Sander’s Blog

As I am testdriving an x2100-m2 (1 cpu, 2GB RAM) with the sunray server software to see how good it runs compared with the E4500 (8 cpu’s, 8GB RAM) I ran into a major problem. Adobe only has a Solaris Sparc version of there Acrobat Reader program, there is NO x86 version availlable.

I would like to request everyone who would like to see Acrobat Reader for Solaris X86 to leave a not at the feature request form from adobe.
ps. the performance of the x2100-M2 with the sunray server software is amazing so far. It would save as huge electricity costs and gain a lot of performance.

Last week we wanted to see how much amps our Sun E4500 was using. Its got 8 400Mhz Sparc cpu’s and 8GB RAM. I had to should down the server and put a device between it to measure the power. Turned out that he was using about 3.5 Ampere when just being idle.

After removing the device and rebooting the server, this server didn’t come up anymore and gave the following error:

Boot device: sol10  File and args:
not found: rtt_ctx_end
not found: rtt_ctx_end
not found: rtt_ctx_end
not found: rtt_ctx_end
not found: rtt_ctx_start
not found: rtt_ctx_start
not found: rtt_ctx_start
not found: rtt_ctx_start
do_relocations: /platform/sun4u/kernel/cpu/sparcv9/SUNW,UltraSPARC-II do_relocate failed
krtld: error during initial load/link phase
panic - boot: exitto64 returned from client program
Program terminated

So it seems the kernel got a corrupted file (/platform/sun4u/kernel/cpu/sparcv9/
SUNW,UltraSPARC-II). I booted from CD and checked the above file. It did excist. I checked witch checksum and compared it to a file from another sparc server. It seemed that the checksum was different but the filesize the same, so I copied it from the other sparc server and replaced this file, however it still didn’t work.

In the end I ran an install from cdrom and choose an upgrade installation from the install menu. The upgrade took about 5 hours but fixed everything. All my configurations kepped unchanged (SunRay Server, Metadb’s etc.). After the upgrade everyone was able to run on this server again.

Today I spend most of my day building a test environment. The test environment has 1 Sun Fire X2100-M2 with a Sun StorageTek SCSI Adapter connected to a Promise VTrak M210 with 8 x 320GB configured with Hardware RAID6.
For networking a Cisco ASA 5505 is used (because of its VPN functionality) and a 3Com 24 x 10/100/1000 switch.

The X2100-M2 has 4 NIC’s. 2 NIC’s are configured with aggregation, 1 is used for the Service Processor and the other one is not used.

All seems to be working, solaris x64 is installed on the x2100-M2. The VTrak works perfectly and shows a 1.76TB RAID6 partition which is perfectly mountable with Solaris 10. Tomorrow all will be installed at the client on location and will be the heart of the network which consists of severel Mac workstations.