Narsing Shah

Solaris System Administrator Cheat Sheet

8/15/2014

Solaris System Administrator Cheat Sheet

Environment: Oracle Solaris 10/11 on Oracle X-Series and M-Series Servers.

Introduction

This cheat sheet is written for beginner Solaris administrators. It contains common commands used in production environments for disk management, CPU and memory monitoring, hardware maintenance, and firmware upgrades.

Solaris

Figure 1:. Image credit : Google.

Disk Management

List disks

format

Disk health

iostat -En

Disk performance

iostat -xn 5

Filesystem usage

df -h

Mounted filesystems

mount

ZFS pools

zpool list
zpool status

ZFS filesystems

zfs list

Multipathing

mpathadm list lu
fcinfo hba-port
luxadm probe
cfgadm -al

CPU and Memory

CPU information

psrinfo
psrinfo -pv
mpstat 5
uptime

Memory

prtconf | grep Memory
vmstat 5
swap -s
swap -l

Processes

prstat
prstat -s cpu
prstat -s rss
ps -ef
ps -ef | grep oracle
kill PID
kill -9 PID

Operations After Hardware Changes

After replacing disks, HBAs, memory, CPUs, or PCI cards:

Verify hardware

prtconf
prtdiag

Rebuild device tree

devfsadm

Verify disks

format

Configure hardware

cfgadm -al
cfgadm -c configure AP_ID
cfgadm -c unconfigure AP_ID

Verify SAN

luxadm probe
mpathadm list lu
fcinfo hba-port

Review logs

dmesg
tail /var/adm/messages

Firmware Upgrades

Typical firmware:

  • ILOM
  • BIOS
  • RAID Controller
  • HBA
  • Disk
  • System Firmware

Before upgrade

  • Verify Oracle support compatibility.
  • Schedule maintenance.
  • Backup configuration.
  • Ensure console access.
  • Check current firmware versions.

Check versions

uname -a
cat /etc/release
pkginfo
pkg list

ILOM:

ssh root@ILOM-IP
version

After upgrade

Verify:

uptime
prtconf
prtdiag
format
zpool status
ifconfig -a
dmesg
tail /var/adm/messages

Useful Commands

Task Command
Hostname hostname
Solaris Version cat /etc/release
Kernel uname -a
Hardware prtconf
Diagnostics prtdiag
CPU psrinfo -pv
Memory prtconf | grep Memory
Disk format
Disk Errors iostat -En
Filesystems df -h
ZFS zpool status
Processes prstat
Swap swap -s
Device Tree devfsadm
SAN luxadm probe
Dynamic Reconfiguration cfgadm -al

Best Practices

  • Check logs before and after maintenance.
  • Verify multipathing after storage work.
  • Run devfsadm after adding hardware.
  • Monitor CPU and memory regularly.
  • Check ZFS pool health daily.
  • Upgrade firmware only during maintenance windows.
  • Record firmware versions before upgrades.

Conclusion

You do not need to memorise every Solaris command. Learn when to use each command and understand the output. With practice, these commands become part of your daily administration routine.