obtaining node status

UserPreferences

Obtaining node status

Several tools are available which allow the examination of the running state of a node and its major services.

setsvc; showstatus is a useful command which gives the status of each service running on the node, as listed in the service table. The setsvc command reads /etc/svctable, then examines the utmp file and mnttab to compute the status for each service and filesystem on a node. The data is written into /etc/srvctab. This file is recreated each time the setsvc command executes. The /etc/svctable.o file is also recreated each time the setsvc command is executed. srvctab contains what that machine sees across all three processors. svctable.o contains what it sees on its own machine.

The showstatus command gives the status, in human-readable form, of all services and filesystems for a particular node or processor. You can also specify showstatus -s service to get output of only one particular service.

sar gives the system activity report, indicating the percent of cpu time being used by the users, system, and I/O. The remaining cpu time is reported as idle time. Increments can be specified, as in sar 5 5, to get an ongoing real-time picture of what the idle time is. sar -q will give the runq size (number of processes waiting); this number should ideally never be more than 5.

cpuhog reports the top processes using cpu time provided they are using at least 0.1% of the CPU. (This command is similar in function to top, which is not available.)

Port monitors are controlled by the sac program. Information from the sac program's administrative file can be displayed via the sacadm -l command. The -l shows a formatted listing, with a header defining the information lsited in each column and each column separated by a tab in the output. The output of the listing can be restricted to information on a specific port monitor or a type of port monitor. The sacadm -p pmtag option is sued to restrict the listing to a specific port monitor. A port monitor can be in one of six states:

ENABLED	running, accepting connections
DISABLED	running, not accepting connections
STARTING	in the process of starting up. This is an intermediate state between not running and enabled/disabled
FAILED	unable to start and keep running
STOPPED	is, or is in the process of shutting down. This is an intermediate state between enabled/disabled and not running
NOT RUNNING	all services associated with the port monitor are unavailable

Port monitor state changes are recorded in the log file under /var/saf/pmtag/log. Port monitors are also referred to as listeners. To attempt to restart a failed listener that is in the service table, release the service, grep for the process to ensure it is not still running and in a hung state, and then activate the service.