Pearl Harbor

0755AM, December 7, 1941

And more memories fade away

Assessment

I'm using sharebuilder for my IRA and my test of a ETF version of one of the coffeehouse invester set ups.

I heard of sharebuilder from my wife about the time I needed to roll my old 401K into something. Poking around a bit and I decided to give it a try. I used its PortfolioBuilder.

It suggested the following for me:

WD RUSSELL 1000 VALUE 45%
IWF RUSSELL 1000 GROWTH 30%
EFA EURO-ASIA INDX 15%
AGG LEHMAN AGG BOND FUND 5%
TIP LEH US TREAS INF FD 5%

My return for the past year is a wee bit over 10%

The ETF version of the coffeehouse invester set up didn't do so well in my taxable account.

AGG LEHMAN AGG BOND FUND 40%
VNQ VANGUARD REIT ETF 10%
VTV VANGUARD VALUE ETF 10%
EFA EURO-ASIA INDX 10%
RSP S&P EQUAL WEIGHT INDEX 10%
VBR VANGUARD SMALL-CAP VALUE ETF 10%
VB VANGUARD SMALL-CAP ETF 10%

Return on that was a little over 6%.

Looking at things a bit more I thought to repoint my taxable account and get rid of the overlap with the IRA and focus on sectors. Specifically, equal ratio of the following: financial services, natural resources, utilities, real estate, and telecom.

ICF COHEN & STEERS REALTY
IDU UTILITIES INDX
IXG S&P GLBL FINL SECTOR
IXP ISHARES S&P GLBL TELECOMM SE
IYE ENERGY INDX
VAW VANGUARD MATERIALS ETF

Past data indicates this will return over 10%. If so, I will pursue it aggressively.


Future project --- some form of trading (stocks, commodities, forex, something) where fees and taxes don't eat up the majority of a given 3, 6, 9, or 12 months profit.

ETFs don't appear to lend themselves to short term trading and only forex (at this time) looks to allow investors to live test on the cheap.

Veterans Day

Been slacking as usual.

In observation of Veterans Day 2006:

Happy Veterans Day

Veteran's Day: "In the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month"

Yea Me Day!

Veteran's Day, 2006

Warfare Class

I'm Sitting Here on Veteran's Day

Veterans Day - Generations of Valor

Proud

Hangin’ Out With the Boys


Project Valour-IT

How To Support The Troops

RIP

Col. Jeff Cooper, RIP

On D-Day

D-Day Remembered

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day, remember the families of our fallen heroes

Gates of Fire

"I am going to die well"

Major Mathew Schram's Memorial Day

TSgt John A. Chapman

Video Tributes

We all lost a Brother Today

Letter From Canada

Chai Tea, Mud Huts, Villages With No Names and Heroes

Rafael Peralta - Home of the Brave

BAGHDAD ER

The Notification

Godspeed Kyle Jackson and Mitch Carver

Final Salute


I often think to myself, how is it that I can enjoy a life here in the US where I don't have to bribe officials to get ahead? Where any US citizen can get ahead in life if they are determined and apply themselves. Where any US citizen is free to move to a different town or state in order to find a favorable spot to put down roots. And how is it that the US doesn't turn into another Zimbabwe?

How To Support The Troops
Some Ways To Support Servicemembers

HA!

HAHA!!!

The internet is such a wonderful thing

Running through my links and found these two at the instapundit:

Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of the Capitalists

Which led to finding this list of "carnivals": Carnivals for week of 1/9/06

A retirement link

Found this on a quick google search:

retireearlyhomepage.com

Gonna poke around in it over the next few days to assess worth.


UPDATE: Strange cold is leaving me real tired all the time, so I haven't gone over the link in detail.

From what I see, there is an emphasis on saving. I see this in many books and links I've skimmed over. I've been discounting them as common sense items. But then I remembered that people don't save and routinly live outside of their means. So, I guess it is good.

Noticing an alignment with the ideas at the coffeehouse investor. Buy and hold methods. Starting to get interested in that method. Like the idea of not spending forever studying companies.

Observation: why is it that most investment methods today sound like cults? "A coffeehouse invester does this... A coffeehouse invester thinks that".

bah

A potential theme

or, "a new shiny thing has been found"

Something I've been working on for past few years has been how to retire early.

