Author Archives: Viktor Balogh

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

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 [...]

Configure RAID mode on a P410i

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 [...]

Changing a P410i from HBA mode to RAID mode

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 [...]

Checking the status of multipathing in 11iv3

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 [...]

Recommended BladeSystem Firmware Installation Order

For HP c-class BladeSystem Enclosures if there is an OS installed to the blade, update the firmware in the following recommended order: Update the firmware of the server blades Update the firmware of the Onboard Administrators Now reboot the systems Update any offline-only firmwares like Emulex or QLogic adapters Update the firmware of the Virtual [...]

Oracle Grid Control on HP-UX: swap shortage

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) [...]

Exporting SQL*Plus output to HTML

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 [...]

Exporting putty settings

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 [...]

Glance adviser scripts

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 [...]

Physical vs. Logical I/O

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 [...]