Thursday December 28, 2006

Solaris install + USB ... a no-no

Last night ... mmm, more early this morning :-) ... I was installing OpenSolaris SDX beta (Nevada build #55) and forgot that my USB external drive was still plugged in. This happened because I had downloaded on that drive the 4 Gig ISO image and then burnt it to a DVD.

The install went well, with the only muddy thing that my bootdisk had become c2d0 and not c0d0, what I'm used to. But still: so far, so good. After login I noticed the USB partition being auto-mounted, which is good, and I suddenly understood what had happened. The USB device has one way or another a higher priority over the ATA harddisk and therefore the bootdisk becomes c2d0. Which is of course not what you want to happen.

You can imagine that when I unmounted the USB disk and rebooted, the system needed some deep hard thinking – read "long timeouts" – before it understood where to find its MBR. In short: don't do this!! I took the easy way out and reinstalled everything from scratch, which was not too bad but could have been avoided. Lesson to learn: unplug every USB stick or device before you install an OS.

1-888-THUMPER

A while back I attended Immersion Week in St Charles near Chicago, which is a Sun internal conference / training session "for the techies" to learn about the latest products and technologies. After a morning session on Thumper (now officially Sun Fire X4500) and Honeycomb (StorageTek 5800), I decided to skip lunch and get some fresh air instead.

I walked into town, which is pretty small, and after a brisk walk, my eye suddenly fell on this truck. Not so much because of the shape or color, but of course because of the phone number. What kind of coincidence was this? The truck seemed to belong to some kind of utility repair company. And I guess the ladder will come in handy if you need to replace a disk in a "top of the rack" Thumper system. :-)

Thumper, a server/storage combination with 24TB of disk and dual AMD Opteron processors, got its code-name from John Fowler. Which was last July C|Net's "Quote of the Day" with the phrase "and from now on I'm not allowed to name anything". The summary and details of that story are still online. If it is completely true, I don't know. But it's as funny as this 1-888-THUMPER telephone number.