This idea started for me around 1995 or so when I decided that I just had no tolerance for debt. It just bugged me. I was unable to take my mind off of it.

So, I promptly bought a video game that I became enthralled in for a month or so. When the nagging worry came back I would buy another one. After a while the games didn't work anymore and I had to deal with the issue.

At the time I was renting an apartment with my wife and had some credit card debt and minor loans. Looking through the personal finance offerings at the bookstore indicated that CC debt had to go followed by loans. Many books and such indicated that I shouldn't worry about low interest loans and such, but I could not tolerate any debt.

It was also about this time when I began to lose any and all patience with the keeping up with the jones' people. You know the ones... The folks that go out to lunch at the $20+ spots everyday and $10 a beer bars every night. The folks that have the newest gadgets and a new car every 3 years.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't care how they spend *their* money. I just couldn't deal with them telling me how I should spend *my* money. And, should I take the time to explaine that I'm paying off my debt and building my equity, they would look at me like I'm some kind of leper. Or come right out and say I'm acting like a Jew.

I never understood that association. Nevermind that I have nothing against Jews, but, tending to the financial health of one's household means that I'm acting like a Jew? Really? I've known a few Asians and they seem to hold to the same idea as me. But they aren't said to be acting like Jews. I just don't get people.

Anyways...

It was at this time that I learned another lesson. Your employer is not your friend. And if you could make more money by job hopping, then do it. Shortly after I learned this I found out that if your ego allowed you to take a job that was junior to what you had been doing but paid more, you should take it. Granted, this opened the door to having to deal with both management and peers that always took a condescending tone with me. But, I had already grown used to this because I never pursued my degree. I did this anywhere from every 2 months to a year.

So, as my income grew, I paid off all my debts. I learned that vehicles bought a few years old were several thousand dollars cheaper and if I tended to the 3K mile maintenance they would last and last (my last vehicle was a 1995 Ford Explorer with 240K miles on it and the only reason I got rid of it was that I couldn't justify the 13mpg).

In 1999, I bought my first house. I purposely bought a house out in the sticks off of a dirt road on top of a mountain. My objective was not to make money, but to have something cheap that I could pay off fast and use as a down payment for someplace that I would live in for a few decades. 1999 was the start of insane pay rates in northern VA. Unlike my peers who bought $500+K houses and fancy cars, I paid off my mortgage.

When the dot com bust came, a few of my peers had to file for bankruptcy after being unable to find work for over a year. And just because of those fancy trophy houses, cars, and toys.

Again, I don't really care how people spend their money, but I will comment on what I consider stupidity.

Now this brings us to 2005...

The housing market had grown so expensive in the DC metro area that increasing amounts of people started to move out my way. This meant that my previously 1.25 hour one-way commute grew to 2.5-3.5 one-way commutes.

I was unable to deal with that.

Then an idea that had been brewing for a while came a little closer to the top. What if I move to a low cost of living state (like NC)? With the insane VA housing market, I could buy a NC house outright with the proceeds of selling my VA house.

And so I did...

Now I'm at another crossroads: I find that the more independant I am, the less tolerant I'm of the sociopathic folks that populate the tech sector. Yes, Dilbert does reflect reality... only through rose tinted glasses. It is much worse.

So, do I try to retire now and live under the poverty line? (which in the US really isn't as bad as it sounds) Or, to try to suck it up for a few more years in order to sock more away into my investments?

I'm starting to do some research into a safe early retirement and I'll be posting a few links that I find along the way.

Let's see where this takes me....

Still Around

Work and now world of warcraft have taken most of my spare time.

Please check the links to the right.

An irony

I put together this page to help me by having all of my reference material in one place.

Then I go to work with an employer that blocks pretty much any and all internet sites (including Sun's big admin).

hmmmmm

Maybe it shall morph to include other things...

It'll be a bit as I'm still getting used to the new shop, new area, and moving house.

Later.

Point-In-Time Copies: Enterprise

This uses FlashSnap, which requires a separate license to use.

