Friday, September 29, 2006

Me versus the M2

I'm getting a very negative feeling about the SP on the X2100 M2 I'm trying to set up. This thing is just plain awful.

Yes, it's got some very fancy features. Basic functionality like being easily able to access the system console, and being able to operate for more than a few minutes without goofing up, or having documentation that is understandable, seem to be missing at this point.

The basic problem is that I can't get anything sensible out of the serial console. I can tip to the SP, and that works fine. But I just get junk output (if at all) on the console.

The KVM applet gadget is very nifty. And I can see output (once I've redirected to ttyb, anyway), but nothing I can do can persuade Solaris to accept keyboard input. It's just Solaris, as I can type into the GRUB screen OK. But if the install goes interactive I'm stuffed.

Anyway, I've got it installed by persuading it to jumpstart completely hands off. It insisted on asking for terminal type and locale before, although I'm not sure why. (Well, not completely - it complained about not being able to set the boot device and didn't reboot when it had finished installation, but that's OK, I can remote power-cycle it [and I've used that piece of functionality a few times today!].)

So my attempts here were to add:

-b console=ttyb

to the add_install_client invocation, and make sure that terminal and locale were defined in the sysidcfg file, and then edit the menu.lst file to add install as a argument - after:

kernel/unix

I added

-v -m verbose install


Of course, I'm now stuck a little further on - looking at the kdmconfig screen where it's asking me to select an X server. Must find my notes about how to disable that prompt.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the biggest annoyances with the Sun product line has been the inconsistent approach to remote management (especially on the AMD family).

I think Dell has the right approach on this: for $300 you can install a DRAC into any Dell server and the interface/functionality is consistent across the board.

Why can't Sun have something like that?

Anonymous said...

I've had this problem before on a x2100, I believe you have to use "nowin" or specify it on the add_install_client using the -b option.

Anonymous said...

we got an x2100 m2 for some reason..
the net management console does not work.

the ports listen for ssh, http, https, but you damn sure can't load anything.
no firewalls are involved, so I have no idea what I can do to fix it. There are no configuration options on the SP in the m2 for http/ssh/https.

I can't either of the 250gb SATA disks when we try to install RHEL 4 ES on them. We bought RHEL 4 ES from Sun when we bought the systems btw, so I'd assume it is supported.
I've even download the latest driver disk from Sun and still, the disks are not found.

wow. I've never had so many problems setting up a peice of Sun hardware.

Peter Tribble said...

Derek,

The nowin option doesn't make any difference - the installer runs in command line mode just fine. And I never had any problems with the original X2100 - the M2 variant is a different beast entirely.