Tag: sun

Changing Video Settings on SunBlade 100

To change the display resolution or refresh rate on a SunBlade 100 or similar Sun hardware isn’t as easy as it sounds. Or at least it’s not obvious. These directions are for an M64 type graphics accelerator. The steps are similar for other Sun graphics accelerators, but the command will be different (maybe ffbconfig). Check your hardware documentation for details.

These coommands should be run as root. I recommend running these commands via ssh from another system. If you accidentally change the resolution to something that is not supported you won’t be able to see so well to change it back.

To change video settings you’ll first want to find out what the card and display are capable of.

m64config -res ?

This will print the resolution and refresh rate options you have. Where three numbers are listed this represents the horizontal and vertical resolution and refresh rate respectively.

The current configuration will be shown with a [3] next to it. Write down the current resolution and refresh rate. There are a lot to choose from and you’ll want to know you can get back to one that works.

Configurations marked with a [2] are not supported by the video card and will probably not work.

To change the settings run this command with the desired resolution/refresh rate. The now forces the system to change these settings immediately rather than at next refresh.

m64config -res 1024x768x75 now

Your monitor should click and flicker and with luck will then come back at the new resolution. If it doesn’t you can change it back to the old settings by running the m64config command with the orignal settings. You did write the old setting down like I told you to right?

solaris, sun, unix, system administration, sysadmin

Getting Hardware Information in Solaris

Here’s a quick way to find out what hardware is installed in your Solaris system, including RAM, CPUs, PCI cards, and external devices. The output will usually include the size of each memory chip in the system.

The one trick to using this command is to make sure you use the backtick instead of a single quote around the uname -i. The backtick is typically shift tilde and forces the command between the backticks to be executed and substituted in to that part of the command.

/usr/platform/`uname -i`/sbin/prtdiag

prtdiag actually displays system diagnostic information. I’ve used this on Solaris 7 through 10. The best parts is you do not even need to be root to execute this.

For more info on prtdiag check out the man page.

solaris, sun, unix, system administration, sysadmin

Oracle Prefers Solaris 10

It looks like Oracle is re-aligning themselves with Sun Solaris as their preferred 64-bit platform. In the March issue of Oracle Magazine they have a short announcement on the topic:

Oracle has chosen the Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems’ multiplatform, open source operating system, as its preferred development and deployment platform for most 64-bit architectures. Solaris 10 will be used throughout Oracle’s development organization, and Oracle will release and ship 64-bit versions of all Oracle products on Solaris prior to, or simultaneously with, release on other operating systems.

Check out the whole article here or sign up to get your free copy of Oracle Magazine.

Thanks to Jon G. for sending this on to me.

oracle, database, database administration, dba, systems administration, sysadmin, solaris, sun, sun microsystems, UNIX, open source, 64-bit

Oracle on Solaris: 32-bit or 64-bit

It is important for optimal performance to make sure you match up your Oracle RDBMS installation with your OS. Running a 32-bit version of Oracle on a 64-bit OS is may not give you peak performance, but also will not be able to address large segments of RAM and large files. So how do you know what your OS supports? How can you tell if that Oracle install from before you started is 64-bit? Here’s how:

Is my Operating System 64-bit?

In Solaris, from the command line (you don’t have to be root in most cases) run this command:

/usr/bin/isainfo -kv

If your OS is 64-bit, you will see output like:

64-bit sparcv9 kernel modules

If your OS is 32-bit, you will get this output:

32-bit sparc kernel modules

For Linux users

If you are running Linux, you can check your distribution with the uname command:

uname -m

The output will read x86_64 for 64-bit and i686 or similar for 32-bit.

How about this Oracle install? Is it 64-bit?

The question here is weather your Oracle binaries are 64-bit. While some of the binaries associated with Oracle may be 32-bit, the important ones will be 64 bit. To check those, follow these steps from the command line:

cd $ORACLE_HOME/bin
file oracl*

This will display the file type of your oracle binaries. If you are running 64-bit binaries, the output should look like this:

oracle: ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped
oracleO: ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped

If your binaries are 32-bit, the output will look like this:

oracle: ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped

If you find you are running 32-bit and decide to go to 64 be careful. The switch can be a bit tricky. Read the documentation closely and make sure your service contract is payed up!

oracle, dba, database administration, database, solaris, linux, sun, sun microsystems, 32-bit, 64-bit