Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Linux to Solaris

For some time I've been interested in Solaris (particularly OpenSolaris) but I've never had the time or interest to take my explorations beyond installing the system and doing basic SysAdmin tasks. While reading some comments on an interesting blog post about 'The Enterprise Linux problem', I saw the following link:

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/advocacy/immigrants/

It provides links to some great posts that will help experienced SysAdmins get used to Solaris.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Comparison of console management techn{iques,ology}

Here's a great bit of work by Ian Durkacz (University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, April 2007) which compares various methods of remotely connecting to the console of a Linux server:

http://www.dice.inf.ed.ac.uk/units/infrastructure/Projects/06-Consoles/consoleoptions.pdf

It covers KVMoIP, multi-port serial cards, serial concentrators, IPMI and Dell Remote Access Cards (DRAC) and provides rough per-server prices.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Pipe viewer

"Pipe viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion."

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/