[rescue] Rescue me from Sun's screw ups!

[Billy B. Bilano]

Hey sundudes!

(I originally posted this to another Sun mailing list but they were all 
crazed people and left a bunch of mean comments on my guestbook! Boy, 
what a hornet's nest that list was! But, I am the bigger man so I just 
put their words behind me and move on, so here's my question and I am 
ready for you to help me...)

First let me tell you all that I don't use those metatools, that is all 
a bunch of balderdash that makes no sense to anybody. The only way to 
interact with the system at a lower level is via the command line. 
Anybody who is anybody in the UNIX world knows that the command line is 
text and therefore superior!

In order to speed up my network connections, I've decided to try some 
hard drive style technology by using the RAID5! Raids lets you use the 
parity information to account for the corrupt packets inherent in any 
network, those darn crazy inodes, and to keep the fat table in order. 
This technology will also allow my network connections to go faster and 
to finally eliminate that ever-glowing collision light on my switches!

The first thing that I needed to do was to create the state databases to 
keep track of what interfaces are playing what roles. To do that, the 
command I used was:

# metadb -a -f-c 42 /dev/bge

Ok, that went great! Then I needed to build the raid5s for the network. 
This is very easy to do, and I can see why Solaris outsells Linux 
because of this. Off the topic a bit, but why did they use RedHat as a 
name? I know what a blackhat, a whitehat, and even a greyhat are -- but 
what is a redhat? I think it might be communist (like RedChina) since 
the GPL is from the old Soviet Union. But I digress. So, to set up the 
raid5 on the Solaris, I do is this thing:

# metainit d5 -r /dev/bge0 /dev/bge1 /dev/beg2 /dev/bge3

Ignore any errors that come up from that, as they are just for debugging 
purposes only and don't mean anything. You can add > /dev/null if you 
want to suppress them!

After that, you need to organize the machine correctly. Part of this 
involve creating the network interface on the boots. To do this, simply 
follow these simple steps (feel free to cut and paste this if you are 
following along):

# echo "192.168.1.100 raid5networked" >> /etc/hosts
# echo "raid5networked" >> /etc/hostname.d5

The only problem with this setup is it does not work. I believe 
something is wrong with the plumbing of the network interface on boot 
up. I have attempted to fix this by doing:

# ifconfig d5 plumb

Even after that it does not work. I think it might be because of my ugly 
cisco switch. I think I should replace it with a new DLink managed solution.

I tried to debug this in the obvious ways. Too bad I am not on Solaris 
Express, or I could take the fast line to the dtrace and be done with it 
but good! Anyways I did this thing:

I need to create a dubugged project for it:

# projadd -u billy raid5it!

Then watch the audits:

# tee ifconfig plumb d5 |praudit| grep -i WARNING | grep -x `pgrep 
praudit` > /tmp/errors

 From that I see that some dumber installed Damien Reed's ipf. Heh, that 
was a mistake for them! Everyone knows that was pulled and replaced with 
pf because Reed was putting trojams into the kernel space to pull 
packets for the Russians! I had to remove it:

# rm -rf /dev/ipf
# cat /etc/system | sed 'r/ipf/gotya!/' > /etc/system

But then after I rebooted, I can't get it up. It says invalid system 
map. Any one know what is wrong? I opened a ticked with Sun Sliver 
Support, but I don't trust them cause their call center seems to be from 
England and I know that they are still mad at us for seconding the 
French Navy to win our war for us against the red-coats. So I thought I 
would turn to the good sunhelpers on this list!

Help little old Bill out here a bit... could you please?

P.S. Check my bloglog! http://www.bilano.biz/ -- I wrote a neat greylist 
app for postfix, too, dudes!

-- 
Mr. Billy B. Bilano, MSCE, CCNA
<http://www.bilano.biz/>
Expert Sysadmin Since 2003!
'C:\WINDOWS, C:\WINDOWS\GO, C:\PC\CRAWL'  -- RMS