memory

Basic AIX Performance Troubleshooting Commands

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

600px-Orange_x.svgWow, today I logged into my first AIX Server in about 4.5 years. It was a horrible experience. I’ve been working with Redhat/CentOS pretty much exculsively for so long, I was mostly helpless to do anything of importance on the CLI other than create a few users and move some files around.  None of the common commands that I am so used to using even exist in AIX.

Figured I would do a bit of homework and figure out how to do some basic troubleshooting before I was in a server down situation with no idea how to troubleshoot.

Checking Free Memory

To check free memory on a box use the svmon command.

svmon -G

Overall System Status

For this you will probably want to use topas, which is pretty simiar to top. Topas gives you a quick and dirty overview of what is going on on a system. Here you can find CPU usage, top processes, disk utililization. Check out the fancy screen shot below.

Top-ass1

List Volume Groups

Wow, Linux has really confused me on this one. Anyway, use lsvg

# lsvg -o
rootvg
crsrdb_bin
crsprdb_data
crsprdb_index
crsprdb_arch
crsprdb_rman

List Info About a Volume Group.

# lsvg rootvg

Display Names of all Logical Volumes in a Volume Group.

# lsvg -l rootvg

Display Physical Memory

# lsattr -El sys0 -a realmem

Finding Disk I/O Issues

Sar appears to be a fine option here. Especially since I am looking for percent busy. Iostat also exists on AIX, btw.

# sar -d 1 2

Show Network Throughput

The more I poke around the internet trying to figure out how to actually use AIX the more I keep running into topas. Anyway this one is a good one

#topas -E

I plan to have more of these one liners documented here in the future, but for now this is going to have to do.

Ubuntu Linux- Locate Failed Dimms without Pain

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Cartoon_ramSo I have recently made the switch to Kubuntu 12.10 on my new desktop. Basically I am building a monster workstation and I ran into issue running Fedora 18. Since I wanted Steam support too I decided not to try to move to an earlier Fedora version, but rather, I chose to  give Ubuntu another try (its been years since I have run Ubuntu).

Anyway, I am building this hoss of a work station that has 12 Dimm slots, which I fully populated with 4GB dims. However when I booted my new monster, I found that I was 8GB short in the Memory department.

So, how do I figure out which two dimms are bad? I certainly dont want to have to pull all of them out and boot the machine and test each dimm one by one.

So this is where lshw comes to the rescue. Which I blogged about back in 2010 here.

Anyway. Here is how you find the empty slots.

# lshw -short -C memory

which output what you see below.

0/14                           memory      System Memory
/0/14/0                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/14/1                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/14/2                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/14/3                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/14/4                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/14/5                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/22                           memory      System Memory
/0/22/0                         memory      DIMM DDR3 [empty]
/0/22/1                         memory      DIMM DDR3 [empty]
/0/22/2                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/22/3                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/22/4                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/22/5                         memory      4GiB DIMM DDR3 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)

Basically this is telling me that my first two dimms on CPU two are dead and are the ones that need to be replaced.

Now all I have to do is powerdown and pull and replace two dimms.. which will save my fingers from much discomfort.

lshw – Linux Hardware Utility

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Snapshot1lshw (Hardware Lister)
is a tool used to provide detailed hardware information on your server's hardware. It can report exact memory configuration,
firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache
configuration, bus speed, etc.

On Redhat you can install using yum from the Dag Repo. Using the command below you get both the command line version and the gui.

yum install lshw-gui.x86_64

Then launch it with lshw-gui, or run the command line version with lswh. You can also dump your output to a file. In the example below I am dumping out to an html file

lshw -html >MyLinuxBox.html

More information here http://ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter