« Open Source Java | Main | X2100: Console Redir... »

20060506 Saturday May 06, 2006

My X2100 server finally arrived

My server, ordered April 6th, finally arrived. Being Sun's busiest quarter and the fact that I chose the "next year" box to save on shipping costs, imagine my surprised when it came 11 months early. Employees (with employee discounts) get the back seat in the priority list. Or perhaps they knew me by reputation and repeatedly put me at the back of the line .... .

During my 15 minute lunch break (at about 3:00pm), I unboxed the puppy and popped the hood. Sweet! After inserting the RAM and the 2nd disk drive, I couldn't figure out where to put the lights-out management daughterboard.Hrmph. No directions. So, I improvised by pulling out my drill and made four holes to match that of the card. Bingo! I powered it on. Holy cow that sucker is LOUD. No worries, I was prepared.Haven't even had time to take the X2100 for a test spin. I have had real work to do, not to mention spend some quality time with the family.

I'll let you know what I think after I play with it. Until then, I have to think of a server name in the genre of chess openings. English, benko and sicilian are taken.

Oh, and the drill thing, just kidding. The Sun System Handbook showed me it goes on top of the DVD-ROM bay. Hey, it wasn't intuitive to me.

(2006-05-06 02:27:03.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Comments:

Two things you should probably know. 1) The out-of-band management card doesn't have a command interface other than IPMI - although you can't even talk to it with impitool(1M). So you need to set up N1 System Manager in order to power it off and on remotely. If you get this thing working some other way, please blog about it because I would really like to know. 2) The nge(7D) interface has a bug - check document ID 6348897. -Alex

Posted by alex on May 06, 2006 at 07:31 AM PDT #

I was able talk to it using the ipmitool packages on the N1 CD's. Ok I'm just doing basic: power cycle, on/off or power status command, and never try other commands but at least that does "work".

Posted by Philippe Plouffe on May 06, 2006 at 11:19 AM PDT #

So, do we get a "zone count" on this box? ;-)

Alan.

Posted by Alan Hargreaves on May 06, 2006 at 09:52 PM PDT #

How about "ruylopez"? I just got two X2100s delivered. Look forward to hearing about your experiences. The hardware seems terrific, I'm just waiting for ZFS to reach mainline. And also working on building Apache/mod_perl with bundled gcc, together with the Solaris 10 certified binary of MySQL 5.0.

Posted by Toby on May 06, 2006 at 11:31 PM PDT #

Alex & Phillipe, I got ipmitool (on Nevada b38) to talk to the SMDC on the X2100 just fine. Power on/off. Print sensor information.

And most of all: Console redirect! I upped the baud rate to something a bit more to my liking: 115K. More notes in a followup blog.

Alan: Don't tempt me! :)

Toby: I tend to play Ruy Lopez. However, I named the box "pirc", simply because I installed the OS before your comment :)

Posted by John Clingan on May 07, 2006 at 12:01 AM PDT #

Post a Comment:

Comments are closed for this entry.