Veritas Storage Foundation with FlashSnap provides three types of PITC solutions:
* Volume-Level PITC Solutions:
- Full-Sized Instant Volume Snapshots
- Space-Optimized Instant Volume Snapshots
* Filesystem-Level Solution:
- Storage Checkpoints


Preparing to Create a Full-Sized Instant Volume Snapshot: CLI

Enable FastResync:
vxsnap –g diskgroup [-b] prepare origvol

Allocate the storage using ONE of these methods:
1) Add a mirror to use as a full-sized instant snapshot:
# vxsnap –g diskgroup addmir volume
2) Use an existing ACTIVE plex in the volume
3) Create an empty volume for use as the snapshot volume:
# LEN=`vxprint –g diskgroup –F%len volume`
# DCONAME=`vxprint –g diskgroup –F%sco_name volume`
# RSZ=`vxprint –g diskgroup –F%regionsz $DCONAME`
# vxassist –g diskgroup make snap-origvol $LEN
# vxsnap –g diskgroup prepare snap-origvol regionsize=$RSZ


Creating and Managing Full-Sized Instant Volume Snapshots: CLI

Create the snapshot volume using ONE of these methods:
1) Break off an existing plex to create the new snapshot
# vxsnap –g diskgroup make source=origvol newvol=snap-origvol plex=name

2) Specify an empty volume to be used as the snapshot:
# vxsnap –g diskgroup source=origvol snapvol=snap-origvol

Update:
# vxsnap –g diskgroup refresh snap-origvol source=origvol
# vxsnap –g diskgroup reattach snap-origvol source=origvol
# vxsnap –g diskgroup restore origvol source=snap-origvol
# vxsnap –g diskgroup dis snap-origvol

Remove:
# vxedit –g diskgroup –r rm snapvol


Note: These are a few more items that I have not transcribed. The reason being that they require additional licensing and are useful only in specific setups.

Performance Monitoring

Performance Analysis Process
1) You must understand your application workload and your performance objectives for each application workload
2) You must identify all components of the data transfer model of your storage architecture, that is, the complete I/O path of your data from application to disk
3) For each of the hardware components in your architecture, determine the theoretical performance characteristics of each component
4) Use performance monitoring and workload generation tools to measure performance for each of the components in your configuration.

Tools:
* vxstat
* vxtrace

Note: I was lazy on this one. There is too much system specific info to put in. Besides the VxVM tools, everything else is more system performance related

Volume Maintenance

Topics:
Changing the Volume Layout
Managing Volume Tasks
Analyzing Configurations with Storage Expert


Changing the Volume Layout

Online relayout: Change the colume layout or layout characteristics while the volume is online.

By using online relayout, you can change the layout of an entire volume or a specific plex. Use online relayout to change the column or plex layout to or from:
* Concatenated
* Striped
* RAID-5
* Striped mirrored
* Concatenated mirrored


Online Relayout Notes
* You can reverse online relayout at any time
* Some layout transformations can cause a slight increase or decrease in the volume length due to subdisk alignment policies. If volume length increases during relayout, VxVM resizes the file system using vxresize.
* Relayout does not change log plexes
* You cannot:
- Create a snapshot during relayout
- Change the number of mirrors during relayout
- Perform multiple relayouts at the same time
- Perform relayout on a volume with a sparse plex


Changing the Layout: VEA

Highlight a volume and select Actions -> Change Layout


Changing the Layout: CLI

# vxassist relayout
- Used for nonlayered relayout operations
- Used for changing layout characteristics, such as stripe width and number of columns

# vxassist convert
- Changes nonlayered volumes to layered volumes, and vice versa

Note: vxassist relayout cannot create a nonlayered mirrored volume in a single step. The command always creates a layered mirrored volume even if you specify a nonlayered mirrored layout. Use vxassist convert to convert the resulting layered volume into a nonlayered volume.


vxassist –g diskgroup relayout volume|plex layout=layout ncol=+|- ncol stripeunit=size

To change to a striped layout:
# vxassist –g datadg relayout datavol layout=stripe ncol=2

To add a column to striped volume datavol:
# vxassist –g datadg relayout datavol ncol=+1

To remove a column from datavol:
# vxassist –g datadg relayout datavol ncol=-1

To change stripe unit size and number of columns:
# vxassist –g datadg relayout datavol stripeunit=32k ncol=5

To change mirrored layouts to RAID-5, specify the plex to be converted (instead of the volume):
# vxassist –g datadg relayout datavol01-01 layout=raid5 stripeunit=32k ncol=3

To convert the striped mirrored volume datavol to a layered stripe-mirror layout:
# vxassist –g datadg convert datavol layout=stripe-mirror


Managing Volume Tasks: CLI

Use the vxtask command to:
- Display task information
- Pause, continue, and about tasks
- Modify the progress rate of a task


The vxrelayout command can be used to display the status of, reverse, or start a relayout operation:
# vxrelayout –g diskgroup status|reverse|start volume


What is Storage Expert?
Veritas Storage Expert (VxSE) is a CLI utility that provides volume configuration analysis.

