1z0-821 Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration – System Processes and Tasks

1. Exam Objectives

During this part of the course, we’re going to look at managing system processes and scheduling system tasks. Now, there’s a few objectives under this heading that we’ll look at for the OCA exam, but there’s also a few things we’re going to discuss that aren’t on the exam. At least they’re not part of the objectives. You still may see them incidentally on the exam. And those are things like performance monitoring and troubleshooting performance issues. I like to include those in the course because I think they help you with the overall objective of managing system processes. So we’ll take a look at those things as well. The objectives that we’re going to look at are managing system processes and this will help you manage the different processes that go on on the system in the background and unfortunately can cause problems.

So we’ll look at how to list them and how to deal with them, and then we’ll look at how to troubleshoot process issues and we’ll use things like PS, PGRP, Kill and so forth. We’ll also look at scheduling system administration tasks and we’ll do this using the at and Crontab commands, two commands that have been around in Linux and Unix for a while and you may have used them before. We’ll also look at monitoring system logs, we’ll look at how to look at the logs, what they will tell you and what you’re looking for and how you can use them for troubleshooting or looking at system performance and so forth. We’ll also look at core files, core dump files, and crash dump files because these can actually help you troubleshoot system issues as well. And you can look at these files and determine when something serious has gone wrong and possibly what the cause was and more importantly, how to fix it. So there’s a few things we’ll look at here in addition to these objectives. Performance monitoring again and performance issues are one thing I want to touch on. Another thing I’d like to touch on, too, here in a moment is getting system information getting hardware and software and operating system information about your system so you can better measure your system performance and troubleshoot issues such as processes and so forth when they occur. So having having said that, let’s go ahead and jump in.

2. Getting System Info

Before we actually look at managing processes and performance and troubleshooting and so forth. It would help if you know exactly what’s running on your system and this would involve actually the OS as well as software and applications and hardware, all of this information you need to know and it would help you when you manage the system itself, when you manage processes, look at performance and so forth. Some of the things you need to know about the system include hardware information such as CPU, Ram, hard disk space and so forth. And a lot of that you probably already know from the installation, but there may be particular information you don’t know. System configuration information would be helpful as well, so you know how your system is configured and what it’s doing and you can look at how the system deals with its hardware and its software through its configuration files. You also may want to know information about the OS itself, what version, which kernel it’s using and so forth. And finally, software and application information would be helpful because then you can troubleshoot issues that may occur due to versioning or dependencies or so forth.

Now there’s several commands we’ll look at things like you name, PRT, comp host name and host ID, package info, and the services command which we’ve already discussed a little bit. There’s also a few GUI tools that we could look at as well. Now there are several things that you can do with command line. That’s where you’re going to get a lot of your information from, so we’ll take a look at those first. We’ll probably talk about the GUI tools a little bit in a later presentation. All right. We’re our solaris eleven desktop. Let’s go to command prompt or terminal shell as we like to say. And let’s run a few commands just to see if we can get to know our system a little bit. First few commands will run involve looking at our system software, like our operating system. Let’s go ahead and take a look at your name and we’ll run it with a dash A and that will give us the operating system version, sun Oscillaris 511 or Eleven one in this case and it shows you the platforms. So obviously we’re not running a spark platform here. You can get some similar information that includes a little bit more using the catteerelease command and so you get a little bit more information here, not too much more. You get a date of when the system was installed here or when the binaries were assembled rather.

So you get a little bit more, but not too much more. You don’t get the particular information about which sonos version you’re using, like 511. Now, in addition to software information or rather operating system information, we’re looking for software information as well. And what we can do, and you’ve probably seen this already if you’ve played with package, you can look at package info and let’s pipe this to a Less command. This will give us information on every single package that’s installed on the system. Now it’s going to think about it for a second because it’s going to look for all the package information that can find. It’s going to look at the repositories and may even refresh some package information while it’s added. So we’ll let that run for a second. And while that’s running, we’ll also talk about a couple of commands that we can use to get system hardware information with and we’ll run those in a moment. And those are the PSR info command and the PRT configuration command. Our package info has come back so it shows the different information on the packages that are installed and we see that there’s a lot of packages that can be installed. We can scroll through here but it gives you a lot of common information like the state, the publisher, the version, the build release and so forth, the name of it, what it does in some cases, size it’s fMRI.

So you get a lot of different information here. So let’s go ahead and hit queue for quit. Now let’s look at the PRT comp command. I’m going to pipe this into Less. We’re going to see the system configuration information and there’s a lot of information here that we can look at. Some of it won’t make immediate sense to you, things like that, but you’ll get different things about the variables, you’ll get different property information about what properties and values there are and it’s really probably more information than you would care to know unless you’re looking for something particular. So it’d be better to use this with the Grep command. If you’re looking for something in particular to troubleshoot with, let’s hit the quit here. There’s a few other commands we can run as well like Hostname which gives you the name of the host on the network. You can also run Host ID which gives you that. You can also run Services A and that tells you all the services that are on the box and what’s online and running along with their naming convention.

