The sheer size of an old Sun "midrange" server

This one is going back a bit but I have obtained it for legacy support. Its a Sun V880 with 6x UltraSPARC III 750MHz processors and 12GB of RAM. Still a computer to be reckoned with [Update: Spent $50 on a new CPU/RAM board to take it to 8x CPU and 16GB RAM. eBay is great for this kind of thing]

Its as high as my desk, as large as a fridge lying on its side and sounds like a very loud aircon. [Update: When it is running under an OS at low load it throttles the fans and becomes quite quiet]

This one was going to be built with Solaris 10 on a software mirrored root using UFS but the new spin of Solaris 10 allows installation and booting off ZFS. A much more sensible choice when I have 6x 36GB disks.

Do the multipathing first, and the mirroring afterwards!

If you are using a mirrored root under Disksuite and wish to enable mpxio I wish you well. It is a devil of a job, mainly due to the fact that stmsboot won't recognise your metadevice as a STMS device and so won't enable it.

So to fix it here is the answer:

1. Back everything up. EVERYTHING
2. Follow the guide here to undo the mirrored root
3. Run stmsboot -e and reboot immediately
4. Everything should now be correctly multipathed using mpxio
5. Rebuild all the mirrored root and other devices

and next time, do the multipathing first and the mirroring afterwards!

esdsun4 now running

We are still using two old solaris workhorses: esdsun3 and esdsun4. Both are Enterprise 3500's with 6x 400MHz USII with 8MB of cache and a bunch of FCAL HDDs. Just got the second one working. What it troubling is that they are not much slower (if at all) than the V210's we have. Contrasting enterprise kit (old) with new budget kit doesn't reveal that many differences.

Sun saga continues

Tried my cunning plan. Completely failed to work.

New plan:

Install Sol9 and StorageTek SAN from scratch: a
Now all I have to do is:

1. change vfstab
2. change boot in eeprom
3. boot to new disks
4. move fiber
5. setup mirrored root
6. .....
   
7. profit!!!!
   

Servicing Suns

I am trying to boot one of our cad servers from half of a mirror pulled from the other half. Predicatably it is being difficult, however if I want to preserve the exact setup I am at a loss how else to do it.

Still I think I am a sucker for punishment. Installing from scratch may, eventually, be the way to go from here.