Storage Expert:
* Analyzes configurations based on a set of “rules” or VxVM “best practices”
* Produces a report of results in ASCII format
* Provides recommendations, but does not launch any administrative operations


Running Storage Expert Rules
* VxVM and VEA must be installed
* Rules are located in /opt/VRTS/vxse/vxvm
* Syntax:
rule_name options info|list|check|run
* In the syntax:
- info
Displays rule description
- list
Displays attributes of rule
- check
Displays default values
- run
Runs the rule

Troubleshooting the Boot Process

Topics:
Operating System Boot Processes
Troubleshooting the Boot Process
Recovering the Boot Disk Group


Files Used in the Boot Process

* /etc/system (Sun only)
Contains VxVM entries
* /etc/vfstab (Sun), /etc/fstab (HP-UX and Linux)
Maps mount points to devices
* /etc/vx/volboot
Contains disk ownership data
* /etc/vx/licenses/lic, /etc/vx/elm
Contains license files
* /var/vxvm/tempdb
Stores data about diskgroups
* /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db
Indicates VxVM is not initialized
* /VXVM#.#.#-UPGRADE/.start_runed
Indicates that the VxVM upgrade is not complete


Troubleshooting: The Boot Device Cannot be Opened

Possible causes:
* Boot disk is not powered on
* Boot disk has failed
* SCSI bus is not terminated
* Controller failure has occurred
* Disk is failing and locking the bus

To resolve:
* Check SCSI bus connections:
- On Sun, use probe-scsi-all
- On Linux, use non-fast or verbose boot in the BIOS
* Boot from an alternate boot disk


Troubleshooting: Startup Scripts Exit Without Initialization

Possible causes:
Either one of the following files is present:

* /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db
This file indicates that VxVM software packages have been added, but VxVM has not been initialized with vxinstall. Therefore, vxconfigd is not started.

* / VXVM#.#.#-UPGRADE/.start_runed
This file indicates that a VxVM upgrade has been started but not completed. Therefore, vxconfigd is not started.


Troubleshooting: Conflicting Host ID in volboot

The volboot file contains the host ID that was on the system when you installed VxVM.

If you manually edit this file, VxVM does not function.

* To change the hostname in the volboot file:
vxdctl hosted newhostname

* To re-create the volboot file:
vxdctl init [hostname]


Troubleshooting: License Problems (keys corrupted, missing, or expired)

Save /etc/vx/licenses/lic/* to a backup device. If the license files are removed or corrupted, you can copy the files back.

License problems can occur if:
* The /etc/vx/licenses/lic files become corrupted
* An evaluation license was installed and not updated to a full license.

To resolve license issues:
* vxlicinst (installs a new license)
* vxiod set 10 (starts the I/O daemons)
* vxconfigd (starts the configuration daemon)


Troubleshooting: Missing /var/vxvm/tempdb (missing, misnamed, or corrupted)

This directory stores configuration information about imported diskgroups. The contents are recreated after a reboot. If this directory is missing, misnamed, or corrupted, vxconfigd does not start.

To remove and recreate this directory:
# vxconfigd –k –x cleartempdir


Troubleshooting: Debugging with vxconfigd

Running vxconfigd in debug mode:
# vxconfigd –k –m enable –x debug_level
* debug_level = 0 – No debugging (default)
* debug_level = 9 – Highest debug level

Some debugging options:
* -x log
Logs all console output to the /var/vxvm/vxconfigd.log file
* -x logfile=name
Use the specified log file instead
* -x syslog
Direct all console output through the syslog() interface
* -x timestamp
Attach a timestamp to all messages
* -x tracefile=name
Log all possible tracing information in the given file.


