Monday July 24, 2006

X2100 running Solaris 10 Update 2

Matt and I headed down to the data center today to get our respective X2100's up and running. Matt's using the SMDC serial console redirect. I gave up on that and decided to use the serial port. I still use the SMDC to power cycle the box among other things, just not console redirect.

You may be wondering why I made this choice. There are a couple of reasons. My provider has provided me various ways to access the box. The terminal server is by far the simplest. I can get to it at any time and from any OS I have booted. With IPMI console redirect, I have to have a different tunneling client and IPMI running. That's not a good combination for my Solaris X86 client.

Matt and I have been having some problems with installing Solaris 10 X86 remotely with the IPMI. You have to modify asy.conf to configure the serial driver to talk over the IPMI port. A (default) bootable CD image doesn't do that. There may be a way to accomplish this and I am open to suggestions, but given our time constraint we installed his box with a local console. Even with the fix to bug id 6337341in Solaris 10 Update 2, Matt still had to disable bge in /etc/system or else he would lose connectivity to the console via IPMI.

Once up and running, the IPMI remote console works fine. It's the bootstrap problem that was an issue. Keep in mind that the x2100 is designed to be an HPC compute node.

I sliced my two drives with swap and two 10GB UFS (boot) slices each to facilitate live upgrade and a 50GB mirrored zfs slice across the two disks. At some point I'll mirror the UFS boot slice. I look forward to a bootable zfs root slice.


(2006-07-24 08:15:27.0) Permalink Comments [1]