Alasdair on Everything   

SolarisBeat: iSCSI, Zone resource limits, a nicer whois, dd, tail and head.

December 10th, 2008

A brief post with some links to resources I found useful these past few days…

iSCSI Tutorial

A very brief, to the point iSCSI how-to for Solaris.

Solaris Zone Resource Limits

A great, to the point guide to Solaris Zone resource limits.

A Nicer Whois

The standard Solaris whois is not very good – it doesn’t know how to lookup IP addresses, nor some of the newer TLDs. Fear not though – we can grab the latest GNUish Whois and compile it up ourselves.

GNU coreutils on Solaris

On Solaris, the “dd” command doesn’t output any statistics. I frequently use dd to test the speed of transfers and the Solaris one is no good for this. I also get frustrated by the syntax of the Solaris tail/head commands, and want to type the more sane “tail -f -n 50 somefile” command.

Well, thankfully we can just compile up the GNU coreutils package and steal the dd, tail and head commands. They work fine on Solaris. Most of cureutils isn’t needed however – why you’d want the GNU/Linuxesque uname, chmod, etc I have no idea. So I don’t bother with “make install”, and just copy out the tools I want.

Unfortunately coreutils-6.12 doesn’t compile on Solaris as it’s too new. I tried version 6.6 from November 2006, which worked fine!

Entry Filed under: General