Troubleshooting: Invalid or Missing /etc/system File (Sun only)

The /etc/system file is used in the kernel initialization and /sbin/init phases of the boot process.

This file is a standard Sun system file to which VxVM add entries to:
* Specify drivers to be loaded
* Specify root encapsulation

If the file or these entries are missing, you encounter problems in the boot process.

When booting from an alternate system file, do not go past the maint mode. Boot up on the alternate system file, fix the VxVM problem, and then reboot with the original system file.

ok> boot –a

When prompted specify the /etc/hosts file for the system file. You will get many errors but you’ll get far enough in order to fix the original system file.


Temporarily Importing the Boot Diskgroup

Through a temporary import, you can bring the boot diskgroup to a working system and repair it there:
1) Obtain the diskgroup ID (dgid) of the boot diskgroup:
# vxdisk –s list
2) On the importing host, import and temporarily rename the diskgroup:
# vxdg –tC –n tmpdg import dgid
3) Fix and replace the files and volumes as necessary.
4) Deport the diskgroup back to the original host:
# vxdg –h orig_hostname deport tmpdg

Encapsulation and Rootability

Topics:
Placing the Boot Disk Under VxVM Control
Creating an Alternate Boot Disk
Removing the Boot Disk from VxVM Control
Upgrading to a New VxVM Version


What is Encapsulation?
Encapsulation is a method of placing a disk under VxVM control.in which the data that exists on a disk is preserved. Encapsulation converts existing partitions into volumes, which provides continued access to the data on the disk after a reboot. After a disk has been encapsulated, the disk is handled in the same way as an initialized disk.

Requirements:
One free partition (for public and private region)
s2 slice that represents the full disk
2048 sectors free at beginning or end of disk for the private region


What is Rootability?
Rootability, or root encapsulation, is the process of placing the root file system, swap device, and other file systems on the boot disk under VxVM control. VxVM converts existing partitions of the boot disk into VxVM volumes. The system can then mount the standard boot disk file systems (that is, /, /usr, and so on) from volumes instead of disk partitions.

Requirements are the same as for data disk encapsulation, but the private region can be created from swap space.


Why Encapsulate the Boot Disk?
You should encapsulate the boot disk only if you plan to mirror the boot disk.

Benefits of mirroring the boot disk:
1) Enables high availability
2) Fixes bad blocks automatically (for reads)
3) Improves performance (ed. I don’t buy this point)

There is no benefit to boot disk encapsulation for its own sake. You should not encapsulate the boot disk if you do not plan to mirror the boot disk.


Limitations of Boot Disk Encapsulation
Encapsulating the boot disk adds steps to OS upgrades.

A system cannot boot from a boot disk that spans multiple devices

You should never expand or change the layout of boot volumes. No volume associated with an encapsulated boot disk (rootvol, usr, var, opt, swapvol, and so on) should be expanded or shrunk, because these volumes map to a physical underlying partition on the disk and must be contiguous.

If you attempt to expand these volumes, the system can become unbootable if it becomes necessary to revert back to slices in order to boot the system. Expanding these volumes can also prevent a successful OS upgrade, and a fresh install can be required.

Note: regarding Solaris, the upgrade_start script may fail.


Solaris File System Requirements
For root, use, var, and opt volumes:
1) Use UFS file systems (VxFS is not available until later in the boot process)
2) Use contiguous disk space. (Volumes cannot use striped, RAID-5, concatenated mirrored, or striped mirrored layouts)
3) Do not use dirty region logging on the system volumes. (You can use DRL for the opt and var volumes)

For swap volumes:
1) The first swap volume must be contiguous, and, therefore, cannot use striped or layered layouts.
2) Other swap volumes can be noncontiguous and can use any layout. However, there is an implied 2Gb limit of usable swap space per device for 32-bit operating systems.


Before Encapsulating the Boot Disk
Plan your rootability configuration. bootdg is a system-wide reserved disk group name that is an alias for the disk group that contains the volumes that are used to boot the system. When you place the boot disk under VxVM control, VxVM sets bootdg to the appropriate disk group. You should never attempt to change the assigned value of bootdg; doing so may render you system unbootable. An example configuration would be to place the boot disk into a disk group named sysdg, and add at least two more disks to the disk group: one for a boot disk mirror and one as a spare disk. VxVM will set bootdg to sysdg.

