UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there

I am trying to find out what processes were running on my sun solaris 5.8 server yesterday.

There are no jobs running on the server which are monitoring/logging processes on the server.

Is there a way to find this out - is there an operating system log for processes?

Thanks in advance

N

If you are not running accounting, then you will have a hard time figuring out what processes were running - even if you do have accounting it may be difficult.

You can check out some of the following which may show some information.

last - you can tell who physcially signed into the system (by account) but not what they ran.
syslog - check if syslogd is running on server - then check /etc/syslog.conf to see where it's placing it's information - one file it may put it in is the /var/adm/messages file - this will contain errors/warnings/info

/var/adm/sa/* - you may or may not have files in this directory if sar is running - will give performance of server but not processes running.

If you give more information on what you are looking for, it may be easier for us to point you in the right direction.

Thanks for your help.

As accounting is not enabled on the server I don't think I will find what I was looking for!

Doesn't the command "ps" work for Solaris, too? It lists processes on Solaris 9. What about command "top"? What about CDE graphical "process finder".

I can run ps to see what is running currently, I can't do a historical ps which was what I wanted to do in 1st place ....

Thanks anyway