System Adm

Physical memory in AIX

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:56:21 +0000

To check the amount of physical RAM that a AIX Server has, you can use the following commands:

lsattr -El sys0 | grep realmem
realmem 16121856 Amount of usable physical memory in Kbytes

lsattr -El mem0
goodsize 15744 Amount of usable physical memory in Mbytes False
size 15744 Total amount of physical memory in Mbytes False

prtconf|grep "Memory Size"
Memory Size: 15744 MB
Good Memory Size: 15744 MB

Glance shortcuts

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:00:24 +0000

To use the buttons at the bottom of the glance, you should do an "export TERM=dtterm".

After that, you will be able to use:
F1 for ProcList
F2 for CPU Rpt
F3 for Mem Rpt
F4 for Disk Rpt
F5 for NextKeys
F6 for SlctProc
F7 for Help
F8 for Exit

Control agent problem (OVO)

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:32:24 +0000

Sometimes the OVO agent stops communicating with the OVO Server.

Control agent on nodeHOST isn't accessible. (OpC40-405) Network communication problem: Could not obtain endpoint information from node ncadg_ip_udp:10.0.0.10[]. (OpC40-399)

To reestablish the communication, you should restart it:

To stop, use the command:

/opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcagt -stop

Check if it is stopped:

/opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcagt -status

				ITO Managed Node status :

				-------------------------

				Control Agent /opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcctla               (3818) is running

				Message Agent /opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcmsga               (3819) is running

				Subagent 1:

				Action Agent /opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcacta                (3820) is running

				Logfile Encapsulator /opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcle          (3821) is running 

				Monitor Agent /opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcmona               (3822) is running

				Message Interceptor /opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcmsgi         (3823) is running

Attention: the "Control Agent" may not stop, you can kill it with a "kill -9 PID"

To start, use the command:

/opt/OV/bin/OpC/opcagt -start

Check powerpath links in HP-UX

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:22:43 +0000

To check if the powerpath links are up in HP-UX, you can use the following command:

powermt display dev=all

When Glance stop working

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:41:39 +0000

Sometimes glance (performance monitor for HP-UX) can crash (before crash, it will return 0% of CPU, Disk and networking) working with the following error:

GlancePlus fatal error.
== Fatal Nums Error == C.04.50.57 02/10/07 ==
User: root/6pts/6(/dev/pts/6) Date: Sun Dec 6 15:52:12
File: /crm/numsVob/hp/11.0/nums.C Line: 485 Product id: Glance
System: server B.11.11 9000/800
Errno: 0 (Error 0)
Connection to midaemon lost — check midaemon process and status.mi == End of Error Msg
=============================

To solve it, you should:

Stop MWA:

mwa stop

Remove all files (including the hidden ones) from /var/opt/perf/datafiles:

rm -rf /var/opt/perf/datafiles/* rm -rf /var/opt/perf/datafiles/.*

Check if midaemon and ttd are stopped:

mwa status

If midaemon and ttd didn’t stop, force stops them with the command kill (the PID was returned by the command ‘mwa status’).

Now, start MWA again:

mwa start

Disable file size limit in AIX

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:58:48 +0000

By default, if you try do copy/create a file larger than 2Gb in AIX, you will get a “file too large” message. That happen because AIX have a default limit of 2Gb for files.

To disable (or increase) this limit, edit /etc/security/limits and change the parameter fsize to “-1” or whatever value you want.

You can change it in “default” to apply to all users or change it to a specific user.

Remember that the file system should be JFS2.

Working with “SVC”

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:29:40 +0000

Follow useful commands to work with “SVC” in Solaris:

More option can be found at “man svcadm”

svcs -a -> list all installed services.
svcadm disable SERVICE -> disable a service. if you use “svcadm disable -t SERVICE”, the service will be disabled only until the next reboot. You can use this commando to stop a service.
svcadm enable SERVICE -> enable a service. If you use “svcadm enable -t SERVICE”, the service will not be enabled automatically on reboot.
svcadm restart SERVICE -> restart a service.
svcadm reload SERVICE -> reload the configuration file.

More options can be found at “man svcadm”

Creating an user on AIX

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:33:12 +0000

Creating an user on AIX

On AIX, you can use the following commands to create an user

mkuser pgrp=’primary group’ groups=’other groups’ home=’home directory’ shell=’/usr/bin/ksh’ gecos=’GECOS’ USERNAME

Forcing an user changing the password on AIX

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:33:25 +0000

Forcing an user changing the password on AIX

On AIX, you can use the following commands to unlock na user and force it to change it’s password on first logon:

pwdadm -f ADMCHG USER

Lock an user account in HP-UX

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:45:17 +0000

To lock an user account in HP-UX, you can use the following command:

/usr/lbin/modprpw -m alock=YES USER

Martian Friend

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:59:06 +0000

You may find some weird messages indications in your syslog telling you something like “martian source” like the followings:

When a host needs send a package to another host, it can define the route on the network or use the default route. Those “source routed packages” are identified in Linux as martian packages. You can configure your Linux log/do not log those packages:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/log_martians #do not log

Merge many depots

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:58:23 +0000

When you have many depot files, you can create a single big depot and install it instead of install one by one.

