ask | dr. root

Two options here:

• You could use the Sun Trunking 1.3 software, available free from on sun.com -- visit: http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=42e56519
  

Or,

• If you are on Solaris 10 01/06 or later, you can use the built-in OS network aggregation. This is implemented using the dladm command -- which allows you to configure data-link interfaces. You can find details on how to use dladm in the following PDF document: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4554?q=dladm&a=load

I love simplicity and in this instance, the answer is yes.

There's a DTrace NFSv3 statistics generator by Prefecth Tecchnologies, that does exactly that. It's a Perl script that will provide you with information similar to this:

$ nfsclientstats.pl
process read write readdir getattr setattr lookup access create remove rename mkdir rmdir
mkdir     0     0       0     380       0    190      0      0      0      0   190     0
mv        0     0       0     189       0   1890   2079      0      0    189     0     0
orca   3328   194       0    5496       6   6882   8246     12      0      0     0     0
rm        0     0     760     950       0   2850   5320      0    190      0     0   190
touch     0     0       0     378     189   1512   1323    189      0      0     0     0

[Source: Prefetch Technologies]
» Download nfsclientstats.pl

DTrace resources also available from Prefecth Technologies, include:

• Top Ten DTrace scripts
• DTrace file system statistics generator
• DTrace NFSv3 operation tracer

Two options...

In a Terminal window, you can either type:

# xdpyinfo

'xpdyinfo' is a utility for displaying information about an X server, including the types of screens available, their resolution and color depth.

screen #0:
dimensions: 1280x1024 pixels (361x289 millimeters)
resolution: 90x90 dots per inch
depths (3): 1, 24, 32

Or use the 'xwininfo' utility with the added '-root' option:

# xwininfo -root

xwininfo: Window id: 0x60000f

Absolute upper-left X: 0
Absolute upper-left Y: 0
Relative upper-left X: 0
Relative upper-left Y: 0
Width: 1280
Height: 1024
Depth: 24
Visual Class: TrueColor
Border width: 0

Hope it helps.

Earlier this week, when Sun announced it was releasing its implementations of Java technology as free software under the GNU General Public License version two, I thought about the existing five million Java developers who have been using the Technology for the past 11 years and made it a success. Thanks to them, Java is EVERYWHERE. Consider this, Java is used in:

• 800 Million Desktops
• 1.5 Billion Mobile Phones
• 1.65 Billion Smart Cards
• 6 Million Set-Top Boxes
• 180 Telecom Providers
• And somewhere on Mars...

More applications and devices use Java today than the total number of devices running Windows, Linux and Solaris -- COMBINED. Now that's what I call impressive...

And with Sun's annoucement of open sourcing Java, developers around the world are now given the opportunity to take the technology to new horizons.

So what is Sun releasing exactly?

Available immediately are the first pieces of source code for Sun's implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and a buildable implementation of the Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME). In addition, Sun is adding the GPLv2 license to the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), which has been available for over a year through Project GlassFish.

There are three communities you can join if you're interested to learn more and if you would like to start downloading the available source codes:

Java SE -- OpenJDK Community:

From the OpenJDK website, you can get two significant components of the JDK:

• The HotSpot Virtual Machine
  
• And the Java programming-language compiler (javac) with complete NetBeans project metadata

Java ME -- Mobile & Embedded Community:

You can download the source code for Sun's feature phone Java ME implementation, which is the next-gen version of the platform that currently enables rich mobile data services in more than 1.5 billion handsets.

And you can also grab Sun's Java ME implementation for the emerging advanced phone segment, as well as the Java ME testing and compatibility kit framework -- the foundation for Sun's Java ME compatibility tests.

Sun is expected to release additional source code including the framework for the Java Device Test Suite later this year.

Java EE -- GlassFish Community:

GlassFish is the name for the open source development project for building a Java EE 5 application server. It's a robust, commercial, production quality, compatible application server that is free for development, deployment and redistribution.