And you can also run something like DF and DF will show you the file system usage on the drives so that’s all the file system usage, the file system itself, how large they are, how many blocks they take up, where they’re mounted at and so forth. So a lot of these commands that we’ve just shown you will give you a lot of information on your system, both hardware configuration, software, operating system. So you have a few commands at your disposal if you need to know things about the system when you’re looking at performance or troubleshooting issues. And there are plenty of other commands that we did not cover that will tell you a lot more information as well. Some of those we’ll touch on as we go through the next few sessions.

3. Manage System Processes

All right, now let’s take a look at managing our system processes. Now, if you don’t know what processes are, they basically are little applications or Applets or services that run on systems in the background. And there can be literally dozens that run in the background while your operating system is up and running. And they provide services to the system anywhere from login services to the gnome desktop to even the command shell itself. They run a lot of different things on the box. Now, like any application, they use memory, they use CPU cycle time, and they use other resources. So these processes, while there are dozens running, typically behave very nicely. They run with each other, they don’t step on each other’s memory spaces and things like that for the most part. But they can occasionally cause issues. And when they cause issues, different things can happen to the system, like system crashes. That would be probably a worst case scenario, or a hung up system, or just a slow sluggish system due to lots of memory consumption or CPU usage. So it would be helpful for you to be able to manage these system processes, and being able to view and manage them can help you in performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

There are several tools that we have that we can use to manage processes, and I’ll talk about a few of these right now, and a couple of them I’ll talk about a little bit later in a different session. Right now we’ll look at the PS command, we’ll look at PGRP and PRGS, and we’ll look at performance monitor. The P, Kill and Kill commands we’ll actually look at a little bit later when we talk about troubleshooting processes. So let’s go ahead and take a look at some of these commands in the performance monitor. Okay, we’re here in our Solaris Eleven box. Let’s go to a command shell. One of the first things I want to do is go ahead and sue to root so that we can look at everything we need to without worrying about permissions and so forth. Some processes, when you manage them or even look at them, you need root privileges. So what I want to do is go ahead and first and run a PS command.

We’re going to run this with the EF switch and pipe it into less so we can see what’s going on around us. That it’s scrolling off the screen. And we see several things the UID who owns the process, the process ID, and some other information here. You can look at the command here on it, so you can see where it’s coming from and so forth. And there’s other information as well. You can see all of these processes happening on the box right now. These are the running processes. Again, different owners. You can see things like the NFS processes, the Gnome processes, the Cron process, and so forth. So there’s a lot of different ones here.

And in fact, this can be so daunting that it can be difficult to troubleshoot just by looking at this list. So what you may want to do if you’re looking for something in particular is do a PS EF and pipe it into Grep. As you know from probably your Linux and Unix days, that Grep can find anything in anything. So it’s a good handy utility to have. We’re going to look for send mail and see if we have send mail running on the box. We do. We have two instances of send mail running two separate processes here and we have PIDS of 1770 1768 and a third, 119 98. That was actually my graph itself. It’s not really send mail, it found itself. So what I’d like to do now is now that we know what that process is and what the Process ID is, we can work with the Process ID. For example, we could do a PGRP which almost does the same thing and we’ll just do a Process ID here and go 1768 and sometimes we’ll get something back and sometimes we won’t. Let’s go with PGRP 1770. We’ll come back to PGRP here in a moment. The other thing we can do is look at the arguments for it.

Now the arguments will tell you what different configuration settings there are for process. So we’ll go PRS and we’ll look at 1768. There are several different arguments here and you can look down the list here and see an argument value of zero and argument value of one or argument value of two. And they’ll have different arguments based upon what configuration settings they have in there. And you can actually tweak these arguments to change the process if you like. So now that we’ve looked at the different PS commands, let’s go ahead and take a look quickly at the Performance Monitor, the Processes tab of it. As I said, we’ll come back to PGRP in just a few minutes. So let’s go ahead and go up to Applications and we’ll look at System Tools and we’ve got Performance Monitor. It’s a Gui tool and it’s used for several different things.

But what we’re interested in right now is the Processes tabs and we can see a lot of the same things we saw earlier, only the nice way to look at it and it doesn’t include every single child process and so forth. So there’s a little bit less to see here, but it can give you information like the Process ID, how much memory it’s taking up and so forth. This is just a quick look type of thing. Using the PS commands and some of the other commands we’ll talk about will actually help you a little bit more when you’re troubleshooting processes and so forth, when you’re trying to manage them as well. So typically you’d use the command line utilities more than you would use the System Monitor here. So those are the basic utilities to look at and view processes and in the next session we’ll look at some utilities that we can use to help manage them.

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