How to panic a guest domain in Solaris

I recently came across a Solaris 10 guest domain in a hung state.
I accessed its console from the primary domain but I was not able to see a login prompt or anything for that matter.

I was able to ping the server but unable to login to it via ssh.

Hence we decided to reboot the guest domain but we wanted to make sure that a crash dump was generated which could be shared with Oracle support for further analysis.

We decided to induce a kernel panic in the guest domain to ensure the generation of a crash dump on system restart.

The command used to accomplish this is ldm panic-domain.

[sahil@primary-domain-p:~] $ sudo ldm panic-domain test-domain-g
[sahil@primary-domain-p:~] $ sudo ldm list test-domain-g
NAME             STATE      FLAGS   CONS    VCPU  MEMORY   UTIL  NORM  UPTIME
test-domain-g active     -t----  5002    64    158G     100%  100%  157d 1h
[sahil@primary-domain-p:~] $ sudo console test-domain-g
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.

Connecting to console "test-domain-g" in group "test-domain-g" ....
Press ~? for control options ..
 6:21 100% done
100% done: 1523171 pages dumped, dump succeeded
rebooting...
Resetting...
NOTICE: Entering OpenBoot.
NOTICE: Fetching Guest MD from HV.
NOTICE: Starting additional cpus.
NOTICE: Initializing LDC services.
NOTICE: Probing PCI devices.
NOTICE: Finished PCI probing.

The ldm panic-domain command ensured that a crash dump was generated when the guest domain underwent a reboot.

I hope this quick tip was helpful.

Shutdown a zone stuck in down state

While working on a patching activity I came across an issue wherein the swap file system temporarily mounted for a zone did not get unmounted properly during the installpatchset phase.

swap                   295G     8K   295G     1%    /zones/lab-zone/lu

From the zoneadm list output, I observed that the zone to which the above file system belonged to was somehow stuck in down state.

usport-lab-g# zoneadm list -icv

  ID NAME             STATUS     PATH                           BRAND    IP

   0 global           running    /                              native   shared

   7 lab-zone       down       /zones/lab-zone              native   shared

Further investigation revealed that the zoneadmd process for the zone was still active.

usport-lab-g# ps -ef | grep zoneadmd

    root  6962  6863   0 06:31:49 pts/1       0:00 grep zoneadmd

    root 21890     1   0 06:12:45 ?           0:01 zoneadmd -z lab-zone

I forcefully terminated this process with the kill command.

usport-lab-g# kill -9 21890

usport-lab-g# ps -ef | grep zoneadmd

    root  7025  6863   0 06:32:00 pts/1       0:00 grep zoneadmd

This fixed the problem and the zone was now in the installed state as I anticipated.

[ssuri@usport-lab-g:~] $ sudo zoneadm list -icv

  ID NAME             STATUS     PATH                           BRAND    IP

   0 global           running    /                              native   shared

   - lab-zone       installed  /zones/lab-zone              native   shared

I hope this quick tip was helpful for you and I thank you for reading.