Kristian Toms Weblog: Kristian Toms Weblog

OpenSolaris Technology installer USB howto

With my eagerness to start using the 4TB of disk and the lack of a spare slim DVD drive.  I decided to put my Sun CEC gifted 4GB pendrive to use and to install the live OpenSolaris installer onto it. Enabling myself not only to build the home server but also to take OpenSolaris with me to install on any system I need to. The process for creating the UBS drive is a simple one and the steps are below:

If your installer does not have the OpenSolaris SUNWdistro-const packages the first step is to install those packages from IPS.

# pkg install SUNWdistro-const
# cd /usr/bin
# ./usbgen /var/tmp/osol-0811.iso /var/tmp/os0811.usb /var/tmp
# ./usbcopy /var/tmp/os0811.usb

Once complete you can then set your default boot device and boot. This is not the most optimum use of a 4GB pen drive and I'm really interested in some of the work others have completed in both making the usb drive as a complete install along with creating a multi boot implementation.

Over the past month the hardware I have ordered for the Home Server has arrived and so last weekend was the time to put everything together.  As a reminder my initial BOM is here this has changed slightly based on pricing and technology availability.  When thinking about this project I wanted to make the server small and as quiet as possible. I did not realise at the time the implications of this, the Chenbro ES34069 case is perfectly formed but extremely tight especially when you are wanting to use all of the motherboard expansion like I was planning to. 

I purchased the Chenbro from www.x-case.co.uk and there support is excellent however at point of delivery the case arrived missing the card reader and riser card (The card reader was later supplied but would have helped at time of install) One thing I cannot stress enough is that you have to install the components in the correct order other wise you will find there is not enough room to manoeuvre within the case. The order is in the excellent manual.

The install order is as follows:

1. Remove Front Bezel
2. Remove Motherboard Cage
3. Check power supply and all SATA cables
4. Extend the FAN Cables if you desire to control the chasis fan's from the system board or external controller
5. Install Motherboard back plate
6. Install Motherboard
7. Install 2.5" Drive or in my case the Compact Flash to IDE reader
8. Install Chenbro Card Reader
9. Insert Motherboard Cage and screw into place
10. Attach power and SATA cables to motherboard
11. Install PCI SATA Controller and attach cables
12. Install Slim DVD Drive
13. Replace front bezel after removing pop outs for DVD drive
14. Install the 3.5" Drives in the caddies
15. Replace cover
16. Power On

At Power On I was presented with a SATA RAID BIOS in a hung state only discovering a single SATA drive.  Some quick research showed that the firmware was out dated and that I had to flash the BIOS on the card. I will document the learnings and the work around in a later post as the story deserves an entry to itself.

At the time of build and being keen to start building without all the components I finished the build without the DVD drive and moved onto the Solaris build retrofitting the drive once I had salvaged it from its original home.

Pictures of the server are below the iPhone is used to show scale.

The final BOM and stores for procurement are listed below:

Component	Supplier	Price
Chenbro ES34069	www.x-case.co.uk	£179
Chenbro PCI Riser	www.mini-itx.com	£9.50
Intel D945GCLF2	www.lambda-tek.com	£62
Kingston 2GB low profile memory	Staples	£18
Dual Compact Flash to IDE	Ebay	£3
Sil3114 PCI Low Profile SATA Controller	Ebay	£7.50
4 x Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB	www.ebuyer.com	£304
4GB Sandisk Ultra II Compact Flash	Ebay	£6
2 Fan Extension Cables	www.mini-itx.com	£7

Currently I don't believe this list is optimal and in fact I would probably go for a different motherboard manufacturer with 4 SATA ports included and potentially fan less; hen this server would be ideal. especially as this would reduce the need for third party controllers and potentially be cooler and power efficient.  An extra network port or wireless integration would not go a miss as this would then allow this server to become my home router and content filter as well as providing the storage.  

I will document the OpenSolaris UBS stick creation and the install tomorrow.

A conversation point that has been debated with several of my colleagues inside of Sun as well as mentors and friends outside of Sun is that of cloud computing and the thought of being trapped to a single providers SLA. A dream I have had for a while is that of Sky computing where I can use any cloud to deliver my service. I can take this one step further and go back 8 years when I first joined Sun I listened to Scott McNealy talk about centralised compute and a stock market for procuring commodity compute cycles on the open market.

Well today I have just read that a start up originating in Deutsche Telekom, "Zimory" has started to supply tools to enable this virtual sky and to act as a broker to its customers.  The link to the story on the register is here   I still need to understand the technology and how open the tools are e.g if it is only based on managing Hyper-V machines but I think this is an interesting development. 

The key question I have yet to see answered is what happens to the data and how do you move that around to the most efficient provider of storage or compute? It's ok moving virtual machines of a few Gigabytes if you have the bandwidth but when my data is reaching Terabytes what happens then?

 

cloud broker Technology web2.0 Hyper-V

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Along the way I also had to learn the different types of virtual switches created by VMWare Fusion as part of its install to make my appliance host based only for demonstration purposes.

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The tool I used is the new microblogging ping tool microping.me.

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So after following bloggers for the past couple of years especially on blogs.sun.com I thought it was time to introduce myself to the blogging world.  I am an Engagement Architect working in the UK financial services team aligned to numerous accounts.  I started my career at Sun Microsystems and left a couple of years back to gain experience working with a large System Integrator.  I was then presented an opportunity to rejoin Sun Microsystems and at the time due to numours external factors I felt that it was the right time to join Sun again. 

It has taken myself nearly a year since rejoining Sun to create this blog and I have finally had the motivation to start based on an invitation to CEC as well as some of the interesting customer meetings I have been attending and the feedback I have received based on the innovation Sun is driving in the engineering world.

I hope to share both my learning's and experiences from CEC as well as some of the customer feedback in future blogs as well as anything else I find remotely interesting in my personal life as well as work and of course it would not be a blog without blogging about blogging.