For Solaris, enable boot disk aliases: eeprom “use-nvramrc?=true”

Record the layout of the partitions on the unencapsulated boot disk to save for future use.


Encapsulating the Boot Disk

vxdiskadm:
“Encapsulate one or more disks”

Follow the prompts by specifying:
1) Name of the device to add
2) Name of the disk group to which the disk will be added
3) Sliced disk format (The boot disk cannot be a CDS disk)

vxencap:
/etc/vx/bin/vxencap –g diskgroup accessname
/etc/init.d/vxvm-reconfig accessname


After Boot Disk Encapsulation
You can view operating system-specific files to better understand the encapsulation process.

Solaris:
1) VTOC (prtvtoc device)
2) /etc/system
3) /etc/vfstab

Linux:
/etc/fstab


Alternate Boot Disk: Requirements
An alternate boot disk is a mirror of the entire boot disk. It preserves the boot block in case the primary boot disk fails

Creating an alternate boot disk requires that:
1) The boot disk be encapsulated by VxVM
2) Another disk be available with enough space to contain all of the boot disk partitions
3) All disks be in the boot disk group

The root mirror places the private region at the beginning of the disk. The remaining partitions are placed after the private region.


Creating an Alternate Boot Disk

VEA:
1) Highlight the boot disk, and select Actions -> Mirror Disk
2) Specify the target disk to use as the alternate boot disk.

vxdiskadm:
“Mirror volumes on a disk”

CLI:
To mirror the root volume only:
vxrootmir alternate_disk

To mirror all other unmirrored, concatenated columes on the boot disk to the alternate disk:
vxmirror –g diskgroup boot_disk alternate_disk

To mirror other volumes to the boot disk or other disks:
vxassist –g diskgroup mirror homevol alternate_disk

On Solaris, to set up system boot information on a VxVM disk:
vxbootsetup


Booting from an Alternate Mirror (Solaris)
1) Set the eeprom variable use-nvramrc? to true:
ok> setenv use-nvramrc? true
ok> reset
This variable must be set to true to enable the use of alterate boot disks.

2) Check for available boot disk aliases:
ok> devalias
Output displays the name of the boot disk and available mirrors.

3) Boot from an available boot disk alias:
ok> boot vx-diskname


Unencapsulating a Boot Disk
To unencapsulate a boot disk, use vxunroot

Requirements: Remove all but one plex of rootvol, swapvol, use, var, opt, and home.

Use vxunroot when you need to:
* Boot from physical system partitions
* Change the size or location of the private region on the boot disk.
* Upgrade both the OS and VxVM

Do not use vxunroot if you are only upgrading VxVM packages, including the VEA package.


The vxunroot Command
1) Ensure that the boot disk volumes only have one plex each:
vxprint –ht rootvol swapvol use var

2) If boot disk volumes have more than one plex each, remove the unnecessary plexes:
vxplex –g diskgroup –o rm dis plex_name

3) Run the vxunroot utility:
vxunroot


Notes on Upgrading Storage Foundation
* Determine what you are upgrading: Storage Foundation, VxVM only, both VxVM and the OS, or the OS only.
* Follow documentation for Storage Foundation and the OS
* Install appropriate patches
* A license is not required to upgrade VxVM only
* Your existing VxVM configuration is retained
* Upgrading VxVM does not upgrade existing disk group of file system versions. You may need to manually upgrade each after a VxVM upgrade.
* Get the latest upgrade information from the support.veritas.com website
* Backup data before upgrading (Note: copy /kernel/drv/sd.conf to a safe location)


Upgrading Storage Foundation
1) Unmount any mounted VxFS file systems
2) Reboot the system to single-user mode
3) When the system comes up, mount the /opt and /var filesystems
4) Mount the Veritas cdrom
5) Invoke the common installer, run the install command:
cd /cdrom/cdrom0
./installer
6) Answer the prompts appropriately


Upgrading VxVM Only

Methods:
* VxVM installation script (installvm)
* Manual package upgrade
* VxVM upgrade scripts (Solaris only)
- upgrade_start
- upgrade_finish

Note: on Sun, the upgrade_finish script changes /etc/vfstab to point to /dev/vx/bootdg/… even if bootdg doesn’t exist. Remember to change it back by hand before reboot. Unless you like booting off of CD in order to change the vfstab by hand.


