Sun Microsystems - The Crypt

Sun Microsystems, RIP

These are some documents and tools I wrote for Unix and Solaris many years ago, and are no longer maintained. While these are now mostly out of date or incomplete, they may be of use on older Solaris systems (Solaris 8, 9, 10) or for historical interest. (I'm still working on Solaris-related systems and writing new tools.)

Documents

• Solaris Network Monitoring, written as this was one of the weakest and most confusing areas for observability.
• Solaris Metrics was a project to document Solaris performance metrics; it was incorporated into Solaris Performance and Tools.
• OpenBoot PROM docs.
• The unofficial Sun Book of Records.

Software

These are Solaris tools written in either Perl or the Bourne shell:

• Psio is a tool to identify disk I/O by-process. This page contains psio, prusage and other related performance analysis tools. psio has been retired as most modern Solaris systems ship with my DTrace based tools for this (iosnoop, iotop).
• CacheKit is a collection of Perl and shell programs to report on cache activity for Solaris. The kit reports on I$, D$, E$, DNLC, inode cache, ufs buffer cache and segmap cache. This assists performance analysis and tuning.
• CheckCable prints the NIC status, duplex and speed. It can check if a cable is unplugged. Before dladm(1M) existed, this basic information was difficult to determine and inconsistent across interfaces, which is why CheckCable (and others like it) were written. example.
• Version is a tool that prints which version of Solaris commands first appeared in. example.
• OBPbanner prints out the OBP banner from Solaris, most useful on SPARC servers. example.
• InterfaceStat is a simple script to list ndd parameters of network interfaces. example.
• lsfd is a Solaris 10 tool to list processes and their open file descriptor paths. example.

Unix/Linux

These older documents and tools were written for all Unix/Linux types, not just Solaris:

• My regexp, sed and awk summary (2004). While an old document, it should still be valid since the basic syntax doesn't change. It is plain text, to facilitate viewing at the command line.
• The Ping Scripts page has a collection of scripts that ping servers and illustrate different monitoring strategies.
• CodeRanker is a program that rates other programs on their estimated difficulty. example.
• Search is a text search tool that prints surrounding lines (like GNU "grep" or VMS "search"). example.
• BackupConfigs creates an archive of common Solaris system config files. Customisable for other OSes. example.
• CodeRanker is a program that rates other programs on their estimated difficulty. example.

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