Solaris Zone down

I made a minor configuration change to a Solaris zone and rebooted the zone.

On the way back up it hung with an error message about booting.

I entered zoneadm list -cv with the following results

root@server01 # zoneadm list -cv

ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP
0 global running / native shared
1 licence3-zone running /export/home/zones/licence3-zone native shared
2 licence2-zone running /export/home/zones/licence2-zone native shared
5 licence-zone running /export/home/zones/licence-zone native shared
7 licence1-zone running /export/home/zones/licence1-zone native shared
21 la-zone running /export/home/zones/la-zone native shared
23 build-machine down /export/home/zones/build-machine native shared
24 build-2 running /export/home/zones/build-2 native shared
- build-1 installed /export/home/zones/build-1 native shared
root@server01#
Its state was shown as down!

I entered
zoneadm -z build-machine halt
but it failed with a message saying the zone's /tmp directory couldn't be unmounted.

Entering
zoneadm -z build-machine reboot
failed with a similar message.

Entering
zoneadm -z build-machine boot
was the same.

So I traversed the zone's filesystem from the global zone. I'd downloaded some files to the zone's /tmp directory. I deleted the entire contents and entered
zoneadm list -cv
Its state was still shown as down!
I entered zoneadm -z build-macxhine halt, which returned without error. A zoneadm list -cv showed some good news.

root@server01 # zoneadm -z build-machine halt
root@server01 # zoneadm list -cv
ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP
0 global running / native shared
1 licence3-zone running /export/home/zones/licence3-zone native shared
2 licence2-zone running /export/home/zones/licence2-zone native shared
5 licence-zone running /export/home/zones/licence-zone native shared
7 licence1-zone running /export/home/zones/licence1-zone native shared
21 la-zone running /export/home/zones/la-zone native shared
24 build-2 running /export/home/zones/build-2 native shared
- build-machine installed /export/home/zones/build-machine native shared
- build-1 installed /export/home/zones/build-1 native shared
root@server01 #

And it booted successfully. Huzzah!

Well, that's that!

ClearCase Funny!

Funny as in peculiar!

This morning an user came up to me. He had tried to create a new view and received an error message.

I logged in as him and got the same error.
# cleartool mkview -tag mtest /net/server/views/my_view.vws
cleartool: Error: Unable to contact albd_server on host 'server'
cleartool: Error: Cannot bind an admin_server handle on "server": ClearCase object not found.
cleartool: Error: Unable to create view "/net/server/views/my_view.vws".
...

I googled the error message and it showed up a whole bunch of pages with similar discussions to this IBM support document.

However that wasn't the problem.

For various reasons, the user had set the environment variable ATRIAHOME to what amounted to garbage for his shell. That value had then been used by the cleartool mkview command, with the appropriate error.

So it goes!