A friend asked me how he could see the network utilization in Solaris. It seems like a fairly simple request but for some reason this is not a simple command line away. In Linux I would instinctively go straight to iptraf. I don’t know if iptraf is the tool of choice these days but…

Recently, I was asked to give some advice on an integration project involving some Solaris web servers . One of the sides requested to install the top command.Now I know and love top for Linux but using top on Solaris is a waste in my opinion. Solaris comes with the prstat command built in-…

Static routes are a very common necessity once your networks become even a little complex. Whether you need to route specific traffic over a VPN or setup specific test addresses for IPMP failover, static routes are indispensable. For many years the “correct” way of configuring static routes in Solaris has been to create an…

I recently installed Solaris 08/07 on a T2000 with a Sun Quad GbE x8 PCIe Low Profile Adapter (X4447A-z) inside. The machine gave lots of problems. One of the issues was the following message which the machine logged hundreds if not thousands of times: Oct 23 22:18:27 hostname fmd: SUNW-MSG-ID: SUNOS-8000-1L,…

I recently installed Solaris 08/07 on two T2000 machines and was extremely surprised to find a serious bug with the fmd (Fault Management Daemon) service. The service would, seemingly at random, fail to start on boot. It wouldn’t actually fail though- it just never finished starting. This caused numerous side effects including that prtdiag,…