of regular sites using wiki as their CMS (Content Management System), but this map site i’ve found today is using wiki for a whole new way,
by letting people mark specific spots and locations on a joined map.

Wikimapia

This is the site’s description from its own front page:

WikiMapia is an editable interactive map.
The Goal of Wikimapia is to create and maintain a free,
complete, multilingual, up-to-date map of the whole world.

But i think images will do the work best -
here are a few views you can use to watch a specific area:

The Classic view – with areas marked on the map

In the case of New-York, People have even marked
each building with its name

The wiki has a drop down category list of interesting
views to use

I can choose a close restaurant to go to

Or to create a list of interesting spots by their distance
from each other and plan my visit days by areas

And I can see the exact same category on the regular map view

I’m very pleased with this site, it can help you plan your travels, choose activities by their walking distance from each other, search for shops near by.

and of course – its all updated by the poeple for the poeple.

amazing work, cheers!

Technorati Tags: google, wiki