Category: Systems

All systems related posts

Solaris 10: On which CD is that XYZ package ?

If you want to know on which CD is a package, without :

  1. Mounting CD
  2. Searching
  3. Unmounting
  4. Swear and
  5. Go back to 1

Then you can :

  1. Mount CD #1 (mount -F hsfs /dev/dsk/<CDROM DEVICE> /mnt or, if you have automount cd /cdrom/cdrom0 or something like that)
  2. Go in the Solaris_10/Product directory of the CD
  3. Do grep -l <PACKAGE NAME> .virtual_packagetoc_*

    4. which will output the .virtual_packagetoc_N where N is the number of the CD holding that package.

Exemple :

# pwd
/mnt/Solaris_10/Product
# grep -l SUNWzsh .virtual_packagetoc_*
.virtual_packagetoc_5
#

So SUNWzsh, the package for ZSH shell, is on CD #5 of Solaris 10 distribution (damn, I don’t have it !)

This tip is courtesy of BlaF (thanks dude !)

Zsh is cool : brace expansion

Quoting the zshexpn man page :

 

An expression of the form {n1..n2}, where n1 and n2 are integers, is expanded to every number between n1 and n2, inclusive. If either number begins with a zero, all the resulting numbers will be padded with leading zeroes to that minimum width. If the numbers are in decreasing order the resulting sequence will also be in decreasing order.

Check out this :
spaghetti% for i in {8..11}; do echo $i; done
8
9
10
11
spaghetti%

and then this :
spaghetti% for i in {08..11}; do echo $i; done
08
09
10
11
spaghetti%

So much for the “while loops” with expr to increment a variable and “if” tests to add the padding zeroes 🙂

ZFS = zpools + zfs filesystems : concepts of a killer filesystem

ZFS, Sun’s latest filesystem, got a well deserved fame because of it’s ease of use and powerful features.

The ZFS community at the OpenSolaris.org website provides a great introduction to Sun’s ZFS.

Those of you who have actually already setup a software RAID with Solstice DiskSuite will truly appreciate how much simpler Sun made it with ZFS. The concepts of volume management and filesystems behind ZFS are not new, but Sun brought an unprecedented ease of use administration to those.

To understand Sun’s ZFS philosophy, you have to understand that it is built over two concepts : pools and filesystems. Let’s see what they are. Continue reading ZFS = zpools + zfs filesystems : concepts of a killer filesystem

OpenBSD : 4.1 is out !

As stated in the mailing list, the twice a year release of OpenBSD went out today ! Follow the link below for the full announce.

‘OpenBSD 4.1 Released’ – MARC
May 1, 2007. We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.1. This is our 21st release on CD-ROM (and 22nd via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system: […]

Long live OpenBSD !

CFEngine – Installing on Debian GNU/Linux

In this post we’ll install CFEngine on a Debian system. Debian make is really simple to install any packages, so let’s follow the “standard” package installation procedure (I’ll assume that apt is correctly setup on your system ! If you have troubles with it, let me know, I’ll write a post on this topic).
Continue reading CFEngine – Installing on Debian GNU/Linux