Comments on: Emergency OS patch on file server

By: Lorette Harsberger

Lorette Harsberger — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:26:43 +0000

UNABLE TO CONNECT TO WEBSITE WITH DREAMWEAVER FOR UPDATES AND SITE ADMINISTRATION.

HAS USERNAME OR PASSWORD CHANGED?

IT APPEARS TO BE CONNECTING, AND THEN IT GETS TO THE END AND SAYS UNABLE TO CONNECT TO SERVER, AND FTP UNAVAILABLE.

PLEASE HELP.

THANK YOU.

By: ems

ems — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:48:44 +0000

my email is still down

people are still not receiving emails from me using simple php mail

By: setsuna-xero

setsuna-xero — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:42:34 +0000

@Kelly
no the hardware was 10 years old
the zpool was only a few months old

but seriously the only time I’ve seen a Solaris Server go down was someone playing with it, otherwise they just keep chugging along for years and years, other than catastrophic hardware failures such as our SCSI box emitting some nice blue smoke of death…

I will agree that ZFS needs some more work, but its still a baby really in relation to the other volume managers/FSes

I also don’t get why many places don’t do proper backups, disk space is pretty cheap now, unless you’re looking a few dozen terabytes, but by that point your accountants should realize how much money will be lost WHEN you need those backups that don’t exist…

By: AJ

AJ — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:55:42 +0000

I have heard of a few instances when the zpools have gone screwy - a couple of times it was bad enough to require recovery from backups.

I know some places think they can ignore backups if they use zpools - but thats assuming everything works and nothing breaks.

I hope there are some backups here instead of just depending on zpool to not go on a rampage and eat up a bunch of files ……

By: Kelly@Dreamhost

Kelly@Dreamhost — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:52:42 +0000

Re: Patching, yes I mis-read one of the patch dependencies, which turned into a chain of them that I was missing. Fortunately network works in single user mode, so I could scp them in from another server! Then sunsolve decided it didn’t want to play with me anymore.

Re: setsuna-xero: You have 10 year old zpools? It is strange. There are certainly kinks to work out, but overall it’s pretty slick!

I’m sorry for touching the Solaris server. It obviously knows better than I do about what should be done.

By: Sharon McCormick

Sharon McCormick — Sat, 10 May 2008 14:24:01 +0000

This is good info!

By: setsuna-xero

setsuna-xero — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:42:03 +0000

wait wait wait…
you broke a sun server?
you touched it didn’t you, you dirty monkies

that said, I’m quite surprised to hear of a zpool breaking, I’ve never seen that, even on 10 year old sun hardware with poor reliablity…

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:08:45 +0000

@Nyhm,

I hope that they do implement this. I think what they’re doing now is averaging the two; although this is faulty because you can hardly call something that affects all users very, very slightly medium severity; and if somebody’s site is gone, it’s more than low severity to them.

By: Kyle J

Kyle J — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:31:00 +0000

Ah, gotta love Sun’s archaic patch download system. Almost as good as trying to get ahold of Cisco software. Good luck guys.

By: Nyhm

Nyhm — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:47:53 +0000

Thanks, Eric. This ranking is similar to software bug severity, of which I have much experience. That is, if there are no High Severity bugs, I know my software is not “broken,” and there is no need to alert any users of a possible catastrophic failure. Med Severity bugs indicate something is wrong, which the users may need to know about. Low Severity means the issue does not degrade any features, which usually implies an enhancement, which users do not need to worry about.