Upgrading VxVM Only: installvm
* Invoke the installvm script and follow the instructions when prompted
* If you are performing a multihost installation, you can avoid copying packages to each system. For example, to ensure that packages are not copied remotely when using the NFS mountable filesystem $NFS_FS:
# cd /cdrom/CD_NAME
# cp –r * $NFS_FS
# cd volume_manager
# ./installvm –pkgpath $NFS_FS/volume_manager/pkgs –patchpath $NFS_FS/volume_manager/patches
* This copies the files to an NFS mounted file system that is connected to all of the systems on which you want to install the software.


Upgrading VxVM Only: Manual Packages Upgrade
1) Bring the system to single-user mode
2) Stop the vxconfigd and vxiod daemons:
# vxdctl stop
# vxiod –f set 0
3) Remove the VMSA software packages VRTSvmsa (optional)
4) Add the new VxVM packages using OS specific package installation commands
5) Perform a reconfiguration reboot (i.e. on Sun: reboot -- -r)


Scripts Used in Upgrades: Sun only
The upgrade_start and upgrade_finish scripts preserve your VxVM configuration

To check for potential problems before and upgrade, run:
# upgrade_start –check

Note: on Sun: save off a copy of your /etc/vfstab and /kernel/drv/sd.conf. The upgrade_finish will screw both up. Your /etc/vfstab will point to bootdg even if you don’t use that diskgroup name. Also, your sd.conf will be messed up if you use SAN and you’ll not see all of your disks. The vfstab can be corrected by hand, but you’ll need to copy the sd.conf back to your system to correct the “fix”.


Upgrading VxVM Only: Upgrade Scripts: Sun Only
1) Mount the Veritas cdrom
2) Run upgrade_start –check
3) Run upgrade_start
4) Reboot to single-user
5) mount /opt if not part of the root filesystem
6) Remove the VxVM package and other related VxVM packages with pkgrm
7) Reboot the system to multiuser mode
8) Verify that /opt is mounted, and than install the new VxVM packages with pkgadd
9) Run the upgrade_finish script


Upgrading Solaris Only
To prepare:
1) Detach any boot disk mirrors
2) Check alignment of boot disk volumes
3) Ensure that /opt is not a symbolic link

To upgrade:
1) Bring the system to single-user mode
2) Mount the Veritas cdrom
3) Run upgrade_start -check
4) Run upgrade_start
5) Reboot to single-user mode
6) Upgrade the OS
7) Reboot to single-user mode
8) Mount the Veritas cdrom
9) Run upgrade_finish
10) Reboot to multiuser mode


Upgrading VxVM and Solaris
To prepare:
1) Install license keys if needed
2) Detach any boot disk mirrors
3) Check alignment of boot disk volumes
4) Ensure that /opt is not a symbolic link

To remove old version:
1) Bring system to single-user mode
2) Mount the Veritas cdrom
3) Run upgrade_start –check
4) Run upgrade_start
5) Reboot to single-user mode
6) Remove VxVM packages

To install new version:
1) Reboot to single-user mode
2) Upgrade OS
3) Reboot to single-user mode
4) Mount Veritas cdrom
5) Add new licensing and VxVM packages
6) Run upgrade_finish
7) Reboot to multiuser mode
8) Add additional packages


After Upgrading
1) Confirm that key VxVM processes (vxconfigd, vxnotify, vxcache, vxrelocd, vxconfigbackupd, and vxesd) are running:
# ps –ef grep vx
2) Verify the existence of the boot disk’s volumes:
# vxprint –ht


Upgrading VxFS
1) Unmount any mounted Veritas file systems
2) Remove old VxFS packages
3) Comment out VxFS filesystems in /etc/vfstab, then reboot
4) Upgrade the OS if necessary for VxFS version compatibility.
5) Add the new VxFS packages
6) Undo any changes made to /etc/vfstab
7) Reboot

On the enemy's tactics and targets

Building Small Coffins

Jobs and NC

Looks like I'll be starting the first of August down there.

I'm getting too old for this job hopping stuff.

Admiral James B. Stockdale - RIP

Godspeed, Admiral Stockdale