Wednesday November 19, 2008

After spending too long today installing onto the wrong disk of an x4500 I thought I better write down how to find the right one.

The solaris install document: http://docs.sun.com/source/819-4362-16/solaris.html tells us that the bootable devices are:

Now the important thing to remember is, ignore the device nodes from the table. Instead boot of the media and use cfgadm to list the devices and the device nodes for sata3/0 and sata3/4.

# cfgadm | grep 'sata3/[04]'    
sata3/0::dsk/c3t0d0            disk         connected    configured   ok
sata3/4::dsk/c3t4d0            disk         connected    configured   ok
# 

So on this system and this OS (snv_101a) the boot devices are c3t0d0 and c3t4d0.

Wednesday June 18, 2008

Interesting change when installing snv_91 over the net from earlier releases. There is a very considerable delay with the “spinning bar” running here:

Sun Fire V440, No Keyboard
Copyright 1998-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.16.1, 16384 MB memory installed, Serial #55495765.
Ethernet address 0:3:ba:4e:cc:55, Host ID: 834ecc55.



Rebooting with command: boot net                                      
Boot device: /pci@1c,600000/network@2  File and args: 
/pci@1c,600000/network@2: 100 Mbps full duplex link up
Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet
4000 /pci@1c,600000/network@2: 100 Mbps full duplex link up
/

Previously you would get the SunOS version message quite quickly.

SunOS Release 5.11 Version snv_91 64-bit

Now it takes many, more than five, minutes (with the 100Mbps link) to load over NFS. So be patient!

Thursday August 31, 2006

The new server arrived and like a good geek I stayed up late last night putting it together and loading the Solaris Operating System on it. So far I've not got that far. A base install with mirrored root file system, plus a second boot environment for live upgrade and the rest of the disk(s) are there for real data on ZFS.

Laying out the disks was harder than it should have been due to me wanting to put all the non ZFS bits at the end of the disk not the beginning so that when we have a complete ZFS on root solution I can delete the two root mirrors and allow ZFS to grow over the whole drive. So on the disks the vtoc looks like this:

Part      Tag    Flag     Cylinders         Size            Blocks
  0 unassigned    wm   37368 - 38642        9.77GB    (1275/0/0)   20482875
  1 unassigned    wu       0                0         (0/0/0)             0
  2     backup    wm       0 - 38909      298.07GB    (38910/0/0) 625089150
  3 unassigned    wu       0                0         (0/0/0)             0
  4       root    wu   36093 - 37367        9.77GB    (1275/0/0)   20482875
  5 unassigned    wu   38643 - 38645       23.53MB    (3/0/0)         48195
  6 unassigned    wu   38646 - 38909        2.02GB    (264/0/0)     4241160
  7       home    wm       3 - 36092      276.46GB    (36090/0/0) 579785850
  8       boot    wu       0 -     0        7.84MB    (1/0/0)         16065
  9 alternates    wu       1 -     2       15.69MB    (2/0/0)         32130

Which looks even worse than it really is. On the disk starting at the lowest LBA I have:

1. The boot blocks on slice 8

2. Then alternates on slice 9 (format just gives you these for “free”)

3. The Zpool on slice 7

4. The second boot environment on slice 4

5. The first boot environment on slice 0

6. The metadbs on slice 5

7. A dump device on slice 6

All the partitions, except the dump device are mirrored onto the other disk so both drives have the same vtoc. As you can see I can grow the zpool over both boot blocks and the metadbs when ZFS on root is completely here.

The next thing to do will be SAMBA.

Tags: opensolaris solaris home server