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My Sun rep was kind enough to arrange an Ultra 40 box as a demonstrator. I've had it up and running for a couple of weeks now and overall, it's great. Herewith some of the highlights and lowlights. Drawbacks :
Otherwise though, it's an awesome machine. I replaced the cheap mouse with a Logitech item I had lying around, since the "middle button" function was sticky (you push in the scroll-wheel, but often it wouldn't click out again). Since the machine has convenient front-facing USB ports I simply plugged in the extra mouse and it just worked. I love USB.
I even like the new Sun Type 7 USB key, and fortunately it came with the PC layout that I prefer (Ctrl key below the shift key). If I were Rich Teer I would have been disappointed not to get the unix layout, but I've just never learned to type that way.
The noisy high-speed fan noise is only the first time power is applied to the box, once it settles it has, so far, never made that kind of noise again, apart from one time it accidentally got unplugged.
Since the machine is a demonstrator, I wasn't sure what kind of spec. I would be getting. I discussed it with my rep and tried to emphasize the things that are useful in my team and those that are not. In particular, we don't use a spectacular amount of RAM, nor high-end 3D visualisation.
For some reason, though, I ended up with the "large" configuration, which is as follows :
So I probably have the fastest PC at my office.
The machine came with Solaris 10 pre-configured, however since I no longer have any Solaris responsibilities at work, I reinstalled it with Windows XP Pro 64-Bit edition.
Sun did a nice job with the Windows drivers for this machine, after downloading and burning the ISO CD image they provide, we were able to get everything working nicely.
Once I finish setting the machine up for my main responsibility
(running a Windows development team) I hope to stick in a second hard
drive and set up a double or triple boot environment so we can explore
this machine under Solaris 10 and Linux as well. Our source code
repository is kept on Unix and runs a homebrew bunch of perl scripts,
so a nice unix dev box may come in handy from time to time also. I
have some ideas about using ZFS with our CVS setup, and this box would
most likely just fly as a ZFS host.
posted at: 17:33 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
The choices were to watch "CSI" about a flight attendant brutally stabbed to death in a hotel room, or fit my DDS3 drive and get my workstation backed up.
It's obvious, right? I fitted the tape drive. It actually took about 10-15 minutes of real work, plus 1/2 hour searching for a power cable extender (you know, those internal power cables with molex connectors? I have a bunch of extenders somewhere). I never found the extender, so I snipped a cable tidy holding back the existing one inside the box and got the tape drive fully hooked up.
I think a SB1000 looks very nice with a DVD-ROM and a tape drive. Sure it would be even better to have a DDS4 or DAT 74 or whatever the latest kind is, but they cost about 5X more!
As I write this, I'm doing a level0 backup of the entire machine to tape. Quick, are there files at risk where you (yes, YOU!) live? :)
To get things kicked off, I'm using hostdump.sh which takes 2 minutes to download install and works out what to dump all by itself.
Yes, I know that real men write their own scripts, using star, fancy block
sizes, FIFO buffers etc, but I've always thought it better to start with
protecting the data, then work on the sophistication and efficiency of
the backup system strictly in that order.
posted at: 22:16 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
I bought a DDS3 drive for my Sun Blade 1000 on Ebay. Should arrive any day. This is a DAT based tape drive which has a pretty good $/MB rating these days. I prefer DLT, but only when someone else is buying the tapes.
At a modest 12GB native capacity, and rather leisurely transfer rate, it's not something I'm going to be keeping my digital video projects on.
On my Sun machine, however, the main things are my programming projects, my .profile, my .emacs, my CVS repository. This stuff fits nicely in a few gig. I also like the idea of a backup device built-in. So I can put a fresh tape in regularly, use a cron job for the scheduling and have a stack of tapes on top of the machine. If something goes horribly wrong, it will be fairly straightforward to get files back.
For resilience, once I have local backups running, I'm going to do a sort of "cooperative rsync partnership" with a friend who lives uptown (see Eloptoof.Net) and I suppose one DDS tape is no big deal to take Upstate when we next get away for a bit of geographic separation.
Long-term I plan to have a backup server, with a better tape drive,
running Amanda but whilst data is at
risk, a small local tape drive, plus hostdump.sh is a
good first step.
posted at: 22:37 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
I need to rationalise my SPARC machines, so where better to start than with an inventory? I need to see if I can get rid of some of these, because we have to move house soon, and right now we have a big basement. I can't count on having that much room going forward.
I used this for several years as my daily Sun workstation at home. I implemented my first OpenGL component on this machine, which eventually got ported to Windows, and with massive further development can be seen from the Bloomberg function "OVDV" (click on "3d graph").
I find that raw compute performance of the Ultra 10 machine is not bad - that's a 2MB cache cpu. Also graphics are quite good with the Elite card. Not as snappy at 2D as a Creator card, or certainly modern PC cards. I/O performance just BLOWS, however, with the default hard disk and cd-rom.
