Bitwrangler

Solaris and Easy now fit in the same sentence

Over the 4th of July holiday here in the Great State of Texas, among other celebratory events, I decided to re-organize the data center at the dam house (not a pejorative term mind you, we live below a hydro-electric dam).  During the cleaning, backing up, organizing and migration two interesting events were undertaken.  

 First, I migrated from an old AMD 32 bit shuttle box to a AMD 64 socket M2 system (ASUS MOBO, 2 Gig of ram, .5 TB hard drive) with my Microsoft Windows XP system.  The overall process to install XP on the system went like this:

1. Load CD and start the boot from CD process.
2. At checking hardware.... black screen never comes back.
3. Check BIOS settings repeat step 1&2 several times with intermittent head scratching.
4. Pull hard drive, attach to another machine with linux image, run fdisk wipe out the existing linux partition on the disk.
5. Replace hard drive, and re-start with step 1
6. After OS load, use MB pro to gather all drivers from ASUS web site for on-board chipset and nVidia web site for graphics card burn CD and use it to finish the install.
7. Attempt to move "files and settings" from old machine to new machine, experience 3 failures and 1 successful completion.
8. Re-install all applications on the new machine.

After getting the XP (legacy machine) up and alive and after hearing horror stories of lost data from a couple of friends who had recently lost hard drives on various machines I decided to make a bold addition to the datacenter in the form of another set of hardware that was identical to the XP machine in every possible way that happened to be available in the bitwrangler overstocked warehouse, dive shop and coffee emporium.  On this kit I decided to give OpenSolaris a go so that I could build a ZFSed NFS server for the local backup of important data, pictures of the two cherubs and mom (bittergirl).  Sounds like a good thing for a Sun engineer to do and it should be well within my capabilities.  (Afterall, I architect HPC systems for a day job.)

It had been a solid year since the last time I installed Solaris X86.  At that time, I had been running it for a solid year on my ferrari laptop and had been quite satisfied with the overall user experience but expected a day of "futzing" to get everything where I wanted it.   I burned the CD, loaded it, answered a couple of questions and voila, it came up with all of the drivers and attached to the network with no extra work required for a basic system.  Another 5 minutes choosing services and the entire configuration was complete, up an running.

Total time (user, not wall clock) maybe 5 minutes.  Compared to the XP experience (just to get to the running system) 3 hours or more.  Outstanding!

CONGRATULATIONS! to the Open Solaris community. You've done a fantastic job to this point.  Keep up the good work. 

Posted at 12:07PM Jul 08, 2008 in Sun  |  Comments[0]