Autonegotiation doesn't

Standing up a Snorcle x4540 storage server. Nice Cisco 4849 switches, and Solaris 10U9. But wait, the stupid NVidia NGE driver autonegotiates 100/Half to the Gigabit Network switch. Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot. My goodness. Years and years of hardware development and standards and two name brand devices can't figure it out. Great.

Start pounding on the various incarnations of the adv_*_cap flags with ndd to see if I can get a clue why it's doing what it's doing. Big chart brewing, and I'm probably gonna have to talk to some guy in a foreign language to see if this problem has a known resolution, or if it's gonna take hammering it for a couple of hours to find the 2^12 combinations that gets me 1000Mbs. At least the network guy is a charm to work with so I know we'll figure it out the hard way.

Office Moves

Another huge time waster. Not only do I get a smaller cube, but right across from the Group Director's office who runs the "can do no wrong" NOC. I'm so happy. NOT.

How dumb do you think we are?

I work in a support organization who has to call support organizations. Often times, I've already done 75% of the "debugging" before I've called so I can effectively bypass that. But one of my vendors has changed, and now they're relying on automated tools, and associated "tools" who make annoying emails about the status of our systems without one clue about what they talk.

An example, I built out a pair of systems about 6 weeks ago. Having some storage problems, and send of the appropriate diagnostics. The rocket scientist on the other end of the line tells me I have a bad disk and I need to replace it. Oh, yeah, Which disk in my SAN array are you talking about? "Oh". mumbles for a while, says he'll get back to me. Things aren't quite right and said rocket scientist again says I need to update the patches to fix things up. I asked him for the specific bug id's he's referring to, along with the patches. "Oh." mumbles for a while. "But our backline says you're down rev'd on patches". Me - Really. 6 weeks ago, this was completedly patched and you've not yet identified any of the problems I've pointed out to you with appropriate bug ids. Yeah, you're using a tool that says patches are out of date. I got one of those too. I don't need you to tell me that. I need you to tell me "here is the bug, here is the bug id and here is the patch or temporary patch". Don't be telling me I need to upgrade my patches on your whim and your stupid tool just because you are out of ideas. What, do you think every system is in a lab and can be upgraded willy-nilly on your say so?

Please buy a clue. and if not, go get a job where they ask "Do you want fries with that?"

you want what version?

As most companies do, mine uses co-lo's to deal with the power, cooling, network, storage and other logistics. Recently, we needed some storage and the co-lo said that we could only run the qlogic's driver from Solaris 10U5. I was like Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot? Are you kidding me? You haven't updated your support matrix in 3 years? I was blown away.

Fortunately, after a fair amount of hang wringing and arguing, we finally got them to agree to a more recent version, and only required a backout of a single patch. I do love Live Upgrade with ZFS root. create BE, remove patch, run pca (Patch Check Advanced) against the ABE to verify that the right patch version will be activated, activate the ABE and reboot. Firedrill averted.

Recreating a Solaris pkg from an installed system

Had one of those days, where the jumpstart server was not backed up and the custom packages I build for our systems disappeared when the disk went south. Then wasted an hour seeing if I could find if the systems I build the package on still had it around. Gave up, figured there must be a way to do it easily. It was.

cd /usr/local
echo "i pkginfo=./pkginfo" > prototype
cp /var/sadm/pkg/MyPkg/save/pspool/MyPkg/pkginfo .
egrep "[fd] none" /var/sadm/pkg/MyPkg/save/pspool/MyPkg/pkgmap | cut -f4 -d\ | pkgproto >> prototype
pkgmk -o -r .

Done. I'm sure the egrep might need tuning for specific stuff in packages, but this did what I needed, and I'm glad I spent the 15 minutes to figure this out. Hope it helps someone else out