This machine came with a near-identical "twin" off ebay (same auction) that I set up for a friend - Solaris 8, forte 6.2, 13w3 adapter, the lot. I took it to the Mailboxes shop nearby and shipped it to London for him. Phew, that was heavy! He paid me back in full. Sadly, he never even unpacked it. That other machine is called "feanor"...
This was a "trophy" machine really. I spent way too much buying this little charmer off Ebay. I had a SPARC20 at Goldman Sachs when I used to work there, so this does have some nostalgia value. I used it as a jumpstart server for a while, but it's really quite slow, and it puts off a lot of heat and sometimes a whiff of hot metal smell, and is also noisy. I have some photos of when it arrived here. The "console funnies" were amusing (odd graphics effects when it switches from X11 back to OBP prompt).
My current jumpstart server. Performs very well, and does not put off too much heat (at least with the unscientific "put hand near air vent" test). I put a SCSI DVD-ROM in it. Works fine.
This was also my first Solaris 10 machine. I attempted to do something interesting with zones and multiple NICs with this card, but I ran across a bug in the then-current version of Solaris 10 and gave up for the time being. I need to get back to that idea (future blog ahoy).
This was fun for a while. It has no graphics so I had to hook up the serial console to a serial port on my Ultra 10. Getting Solaris 8 to install on this was "interesting". It couldn't bring up its NIC when it booted off disk whatsoever. Someone had done a reinstall of Solaris 2.6 (IIRC) and been naughty and not tested it, clearly they'd missed some required stuff. Anyway, I put in a SunSwift card I happened to have (NIC+SCSI) and it -nearly- got on the network (the link went up and down once and then stayed down). However when I broke into OBP and then continued, it finally worked it out. The official solution was to use the platform CD ... which of course one tends not to get with Ebay purchases. There is some bug with CPU speeds over a certain level (227 mhz maybe?)and that version of Solaris. Anyway once I managed to get it on the network, I net booted Solaris 8 and it was fine. Performance is good, but rackmount cases have obnoxiously loud fans. I planned to gut it and rebuild into a quiet case but never got around to it.
I used this for several months. I had to fit some SCA-II SCSI disks to it as it came stripped. The RAID controller has an LCD screen and also a serial port. There was a quad Zynix NIC in it which didn't seem to work, and the built-in NIC was also flaky. Currently it has my SunSwift card in it. I also used a spare Creator3D UPA card in it for a while. Once again the dreaded noise aspect limits the fun. I plan to rip out the good stuff and use it in the AXi rebuild project.
This is what I have at work. It's a very nice machine. Built like a tank. Good performance. Firewire, USB, Fiber Channel, SCSI. Fairly quiet, PCI environment monitoring built-in - it's really a "proper server" in a workstation case - the E280R has exactly the same motherboard. The CPUs come on daughter boards which have to be carefully fitted and then tightened into place using a (provided) torque wrench. Complete beast to move around.
This machine can put off a tremendous amount of heat when it runs flat out, but it also has clock speed switching to limit power dissipation under low load, so it's still Energy Star qualified.
Prices on these machines finally dropped recently. Firstly there is now a steady supply of newer Sun Blade 1500, 2000 and 2500 workstations on Ebay which limit how much the older machine can go for. The 1500 and 2500 have a much more suitable workstation processor, the UltraSPARC-IIIi, however they are still relatively new and costly. I have a 2500 at work also, it kicks ass, but overall it's not quite as special as the 1000. The SB2000 might be good too, but I find it doesn't look as nice for some reason.
The SB1000, after all, has the unique illuminated Sun logo - you should be able to make it out here.
This is my Solaris 10 desktop machine. If I do any more home-based Solaris development, this is where I'll do it.
I'm going to finish with the output of one of my favourite commands on SPARC/Solaris. The prtdiag command has special knowledge of the hardware of the machine that is running it, as long as it's called via the correct, hardware dependent path under /var/platform. This includes hardware details such as number, type, cache size of the cpus, graphics cards, bus adapters etc - even CPU temperature. One thing that disappointed me with recent changes in Solaris is this command stopped printing precise temperatures, because it was giving customers too much to think about, and instead only prints "okay" if the temps are within the acceptable ranges.
One of the things that Open Solaris will allow is "fixing" issues like this - I will be able to have my own version of this command, for example.
I hope that when Sun does full-strength AMD based server designs, this kind of valuable utility will be supported (and similar monitoring hardware will be provided) on the x86 side of the reservation.