Let’s assume that you need install the following depots, and they are all located in the directory /tmp/install/depots:

autoconf-2.64-hppa-11.11.depot
bison-2.4.1-hppa-11.11.depot
gawk-3.1.7-hppa-11.11.depot
sed-4.2.1-hppa-11.11.depot
tcltk-8.5.7-hppa-11.11.depot
texinfo-4.13-hppa-11.11.depot
zip-3.0-hppa-11.11.depot

To create a single depot, run the follow commands:

cd /tmp/install/
for i in `ls depots/*.depot` ;do swcopy -s /tmp/install/$i \* @/tmp/install/big;done

Now, to install it, you can use:

swinstall -s /tmp/install/big

Solaris and NRPE

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:16:20 +0000

A very nice guide to install NRPE and nagios-plugins on Solaris 10 can be found here.

To stop/start the NRPE, you can use the following command:

svcadm disable svc:/network/nrpe/tcp
svcadm enable svc:/network/nrpe/tcp

If you keep getting the “CHECK_NRPE: Error – Could not complete SSL handshake.” message, see this FAQ comment

Resizing lvol in Red Hat AS 4

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:32:55 +0000

As incredible as it seems, RHAS4 doesn’t came with the resize2fs command (just like the others RH distributions). After some research, I found the tool that replace the resize2fs command and it’s the ext2online, for example:

ext2online /dev/mapper/VG00-vl02

name/address mismatch

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:38:37 +0000

You may get in the messages log the follow error when trying access a FTP server on Solaris:

Jul 16 16:19:13 SolarisServer in.ftpd[1940]: [ID 913506 daemon.warning] refused connect from 172.152.121.114 (name/address mismatch)

This happends because the server cannot resolve your IP address. To solve it, you need disable TCP_WRAPPERS checks for in.ftpd by using this command:

inetadm -m svc:/network/ftp:default tcp_wrappers=FALSE

After that, you will be able to do FTP again

rlogin access denied

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:54:48 +0000

In some specific situations, you need use rlogin to remote access a server, but you can face the following error:

clientServer:~ # rlogin rloginServer

Password:

rlogin: connection closed.

If you check the /var/log/secure log on the “rloginServer”, you will find the following messages:

Jun 15 10:44:41 rloginServer rlogind[16640]: pam_securetty(rlogin:auth): access denied: tty ‘rlogin’ is not secure !

Jun 15 10:44:41 rloginServer rlogind[16640]: pam_rhosts_auth(rlogin:auth): denied to root@10.11.4.9 as root: access not allowed

Jun 15 10:44:47 rloginServer login: pam_securetty(remote:auth): access denied: tty ‘pts/0′ is not secure !

Jun 15 10:44:51 rloginServer login: FAILED LOGIN 1 FROM 10.11.4.9 FOR root, Authentication failure

Jun 15 10:44:53 rloginServer login: pam_securetty(remote:auth): access denied: tty ‘pts/0′ is not secure !

Jun 15 10:44:58 rloginServer login: FAILED LOGIN 2 FROM 10.11.4.9 FOR root, Authentication failure

Jun 15 10:44:58 rloginServer login: pam_unix(remote:auth): bad username []

Jun 15 10:44:58 rloginServer login: pam_succeed_if(remote:auth): error retrieving information about user

Jun 15 10:44:58 rloginServer login: FAILED LOGIN 3 FROM 10.11.4.9 FOR , User not known to the underlying authentication module

Jun 15 10:44:59 rloginServer login: pam_unix(remote:auth): bad username []

Jun 15 10:44:59 rloginServer login: pam_succeed_if(remote:auth): error retrieving information about user

Jun 15 10:44:59 rloginServer login: FAILED LOGIN SESSION FROM 10.11.4.9 FOR , User not known to the underlying authentication module

The problem here, is that “rlogin” is not a “secure” shell. To configure it, you should add “rlogin” (without the quotes) to /etc/securetty .

After that, you will be able to access the rlogin server.

Forcing an user changing the password on Solaris

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:18:28 +0000

On Solaris, you can use the following commands to unlock na user and force it to change it’s password on first logon:

passwd -f

passwd: password information changed for

HP-UX password maintenance

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:15:43 +0000

Follow a few utilities to maintain the user’s passwords:

/usr/lbin/getprpw - display protected password database
/usr/lbin/modprpw –x – change password
/usr/lbin/modprpw –k – unlock the user

Setting session timeout on Linux

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:41:14 +0000

To set an automatically shell timeout on Linux (that Will logoff that session after X seconds), you just need setup the following variable (put it in your /etc/profile):

echo “TMOUT=300; readonly TMOUT; export TMOUT” >> /etc/profile

The “readonly” option will not allow an normal user change (ou unset) it.

Hardware specification in HP-UX

Lincoln Zuljewic Silva — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:48:00 +0000

You can use the following command to check the HP-UP hardware (like CPU and memory):

hpuxhost@root:/root # print_manifest |more

System Information

Your Hewlett-Packard computer has software installed and

configured as follows.

The system was created July 04, 2007, 11:53:28 EDT.

It was created with Ignite-UX revision C.6.10.97.

————————————————————-

NOTE: You should retain this information for future reference.

————————————————————-

System Hardware

Model: 9000/800/SD32A

Main Memory: 65005 MB

Processors: 32

Proccesor(0) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(1) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(2) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(3) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(4) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(5) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(6) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(7) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(8) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(9) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(10) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(11) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(12) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(13) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(14) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(15) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(16) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(17) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(18) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(19) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(20) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(21) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(22) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(23) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(24) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(25) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(26) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(27) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(28) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(29) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(30) Speed: 1000 MHz

Proccesor(31) Speed: 1000 MHz

(…) Many other HW information above