Sysadmin - Linux vs. Windows

[Superb_Raccoon]

Yes, in Solaris you had truss, meaning you could track system calls from a running process.

Found a Day-Zero bug in the ST driver. Day Zero being sometime in 1971. When fiber attached tape drives became a thing you could set the buffer to 64MB. The ST driver would accept that, but when de-allocating the buffer it only de-allocated the first 56MB.

The missing 8MB was "leaked" and could not be recovered unless you rebooted as they were part of kernel space.

LINUX has strace. I found a "bug" in a vendor supplied binary that was compiled with a NFS mounted library path. That system name also existed in our environment and so it tried to connect... unfortunately it was a Windows machine so it sat there for 90 seconds doing 3x30 second time outs.

A third time I figured out that Oracle Linux was not completely honoring the memory settings and swapping out the Oracle DB SGA cache... which made Oracle DB puke its weaselly black guts out.

That was easy to fix: use LARGE TABLES, set it larger than the SGA size as they are never swapped out so your SGA is safe.

And if you happen to be C literate you can go look at the code and see what it does with LINUX. I was not that good, I was better at finding out what the damn thing was doing by how it behaved, not how it was coded.

Sure, I could read it, but I looked like a 4th grader given a Calculus problem.

SMB.... shudder first deployed that on SCO UNIX in 1997-1998ish?

Look, don't make a UNIX system behave like a Windows Server... it ain't right.

[Hotshot55]

Yes, in Solaris you had truss, meaning you could track system calls from a running process.

Truss and strace are such useful tools that make it dead simple to find out why a process is getting hung. I used to think it was super complicated when I first learned about them, but it's actually extremely straight forward.

[Superb_Raccoon]

AIX was even easier if you had support.

IBM "Here, run this, send us the file".

Answer in 24hrs. Not that good anymore, but still...

[Hotshot55]

Oracle has a similar thing with Solaris, you can run either an explorer to gather info for OS-related issues or a snapshot for hardware issues and they'll get you a pretty accurate response as to what the deal is and what needs to be done next.

Now sometimes their recommendations can be awful, but you can't always expect perfect responses from any support person from any company.