Useful Solaris commands for BMC Remedy newbies
I wish I had this list a few years ago – anyone who’s been around Solaris for any length of time won’t find this helpful. But I would have liked it on the first day I was exposed to Solaris and Remedy (also, I’d like to be that age again….). It’s a good short list of common commands for beginners.
The bullet points below each question demonstrate the actual Solaris commands (which are the same on most flavors of unix).
1.) How do I start/stop the Remedy server?
- cd /<install dir>/ar/bin
- arsystem start
- arsystem stop
2.) If I have multiple instances running on a server how do find out which (if any) are running?
- ps -ef | grep arserverd
When looking for processes running as a particular user (for example, if you have multiple installs of the product running as different system users…). In this example the unix UID is “remedydev”
- ps -ef | grep arserverd | grep remedydev
3.) How do I set an environment variable like ARNONROOTINSTALL=TRUE
- export ARNONROOTINSTALL=TRUE
or
- cd /<home directory of user>
- vi .profile
- vi is the editor most people use in Solaris – .profile (note the dot in front of it) is where the user configured enviroment is stored
- add the lines below:
- ARNONROOTINSTALL=TRUE
- export ARNONROOTINSTALL
4.) How do I tell what version of Solaris I’m on?
- uname -a
5.) How do I tell if a certain value like “Oracle-Two-Task” is in a file like ar.conf file?
- cd /<install dir>/ar/conf
- grep Oracle-Two-Task ar.conf
You can grep just about anything using the redirect, ie, the pipe sign |. For example, you can grep the results of a directory hierarchy listing if you are looking for a file. Let’s say the file is 123.so and all you know is that it’s under the install directory somewhere. You could navigate to that directory and type this:
- ls -lR | grep 123.so
That will take the entire list, redirect it to grep, and return the listing(s) that have 123.so in them.
6.) How do I change permissions on a file?
- chmod 777 filename
777 is of course wide open permissions – normally you would not do this. However, their is a complete listing of the file commands in numerous places on the internet. The thing to remember is you are setting three permissions - owner, group, and world. Each number represents the respective permission. WinSCP does this visually like this (if you choose the properties of a file):
Also, to change permissions to an entire directory hierarchy you can do this:
- chmod -R 777 directoryname
7.) How do I….
- Make a directory?
- mkdir directoryname
- Copy a file in the same directory (ie, ar.conf to ar.conf.bak?)
- cp ar.conf ar.conf.bak
- Copy a file in a different directory to this one?
- cp /full-path-to-file/filename .
- Copy a file from here to a different directory?
- cp filename /full-path-to-file
- Delete a file?
- rm filename
- Delete an entire directory (THIS IS NOT RECOVERABLE)?
- rm -r directoryname
Hummingbirds, Hawks, and Finches
In the past day I’ve seen the following outside the house – it’s quite interesting.
First, we put up a hummingbird feeder as a leap of faith on 5/22/09 (yesterday). We’d never seen them around here but they are supposed to be here.
Within an hour we saw a few hummingbirds around the feeder- it was pretty cool. They were iridescent blue/green and that’s all I can tell you about what species they were. (Note: If you live in or are familiar with the species of hummingbirds around Stevens Point WI please Contact Me and let me know – I’m clueless).
Then this morning I got up and noticed a big bird in our front yard – I grabbed the binoculars and determined (with the help of Google) that it was a Rough Legged Hawk. It was eating a fresh kill and sat in our front yard for 15 minutes or so eating. It was probably 100 feet away from me so I could see it quite well with my binoculars. It was a fantastic bird – I’d guess it had a 3-foot wingspan, yellow legs, and the way it tore the rodent it was eating apart made me want to NEVER go near it’s beak. Still though – this beats living in the Minneapolis suburbs like I used to – I love seeing this stuff.
Later in the day I actually saw something else cool – an American Goldfinch. That’s not remarkable – there’s a lot of them around Stevens Point. However, this one was VERY fat and full of eggs. It had that same look that 9-month pregnant women do when they are all tired after a short walk (or in this case flight). It came up the a puddle from last night’s rain panting (*perhaps), took a few drinks, and flew off.
I bet there’s a set of fresh eggs in a nest nearby tonight.
Sleep Apnea: 1 month post UPPP surgery
Well, it’s been a month now since I had sleep apnea surgery and a septoplasty. There’s a backstory too…
Anyway, today is May 23rd so I am just over a month – closer to 5 weeks actually. And there’s still some notable issues from the surgery.
First – my throat just feels different. Some foods are just not enjoyable anymore because of the way they go down. I choked on a triscuit for about half an hour tonight – a little crumb got stuck in my throat forever.
Toast is not my friend anymore either – although I can eat it. The crumbs though REALLY get to me. I never have more than one piece of toast – and I prefer it with peanut butter since that tends to hold everything together. In fact, anything that is in the “bread” group is a little hard for me to eat – I’m not really enjoying it. Since it’s summer we’ve been grilling quite often and when we make brats (and by “brats” I mean “healthy turkey brats”, not really awesome real bratwurst) I’m just as likely to eat it without the bun as with a bun.