The GlassFish development community is just getting started, but it has already over 100 contributors signed up. And the number of Sun and Oracle engineers working on this product is comparable in size to other application server developer communities today.

These are truly exciting times, don't you think?

First, don't panic...

What you need to do is to bring your machine to the 'OK' prompt. So press [Stop] and [A] on your keyboard -- if one is attached -- or send break from a terminal session (normally ~# )

Next, you need to use the Solaris Installation Media CD 1 (Solaris 9) or DVD (Solaris 10) and type:

# boot cdrom -s

Now mount the root parition of the disk onto the /mnt partition by typing:

# mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /mnt

(This assumes that /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 is the / partition of your server or desktop)

Remove the existing password from the shadow file by editing it in 'vi':

# vi /mnt/etc/shadow

In the example below, the root password in its encrypted format is $1$8Nr$rT.INHxDBW5gjGzi/.Simply delete it and save the file.

root:$1$8Nr$rT.INHxDBW5gjGzi/:1209:0:99999:7:-1:-1:107497043
bin:*:12188:0:99999:7:::
daemon:*:12188:0:99999:7:::
adm:*:12188:0:99999:7:::

The content of your shadow file should look like this when finished:

root::1209:0:99999:7:-1:-1:107497043
bin:*:12188:0:99999:7:::
daemon:*:12188:0:99999:7:::
adm:*:12188:0:99999:7:::

When you reboot your system, you will find that root has no password and you will be prompted for a password, so just press [enter] to continue.

Lastly, to change password from null to new password, simply type:

# passwd

Now enter the new password and you're done!

The network vulnerability scanning tool you're referring to is called "Nessus" -- after a famous centaur in Greek mythology (but let's keep that for another time :-)).

The open-source Nessus project was started by Renaud Deraison in 1998 and aimed at providing the community with a free, powerful and easy-to-use automated network-based security scanner.

Nessus basically consists of nessusd, the Nessus daemon, which will scan the networks and hosts looking for vulnerabilities, and nessus, the client that will let you configure the scanning run and then provide an interface to the results, once the scan is complete.

Nessus lets you save the results in a number of formats and these results can also be saved in a knowledge base for reference against future vulnerability scans -- which is handy.

You can download Nessus for Solaris 9 & 10 from the Nessus website at: www.nessus.org/download/
(Note: Nessus is also available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X)
One last thing... If you're going to use Nessus, check the plugin section on the Nessus website. Every security check in Nessus is coded as a plugin. And as new vulnerabilities appear all the time, plugins are regularly added to the site, so make sure you keep up-to-date.

Sun has released a Java technology-based Device Detection Tool that lets you check whether the Solaris OS supports the devices that are detected in your x86 system -- Whether you're running Windows or Linux.

There are some prerequisites to running the Sun Device Detection Tool:

• Windows XP Professional
• Windows XP Home Edition
• Linux (2.6 kernel) distributions:
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
• Fedora Linux Core 5
• Ubuntu 6.06
• SUSE Linux 10.0

(If you're running Linux, make sure you're running a Linux distribution that includes PCI Utilities. To verify that you have PCI Utilities installed, check whether the lspci command is available and executable)

Your system must also have Java Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.5 or later installed. The JRE lets you run Java applications.

JRE Free Download – Scroll down to "Java Runtime Environment (JRE)"

Download Sun Device Detection Tool

So how does it work?

Well, the Sun Device Detection Tool will basically probe the devices on your system and compare them with a database of devices that are supported in the Solaris OS.

If the Solaris OS comes with a built-in driver that supports the device, then the Sun Device Detection Tool will tell you which release of the Solaris OS includes that driver.

If a third-party Solaris driver is available for that device, then the table shows where you can get that third-party driver.

Lastly, if no Solaris driver is known to exist to support that device, then a message will be displayed.

You can copy and paste the driver data from the Sun Device Detection Tool window into a text file for later use.