Jumpstart Profile Builder

The latest version of solview includes something I've been working on for a while - the ability to construct a jumpstart profile.

The aim is to get a tool to do the hard work of resolving package dependencies, so that the resulting jumpstart profile is nicely self-consistent. Doing this in the past has been very much a case of trial and error. No more!

I'll just show one screenshot here, of adding evolution on top of the reduced networking metacluster:



There's a lot more work than can be done here. The interface, while workable, is rather crude. I would like to get it to construct a reasonable jumpstart profile based on an installed system, and it would be nice to be able to feed it all my old profiles and get it to fix them up for me. And I'm sure there are many other ways it could be improved, or used in different ways.

So if you have any suggestions, give me a shout!

Solview update

I've just released a new version of solview.

If you've tried to run solview in a non global zone, then you'll find that it didn't work. (Thanks to Tony Curtis for spotting this!) This was due to an ignorant and lazy programmer. Yup, I hadn't tested it in a non global zone for a while.

This latest update actually checks that the files it relies on to grab the information it's going to display exist, and behaves properly if they don't. I'm not saying that it works correctly in all circumstances, but it does work in the cases I've tested, whereas previous versions were rather more fragile.

JKstat update

It's been a bit quiet on the JKstat front recently (summer holidays may have had something to do with that).

I've done a little bit of cleanup I've been meaning to for a while - getting rid of fixed text strings and replacing them with resources, making localization possible.

I've also added a little chart feature - when charting a statistic, it's now possible to add other statistics from that kstat to the chart.

Nothing earth-shattering, but it still represents steady progress and so there's now a new version available for download.

X2200M2 fault diagnosis

I'm just setting up some new servers - Sun X2200M2 (running Solaris, of course).

One wasn't happy. Solaris would start to boot via PXE but the system would reset (over and over, in a loop). A quick look and the fault light was on. Not good.

These systems have remote management - ILOM - but after searching and looking through the documentation I couldn't actually see how to persuade it to tell me what was wrong. It's not helped by the fact that there are several ILOM variants in use, but the one on the X2200M2 is one of the more basic ones.

After running through all the options systematically, I stumbled across:

show /SP/AgentInfo/SEL

which tells me

    Nonrecoverable ,2007/08/31 17:22:00 ,CPU1 DIMM 3 has multi-bit error

Aha! I've reseated the DIMM after swapping it with its partner, and the installation is proceeding apace.

W2100z update

I've just updated the BIOS on my home W2100z (downloaded from here).

The old BIOS on the machine was antique. I mean, it predates all the old versions on the download page. And I remember updating it at least once (to get PXE boot working), so it wasn't the factory version.

The update was pretty smooth. However, on booting back into Solaris I see a CPU pegged and very high interrupt rates. Not good.

Now, it turns out that I've stumbled across this before. And in response to that, Alan Hargreaves got the thermal zone driver backported to Solaris 10. So it's available in patch 125107.

Unfortunately getting hold of this patch is proving troublesome because sunsolve is broken again.

OK, so I go have a cup of coffee and this time, success. Patch applied and just save this blog before I reboot.