I got back into drinking citrus juices without any problem – I know a lot of people have trouble with those but I just waited quite a while before I tried and I never had a problem. In fact, I hadn’t had any until this past week – about a month after surgery.
I haven’t had any real pain since about 3 weeks after surgery – but I was taking lots of drugs. I did feel like I had a sore throat for a long time after the “real” pain subsided. Also, if I ate anything rough my throat would hurt a lot the next day.
I think the biggest surprise diet-wise was hard candy. I keep hard candy in my truck for when I drive – when I get tired I suck on it (usually a Life-Saver) and it keeps me awake. Since I drive quite frequently I’ve gotten used to doing this. However – I can’t do it any more. When I suck on candy the back of my throat just feels WRONG. I have a very bad gag reflex and it sets everything off. However, that DOES keep me awake…
Of course everyone’s question is “Did the surgery work?” – up until my wife and I went on a trip this past week I’d been sleeping in a separate bedroom while I recovered. During this trip she told me I still snored a little when I was on my back. When I slept on my side she said I sounded very different -like a deep breathing. She thinks it is an improvement but it will take some getting used to.
From my perspective I am sleeping better than I ever have. I like it. There was a lot of pain up front – hopefully it will keep paying off.
My septoplasty surgery does have a very noticable improvement for me though – for the first time in years (now that everything is pretty well healed) I can breath through both sides of my nose. It’s fantastic. Until you’ve experienced NOT being to do it and then being able to do it I can’t explain it to you – it’s just fantastic.
Flash Board Server 7.1 patch 005 install failure and solution
Apparently the BMC Remedy Flash Board 7.1 patch 005 doesn’t like being installed as non-root on Solaris 5.10. We kept getting this error when it asked for the directory to install the product:
Directory to install BMC Remedy Flashboards? [/usr/ar/flashboards]
/xxx/yyy/a00/ar/flashboards FBServer
fb_install: syntax error at line 1: `)’ unexpected
It turns out awk was returning the wrong value – a “)” was being appended.
If you run into this just edit the shell script so the installer skips the section that checks for disk space. If you need help with that you can always contact me.
The Measureable value of maintaining B2B relationships
Most of my posts are tech related. This one is too, but more importantly it is both personal and business related.
I’ve worked now at many customers sites over the past 12 years. Some of those have been in Asia, Australia, Europe – but most were right here in the United States.
Some of those gigs have been short term with limited engagements. This is fine if the scope of the project is very well defined and measurable – like completing an install of a specific product suite on a platform or another “known” quantity of work.
But what happens when the quantity of work is unknown and/or continues (even sporadically) for years? Is the customer better off re-bidding the project each time to the lowest bidder or the person who fits the award criteria closest? I would say no. Let me make a short case study of why.
The Short-term value of the Consultant to the Customer
If you are a professional consultant your short term value to a customer is to get the job done. The problem with this is that “The Job” does not exist in a vacuum. Every customer organization is different. When you come in you have to learn the culture. You have to learn the regulatory processes. You have to learn the working relationships within the company that make everything work. Something as simple as installing software can turn into a long list of requirements no one thought of up front. And since each organizations infrastructure is unique the lessons learned are best remembered. When “The Job” is done you now have intangible equity that can be capitalized on by the customer.
The Long-term value of the Consultant to the Customer
Case in point: Two years ago we did a very difficult installation of BMC/Remedy products in a certain customer environment. This was a Solaris non-root install of the ITSM product suite and we ran into many problems. Most of these were tied to permissions on Solaris, the non-root installs, and the fact that we were running multiple instances of the server on each box. We were not doing anything special – we were just installing
- BMC Remedy ARS 7.1
- BMC Remedy Atrium CMDB 2.1
- BMC Remedy Incident Management 7.03 (and related necessary items – Assignment Engine, etc)
- BMC Remedy Service Level Management 7.1
The total install time for this project was over 3 months for 4 servers. THREE MONTHS! On a simple Windows platform this is an install that can take as little as a day. I’d say I was embarrassed but we had BMC engineers (not tech support – actual engineers) helping us and they were mystified too. During the course of that period of time we registered a large number of bugs that were unique to our situation. Server process kept dying, core dumps kept happening, etc. etc.
Fast forward two years. The same customer has another division that is going to upgrade to this same software. I was once again involved as the only outside consultant. We ran into literally all of the same problems previously. However, our prior knowledge solved the problems in very short order. One issue that had hung us up for 3 weeks was literally resolved in 10 minutes.
To be conservative we saved 14 weeks – that’s 70 days, or 560 hours. A standard rate for a consultant in this role is $125/hr – so figure this saved $70,000 over bringing in another outside resource.
Sure, that person might have solved the problems. We’ll never know if it was faster or slower though.
There are many reasons to switch vendors. I believe the above illustrates a reason not to (assuming the vendor is satisfactory). Having a good working knowledge of your organization and architecture is something with great intrinsic value. If I was a hiring manager I’d choose the average consultant with exceptional local knowledge over an outsider who was exceptionally skilled and had no local knowledge.
If you are a consultant you should always be learning the culture of your customer.
If you are a customer you should be mindful of which vendors are actually interested in forming that long term relationship with you and which would rather try to get in and out fast.