Bug: Installing a Netbackup Media server in a HP-UX SRP-enabled environment

15/12/2011 – 16:50

This is a bug I found during the installation of a Netbackup Media server. The target system was an HP-UX 11iv3 which has several SRP containers integrated into ServiceGuard. As I started the installation script on the global container, it failed with an swinstall error stating that it couldn’t set the SRP containers into maintenance mode. You should know that we plan to use the the media server from the global zone, and the client will be installed also only to the global zone.

That’s because two new options were added to the swinstall command to support the Secure Resource Partition functionality. The first one is the global_srp option, by which you can decide if the installation/removal should affect the global system. The other option is the local_srp_list which contains space separated system container names enclosed in quotes. Read More »

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Backup & Restore | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Configure RAID mode on a P410i

08/12/2011 – 13:06

This post is the successor of the previous one, which was written on how to change your P410i controller to RAID mode. Setting the controller to RAID mode is just half the job, you need to define the RAID level and assign physical disks to it. For this you can use the drvcfg -s command at the EFI shell to get into the P410i BIOS.

  1. To determine the drv use the drivers command from EFI shell prompt.
  2. Find the SAS Host Adapter and make a note of the Driver ID from the left column. That is the drv.
  3. To determine the ctr use the drvcfg command from the efi shell prompt. Look for the SAS Host Adapter drv number and the corresponding number is the ctr:
    Read More »
By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Hardware, Servers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Changing a P410i from HBA mode to RAID mode

30/11/2011 – 12:16

So, you’ve just unboxed your freshly came Integrity server, which has a P410/P410i SAS controller. (P410i is an onboard integrated version of the same chipset.) To a P410i controller one can attach a maximum of two SAS drives, and the controller has two operation modes: either it can function as a plain SAS controller without any other intelligence, or we can have the capability of a RAID controller if we set it to RAID mode. Usually when you have to deal with brand new servers, the controller is set to SAS mode, but it is a good practice to install a system onto a hardware-based RAID 1 volume. In order to change the mode you should follow these steps:

  1. Update the firmware of the disk controller.
  2. Change the controller to RAID mode

Read More »

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Hardware, Servers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

Checking the status of multipathing in 11iv3

24/11/2011 – 14:46

A common task in a sysadmin’s life is to assist to the changes which are affecting the SAN network. At smaller organizations it could be that besides the system administrator role you also need to manage the storage side.  So here’s a post which might help you if you need to check the status of the LUN paths. For checking the availability of the LUNs, you can use the ioscan command like this:

# ioscan -P health -C disk
Class     I  H/W Path  health
===============================
disk      1  64000/0xfa00/0x1   online
disk      4  64000/0xfa00/0x6   online
disk      7  64000/0xfa00/0x7   online
disk     10  64000/0xfa00/0x8   online
disk     13  64000/0xfa00/0x9   online
disk     16  64000/0xfa00/0xa   online
disk     19  64000/0xfa00/0xb   online
...

Read More »

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in HP-UX system administration, Monitoring, Servers, Storage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Recommended BladeSystem Firmware Installation Order

28/09/2011 – 14:15

For HP c-class BladeSystem Enclosures if there is an OS installed to the blade, update the firmware in the following recommended order:

  1. Update the firmware of the server blades
  2. Update the firmware of the Onboard Administrators
  3. Now reboot the systems
  4. Update any offline-only firmwares like Emulex or QLogic adapters
  5. Update the firmware of the Virtual Connects using VCSU

For Blade servers without OS, the following order is recommended:

  1. Update the Onboard Administrator firmware
  2. Update the firmware of the Virtual Connect modules with VCSU
  3. Update the firmware of any server-specific components

source: hp.com

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Hardware, Servers | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Oracle Grid Control on HP-UX: swap shortage

21/09/2011 – 14:12

If you are using Oracle Grid Control on HP-UX you may have problems with swap usage. The values reported by Grid Control could be much higher as the values reported by the system trough swapinfo. Maybe it just didn’t turn out until you got a warning something like

“Swap Utilization is 100%, crossed warning (80) or critical (95) threshold.”

That’s how it looked like on our system in Enterprise Manager:

Read More »

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Databases | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Exporting SQL*Plus output to HTML

25/08/2011 – 15:52

Nowadays I deal with Oracle databases, and I found something cool which might be of interest to you. So here is a quick way to capture the SQL*Plus output to a html file:

SQL> set markup HTML on 
SQL> spool index.html 
SQL> -- do something
SQL> spool off 
SQL> set markup HTML off

This captures the whole output in HTML format besides STDOUT into the given index.html file.

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Databases | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Exporting putty settings

19/08/2011 – 15:46

Here is a quick howto on how to import your saved hosts in putty from one machine to another. Putty stores its settings in the windows registry. With the following one-liner typed into the “Start menu” > “Run” you can save your settings as a .reg file.

regedit /e "%userprofile%\desktop\putty.reg" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simontatham

After this the .reg file has been created on your desktop, you should copy it to the destination host and double-click it to import.

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Backup & Restore, Other | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Glance adviser scripts

08/07/2011 – 10:19

The first most important thing in proactive performance tuning is to establish a baseline. This can be done by capturing performance data at normal operation. If you are familiar with the interactive glance, and want to have the output in that familiar format, you can automate data collecting with adviser scripts and have the output in an ASCII file. This is how to get started with adviser scripts:

You have a sample adviser syntax file here: /var/opt/perf/adviser.syntax

Here is a sample of mine which captures physical I/O data:

# cat glance.syntax
PRINT "---------------------", gbl_stattime, "--------------------"
DISK LOOP
PRINT bydsk_devname, " write rate: ", bydsk_phys_write_rate, " read rate: ", bydsk_phys_read_rate
#

You can run glance with this adviser script in non-interactive mode like this (with redirection you can capture the output into a file): Read More »

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Languages and Scripting, Monitoring, Performance Tuning | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Physical vs. Logical I/O

05/07/2011 – 10:46

If you do performance tuning or troubleshooting with glance probably you have observed the terms logical I/O and physical I/O. This post is to clarify these shortly:

Physical I/O: the traffic toward the storage subsystem.

Logical I/O: the requests which come from running processes and threads trough system calls. If the requested data is not to be found in memory, it generates a physical I/O and the system fetches it from the disks.

Note that some tools are reporting either logical or physical I/O, and they simply flag it as “I/O” so you might not have the idea about what kind of I/O it reports. Built-in application performance monitoring tools are reporting the logical I/O (e.g. statspack, awr) while system tools like sar or iostat are reporting the physical I/O. To be sure use glance, it is capable of showing both physical and logical I/O if you select a process or thread.

By Viktor Balogh | Posted in Resource management, System Internals | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)