Meandering Chatter

We spent about 5 days trying to update a SunFire V880 that was running Solaris 10, the 6/06 release.  Initially, we tried to simply get the latest kernel release, however after trying to update two kernel revisions, the last kernel upgrade hosed the system.

Vasantha did a good job of breaking the mirror before attempting to apply the patches, however the mirror was un-bootable.  I don’t know exactly why, both boot drives kernel panicked at boot time. I spent most of Friday restoring from backup, and finished it off on Monday morning.  I spent Monday, making sure that the mirror was good.  I then broke the mirror and took SDS completely out of the picture, and made sure that I could boot from both disks.

I concluded Monday, by applying some patches from the Solaris 10 Recommended Patch Bundle, however the system wouldn’t upgrade to a newer kernel, past 118833-36.  I needed to figure out how to upgrade to a newer kernel revision.  That meant crawling through the Sun patch documentation.  I suspected that I would have to apply a different patch bundle, which meant downloading said bundle in three parts.

On Tuesday, I began downloading the new patch bundle.  While waiting for that to finish, I burned CD’s of the new OS Release in order to setup an updated JumpStart environment.  Once the new patch bundle was downloaded, I transferred it to the system and began to apply it.  Luckily, the new patch bundle was able to update the system to the latest Solaris kernel release, however I needed to perform one more kernel upgrade.  I attempted to upgrade the system using the smpatch utility.  I was able to apply some newly needed patches, however it would still not apply the kernel patch because it was a kernel patch.  So, I then applied the Solaris 10 Recommended Patch Bundle, and that was able to successfully update my kernel to the needed revision.

All of this just to be able to compile dovecot…  Naturally, I notified my peers that changes had been made to the system and that they should verify the services they are responsible for to make sure that they work.  I even tried compiling dovecot, just to make sure that it would compile; and it did.

Patching Solaris Sucks ! ! !

–Raf

I managed to get the VTrak setup and online. We ran into some problems with older iSCSI software and iSCSI tape on the BlackBoard Failover servers. Jason from Swarthmore came over and upgraded the BlackBoard Failover servers to RHEL 5.2, which resolved all of our iSCSI tape issues. The disk was never an issue.

Upgrading 4 SAN modules to 7.0 sp1 went well. The problem now is regarding the additional patches that I was installing. 2 of the modules are unresponsive, 1 of those 2 is unable to be located. I’m guessing the DOMs have gone bad.

I’m also getting around to installing the 2 new NSM 2120 units and getting them online and configured. I need to finish that this week so that I can begin Remote IP Copies to these 2 new units to see how they hold up. I also need them up to make sure that all of their disks are okay. It would really suck if I had to replace a DOA disk; its not so much of a bad thing, its just that it would take a while and ultimately delay our migration plan.

Gotta get back to work,

–Raf

No, not the movie, the browser.  The latest iteration of the browser is pretty cool.  They’ve retooled the navigation toolbar, the whole things looks like a freakish experiment where they forced Safari and Firefox to copulate.  Most pages seem to load w/o problems, however I haven’t really tried it on more complex sites.  I’ll continue to use it on my laptop until I see some clear advantages, before I go installing it on my main desktop.

Vasantha and I have a CPU heatsink and fan to replace in a SunFire v210.  That’s the 3rd (or possibly the 4th) heatsink that we’ve had to replace in these units.  Not good, not good at all…

–Raf

I took off the past Thursday & Friday as well…

It was nice. I didn’t get much done, however it was a very relaxing weekend. I’m trying to take this Friday off as well to head over to Pittsburg and meet up with some old friends.

Over the weekend, I received my new IBM ThinkPad X23. I was able to install Solaris 10 x86 on it and get basic networking (wireless) functionality to work. Its been quite an experience. I’m not sure what it is about the Java Desktop System, but it just doesn’t jive with me too well. Perhaps its the fact that it looks too much like Windows Explorer, or it might be the fact that its a rebranded Gnome desktop. I’ve grown quite accustomed to using Fluxbox or Window Maker. Actually, I’ve grown rather dependant on being able to edit my own menu and add shortcuts to launch connections and applications.

The I need to try and get sound working. There are a couple of web documents out there that focus on getting OSS working with laptops. The other thing I need to find out is if Cisco has bothered releasing a VPN Client application that works with Solaris x86.

Maybe this computer will eventually get its own page. Until then, you’ll find updates posted on the main page.

The college is closed for the next two days, so I have Thurs. & Fri. as a little “me” time.

I’ve just now updated the software for my Netgear 802.11a (yes its an a) card and I can already tell the difference. 54 Mbps is awesome! I should probably check to see if there are any firmware updates to the AP.

I’m hoping to get some work done on Div, my PVR project. I got SPDIF audio working, however I need to make sure that its ouputing 5.1 sound, which means that I need to find a test file somewhere. I also need to test the TV out capabilities however I need to find a long enought RCA cable (6ft. or so) to run it across the floor into the receiver. At work today, we got the opportunity to see a Slingbox in action. It was very cool…

I also want to fire up the E3000 cuz I got two additional processors I need to test. I also need to figure out how much RAM is on the processor card. I also picked up an additional 1 Gig of RAM that should work, however I need to test it out and make sure that’s the case. I have another two SBUS I/O boards comming. I already have 2 or 3 differential SCSI cards to connect a D1000. I want to pick up 2 or 3 four port Ethernet adapters to maximize the E3000’s network throughput. I need to eventually pick up some disks for the beast.

Laters…