SUN Explorer

All machines are prone to failure at some point. Failures may be caused by any number of issues.

It could be a hardware failure.
It could be a software error.

Though high-end machines are mostly designed for hardware fault tolerant, there is no 100% assurance. So these can be expected, though such failures are very very rare in most high-end production environments.

For identifying the cause of the failure, data are needed about the system. One way of sun to generate such diagnostic data is through sun explorer.

Sun Explorer gathers information and creates a detailed snapshot of a system's configuration. It's output is designed to enable Sun support engineers to perform efective assessments of a system, provided a valid contract id exists for the support by sun. The explorer tool simply collects diagnostic information, including logs and system configuration, for analysis by Sun.

These are in packages SUNWexplo and SUNWexpl.

Explorer file can be found in /opt/SUNWexplo

-> Run the explorer

      /opt/SUNWexplo/bin/explorer

-> Resultant explorer o/p is normally stored in

     /opt/SUNWexplo/output

This explorer needs to be send to sun for diagnosis. There are other ways as well to collect data for diagnosis.