My world of Unix and Storage

We have an impressive footprint of Sun server mainly M8000, M5000 and E2900 where frequently we have to create Veritas file system on storage provisioned from Clariions . Since, we handle both the Unix and Storage team it becomes rather easy to fulfill business requirement and avoid possible delays. Once the storage is provisioned we start like this: 1. As leadville drivers are in place on Solaris 10 servers, use cfgadm - al to determine the attachment points for external FC . 2. Use cfgadm -c configure , repeat this for all Ap _Id ,Changing the state of the attachment point for making the occupant hardware resource to be usable by OS 3. devfsadm -C ,Asking the drivers to do whatever to probe for the new devices and build subsequently the device files, it also create links for the files like / dev / rdsk /c1t0dos0 etc 4. powercf -q ,Create emcpower pseudo devices for the newly detected luns 5. powermt config ,Creates powerpath configuration 6. powermt save ,Commit the ch...

We have a mammoth task every quarter to patch all our Unix servers, and every month if the servers are in DMZ. With time we have formulated a couple of steps that makes life easier during patching of Sun servers. 1. We apply the same patch cluster on every Sun server for a particular quarter, no matter when we patch the server during a particular quarter . 2. Once the patch is downloaded at the centralized location, it is distributed to every server on the / directory. This may sound a little off track as the patch cluster consumes a good 1GB of space and the patching process might fail if we do not have sufficient disk space on our / and /var file system, but we had faced some NFS issues before where we had a lot of trouble bringing up the system after the nfs server crash in middle of the patching process. 3. We inform the database team before hand (1 week) about the patch cluster release and also share with the them release notes, for them to identify any issues with the database a...