There are times when working with a Solaris server that you need to know a little more about the hardware configuration. Knowing how much memory that you have and how many processors there are can be very useful to know if you are not to hog such resources.

The command for revealing how much memory has been installed is:

prtconf -v

Since memory is often allocated to individual CPU’s, then knowing how many are on the system is a must. This command will give you the bare number:

psrinfo -p

The following variant provides the full detail that you see below it:

psrinfo -v

Output:

Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 10/06/2008 16:47:54
  on-line since 09/13/2008 14:47:52.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 1503 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 1 as of: 10/06/2008 16:47:54
  on-line since 09/13/2008 14:47:49.
  The sparcv9 processor operates at 1503 MHz,
        and has a sparcv9 floating point processor. 

For a level intermediate between both extremes, try this to get what you see below it:

psrinfo -vp

Output:

The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (0)
  UltraSPARC-IIIi (portid 0 impl 0×16 ver 0×34 clock 1503 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (1)
  UltraSPARC-IIIi (portid 1 impl 0×16 ver 0×34 clock 1503 MHz)

Keeping an eye on disk space on a Solaris server is important for me at work while keeping the same top level overview is good for my use of Linux at home too. Luckily, there’s a simple command that delivers the goods:

df -h 2>/dev/null

The "df -h" piece is what delivers the statistics while the "2>/dev/null" rids the terminal of any error messages; ones stating that access has been denied are common and can cloud the picture.

The time hounoured syntax for a for loop in a UNIX script is what you see below and that is what works with the default shell in Sun’s Solaris UNIX operating system, ksh88.

for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
do
        if [[ -d dir$i ]]
        then
            :
        else
            mkdir dir$i
        fi
done

There is a much nicer syntax supported syntax the advent of ksh93. It follows C language conventions found in all sorts of places like Java, Perl, PHP and so on. Here is an example:

for (( i=1; i<11; i++ ))
do
        if [[ -d dir$i ]]
        then
            :
        else
            mkdir dir$i
       fi
done

Contrary to appearances given by this blog, I am not exclusively a Windows user. In fact, I have sampled Linux on a number of occasions in the past and I use VMware to host a number of different distributions – my Ubuntu installation is updating itself as I write this – as I like to keep tabs on what is out there. I also retain a Windows 2000 installation for testing and have had virtual machine hosting a test release of Vista not so long ago. I also have my finger in the UNIX world with an instance of OpenSolaris, though it is currently off my system thanks to my wrecking its graphics set up. However, ZoneAlarm has been known to get ahead of itself and start blocking VMware. If you go taking a look on the web, there is no solution to this beyond a complete system refresh (format the boot drive and reinstall everything again) and I must admit that this sounds like throwing out bath, baby and bathwater together. I did find another approach though: removing ZoneAlarm and reinstalling it. This wipes all its remembered settings, including the nefarious one that conflicted with VMware in the first place. It’s amazing that no one else has considered this but it has worked for me and having to have the security software relearn everything again is much less painless than rebuilding your system.