Over a year ago, I had a great deal of fun and games when we got some Sun X2100M2 systems:
On to the X2100 M2
Me versus the M2
The M2 comes alive
Server Wars: The M2 strikes back
Well, it looks like I have another battle on my hands. After a stack of flawless installs of X4200 and X4500 boxes, we decided it was worth getting an X4150 to see what the Xeon offered. Our cpu-hungry applications love the idea of quad-core; our data storage likes the idea of 8 disks in a 1U system.
Installing this thing isn't going well. Watch this space...
Showing posts with label solaris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solaris. Show all posts
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Monday, August 20, 2007
Sunsolve needs a makeover
Sunsolve is an excellent resource. I don't have any issues with the content - it's great stuff.
Where I do have problems is with it's reliability and performance. I couldn't get through at all for a while over the weekend, and often have problems with my automated patch scripts - which can time out, report 500 errors, or tell me I'm unauthorized, all at random, and have been that way for a long time.
I even got the following gem off the website just now:
Come on Sun - show us how good your stuff really is by making your own sites work well!
Where I do have problems is with it's reliability and performance. I couldn't get through at all for a while over the weekend, and often have problems with my automated patch scripts - which can time out, report 500 errors, or tell me I'm unauthorized, all at random, and have been that way for a long time.
I even got the following gem off the website just now:
Come on Sun - show us how good your stuff really is by making your own sites work well!
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Spring Clean and Upgrade
I've been doing a bit of a spring clean and upgrade on some of my home systems.
The family PC had its memory doubled. It's survived 3 years with only 512M, which ought to be enough but it's obviously running out. We use fast user switching so there are usually 4 people logged in. That shouldn't be so bad, but it implies 4 web browsers and they guzzle memory like it's going out of fashion. I also replaced the broken DVD-ROM with a working dvd writer.
I think it's the first time the case has been opened for 3 years. And it was filthy inside, so it got a thorough vacuuming.
Next step was a couple of Sun workstations. I use one for OpenSolaris development, and I shuffled that up from build 55 to build 59. I also took a gamble on rebuilding one of the children's systems from an essentially unpatched FCS version of Solaris 10 to the latest Solaris Express release - the same build 59. Only complaint so far is the placement of the tab close buttons in Firefox 2 versus Mozilla.
Next step - run Nexenta using the VMware player.
The family PC had its memory doubled. It's survived 3 years with only 512M, which ought to be enough but it's obviously running out. We use fast user switching so there are usually 4 people logged in. That shouldn't be so bad, but it implies 4 web browsers and they guzzle memory like it's going out of fashion. I also replaced the broken DVD-ROM with a working dvd writer.
I think it's the first time the case has been opened for 3 years. And it was filthy inside, so it got a thorough vacuuming.
Next step was a couple of Sun workstations. I use one for OpenSolaris development, and I shuffled that up from build 55 to build 59. I also took a gamble on rebuilding one of the children's systems from an essentially unpatched FCS version of Solaris 10 to the latest Solaris Express release - the same build 59. Only complaint so far is the placement of the tab close buttons in Firefox 2 versus Mozilla.
Next step - run Nexenta using the VMware player.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Sun, Intel - friends?
OK, so Sun and Intel made a big fuss about some deal or other (one which doesn't really set the pulse racing, mind). What I found ironic was the ticker underneath the main feature on the Sun home page, where they put the knife into Itanium.
I remember Sun recently selling a number of Intel powered systems. The LX50 was a nice box - even if it was pushed with SunLinux. The V60x was OK, but I quite liked the V65x, and that sort of system (6 internal drives) is something that would be quite valuable. And the B200x blade was quite a marvel - twin hyperthreaded Xeons and a decent memory configuration in a tiny package.
I expect closer collaboration will improve driver support for Solaris, but I'm also hoping for a wider range of systems designed for Solaris to give us a breadth and variety of system configurations that Sun themselves seem disinclined to supply.
I remember Sun recently selling a number of Intel powered systems. The LX50 was a nice box - even if it was pushed with SunLinux. The V60x was OK, but I quite liked the V65x, and that sort of system (6 internal drives) is something that would be quite valuable. And the B200x blade was quite a marvel - twin hyperthreaded Xeons and a decent memory configuration in a tiny package.
I expect closer collaboration will improve driver support for Solaris, but I'm also hoping for a wider range of systems designed for Solaris to give us a breadth and variety of system configurations that Sun themselves seem disinclined to supply.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Jumpstart Profile Builder
One of my little projects is to write an interactive jumpstart profile builder, so that you can play with Solaris software selections, and construct a working jumpstart profile.
The problem currently is that you can, with some effort, create a jumpstart profile. But the only real way to test it is to use it to install a system, and either see what works and what doesn't, or look at the installation log to see what package dependencies you messed up on. Eventually you can get quite good at this, but it shouldn't be this hard.
You can select packages in the interactive install, but the dependency resolution is awful. It tells you what the dependencies that failed are, but doesn't give you a way to feed that back into the gui to resolve them. Nor does it tell you what dependencies are required as you look at the individual packages. And once you've selected your software, it will install it but you can't go from that to create a jumpstart profile to automatically install the next set of systems.
I have most of the base code already, in the shape of Solview. That knows how to turn the .clustertoc file (which is where the clusters and metaclusters are defined) into a tree representation of the packages, that could be used as the basis of a selection tree. And it can evaluate the dependencies. I've also got code that can describe a jumpstart profile.
Where I'm currently struggling a little is the actual interface. Using a java swing JTree as the base is fairly straightforward - this is what Solview does already. And I need a custom cell renderer to add checkboxes to show whether the software package is selected or not (or, in the case of an installed system, whether it's been installed or not). But then I got to thinking and I can't use the regular JCheckBox, as there are more states that I wish to display than JCheckBox gives me out of the box.
I've had a quick look around with the help of google, and I'm obviously not the first person to have requirements of this type. And there is a fairly large amount of sample code out there. Unfortunately it appears to be fairly complex, and I would be adding a significant amount of extra code, but it doesn't appear that I have much choice.
The problem currently is that you can, with some effort, create a jumpstart profile. But the only real way to test it is to use it to install a system, and either see what works and what doesn't, or look at the installation log to see what package dependencies you messed up on. Eventually you can get quite good at this, but it shouldn't be this hard.
You can select packages in the interactive install, but the dependency resolution is awful. It tells you what the dependencies that failed are, but doesn't give you a way to feed that back into the gui to resolve them. Nor does it tell you what dependencies are required as you look at the individual packages. And once you've selected your software, it will install it but you can't go from that to create a jumpstart profile to automatically install the next set of systems.
I have most of the base code already, in the shape of Solview. That knows how to turn the .clustertoc file (which is where the clusters and metaclusters are defined) into a tree representation of the packages, that could be used as the basis of a selection tree. And it can evaluate the dependencies. I've also got code that can describe a jumpstart profile.
Where I'm currently struggling a little is the actual interface. Using a java swing JTree as the base is fairly straightforward - this is what Solview does already. And I need a custom cell renderer to add checkboxes to show whether the software package is selected or not (or, in the case of an installed system, whether it's been installed or not). But then I got to thinking and I can't use the regular JCheckBox, as there are more states that I wish to display than JCheckBox gives me out of the box.
- Package or cluster selected
- Package or cluster not selected
- Cluster partially selected
- Package or cluster selected and cannot be deselected
I've had a quick look around with the help of google, and I'm obviously not the first person to have requirements of this type. And there is a fairly large amount of sample code out there. Unfortunately it appears to be fairly complex, and I would be adding a significant amount of extra code, but it doesn't appear that I have much choice.
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