Getting a network interface to function

When bringing up a machine, and having to debug network connectivity, there is no substitute for being able to look at network traffic on the wire. Be aware that sniffing traffic can be fatal to your employment and perhaps your career if you do not follow the approved practices in your environment. If you do have the permission to perform network sniffing, it is an invaluable asset for debugging network problems.

One thing to be aware of, especially when not using UNIX or Linux, is that TCP/IP is an add-on protocol for other environments such as Windows and OpenVMS.

What can you determine from sniffing the network traffic?

• Is the system sending out traffic at all?
• What is the actual MAC address of the interface?
• Are ARP requests going out?
• Is DHCP being used? Is it failing or succeeding?
• Is DNS being used? Is it failing or succeeding?
• Is ping working? Are replies being received?

There are many other things that can be answered through looking at the network traffic. At its most basic (if network connectivity is the problem), the server can be disconnected and traffic looked at from the switch (with the normal cable) and from the server (using a cross-over cable).

With this information, it may be possible to clear up many netowrk connectivity problems.

Do you know Veritas?

I’ve seen this question posed, and been posed it myself. Having worked with HP-UX these some years, answering this question becomes even more complicated. After all, Veritas (now a part of Symantec) has these various products:

• Veritas File System
• Veritas Volume Manager
• Veritas Cluster Services
• Veritas NetBackup

To add to the complexity, HP’s HP-UX shipped with a base version of the Veritas File System until 11i when the operating system began shipping with a full version of the Veritas File System. Besides that, the complete Veritas File System implementation HP uses was rebranded by them as OnlineJFS – and the HP-UX implementation uses VxFS within LVM, not the Veritas Volume Manager.

So what does it mean to say “I know Veritas”? Nothing. Better to be specific – and if you are familiar with HP’s HP-UX filesystem implementation, say so (and clarify). All you can do next time someone asks you this question is to educate them on the different products that are branded “Veritas” so you can answer them clearly.

An OpenSolaris Review, and OpenSolaris Day 2008

This detailed review of OpenSolaris from an experienced Solaris administrator (at OSYS News Weblog) is a delight. Certainly, any review of OpenSolaris in the “main-stream” technical press (whatever that is) is generally more broad and less technical than an administrator could wish for – especially an administrator who is experienced with Solaris. The author specifically mentions arstechnica.com (this review perhaps?) and phoronix.com (this review?), both about OpenSolaris 2008.05.

OpenSolarisDay 2008 (also being billed as OpenJava Day?) will be held at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Facultad de Matemáticas) on July 26 and 27. If you are in Madrid those days (and speak Spanish), why not go? Sounds very open and fun.

If you use Firefox (or alternative spins like Flock) you can use an extension called HyperWords to translate on the fly as I did (I don’t speak Spanish – French, yes; Russian, I can fake it…. but not Spanish). HyperWords allows you to take a number of actions on a selected item, including translations. Worth getting!