Note : one doesn't even have to muck about with switch statements to work out which machine scripts are, just use uname - see the following :-
bash-3.00$ /usr/platform/`uname -i`/sbin/prtdiag -v
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000 (2 X UltraSPARC-III)
System clock frequency: 150 MHZ
Memory size: 2GB
==================================== CPUs ====================================
E$ CPU CPU
CPU Freq Size Implementation Mask Status Location
--- -------- ---------- ------------------- ----- ------ --------
0 750 MHz 8MB SUNW,UltraSPARC-III 5.4 on-line +-board/cpu0
1 750 MHz 8MB SUNW,UltraSPARC-III 5.14 on-line +-board/cpu1
================================= IO Devices =================================
Bus Freq Slot + Name +
Type MHz Status Path Model
---- ---- ---------- ---------------------------- --------------------
pci 33 +s/system-board ebus/ns87317-ecpp (parallel)
okay /pci@8,700000/ebus@5/parallel
pci 33 +s/system-board ebus/se (serial)
okay /pci@8,700000/ebus@5/serial
pci 33 +s/system-board pci108e,1101 (network) SUNW,pci-eri
okay /pci@8,700000/network@5,1
pci 33 +s/system-board pciclass,0c0010 (firewire)
okay /pci@8,700000/firewire@5,2
pci 33 +s/system-board scsi-pci1000,f (scsi-2)
okay /pci@8,700000/scsi
pci 33 +s/system-board scsi-pci1000,f (scsi-2)
okay /pci@8,700000/scsi
pci 66 +s/system-board SUNW,qlc-pci1077,2200 (scsi-+
okay /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@4
upa 120 +em-board/J4501 SUNW,ffb (display) SUNW,501-4788
okay /upa@8,480000/SUNW,ffb@0,0
upa 120 +em-board/J3501 SUNW,ffb (display) SUNW,501-4788
okay /upa@8,480000/SUNW,ffb@1,0
============================ Memory Configuration ============================
Segment Table:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Base Address Size Interleave Factor Contains
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x0 2GB 4 BankIDs 0,1,2,3
Bank Table:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Physical Location
ID ControllerID GroupID Size Interleave Way
-----------------------------------------------------------
0 0 0 512MB 0
1 0 1 512MB 1
2 0 0 512MB 2
3 0 1 512MB 3
Memory Module Groups:
--------------------------------------------------
ControllerID GroupID Labels Status
--------------------------------------------------
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0100
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0202
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0304
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0406
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0101
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0203
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0305
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0407
=============================== usb Devices ===============================
Name Port#
------------ -----
keyboard 3
mouse 4
============================ Environmental Status ============================
Fan Status:
---------------------------------------
Location Sensor Status
---------------------------------------
+stem-fan-slot system-fan okay
+/cpu-fan-slot cpu-fan okay
+r-supply-slot power-supply okay
---------------------------------------
Temperature sensors:
------------------------------------
Location Sensor Status
------------------------------------
+em-board/cpu0 Die okay
+em-board/cpu0 Ambient okay
+em-board/cpu1 Die okay
+em-board/cpu1 Ambient okay
================================ HW Revisions ================================
ASIC Revisions:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Path Device Status Revision
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/pci@8,700000 pci108e,8001 okay 5
/pci@8,600000 pci108e,8001 okay 5
/pci@8,700000/ebus@5 ebus okay 1
System PROM revisions:
----------------------
OBP 4.5.10 2002/02/11 10:38
POST 4.5.9 2002/02/05 21:25
bash-3.00$
I've been struggling to get my webcam to work with my Apple Powerbook. I would have thought it had enough performance - Nvidia graphics, fast ethernet, 867 Mhz PowerPC G4 etc etc. For some reason it just can't show the full-size streaming video.
Running the same feed into my Sun Blade 1000 with Solaris 10 and I get a rock-solid 640x480 video feed in my browser.
Both laptop and workstation are plumbed into a switch, which the webcam is also connected to. The Sun machine just hooks up and works. The Apple simply struggles. I've tried using a direct cable (crossover, and non-crossover) into the laptop. I tried fiddling with the ethernet parameters.
Maybe it's because the workstation has 2 cpus, or something to do with
hardware, but it could just be Solaris 10 kicks ass.
posted at: 01:01 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
OpenSolaris pilot really hotting up
I'm getting pretty excited by the developments going on in the invite-only OpenSolaris pilot. I can't discuss factual details, and besides that stuff can change pretty quickly. What I can say is that I am now convinced that Sun really means to do this, and means to do it well.
Solaris has been a part of my life for 10 years now, as well as many friends of mine. It's a life-changing event for me to be invited into the community that designs and develops it.
But it's not just a fondness for past glories here, Solaris 10 is
creating an unparalleled buzz greater than any previous release, and it's
simply a thrill to connect with the people taking the Unix
state-of-the-art to new levels. Whether it's security (Solaris 10
privileges), virtualisation (Solaris 10 zones), file
systems (ZFS),
whole-system tracing (DTrace), service
management (SMF),
or just hot
cpus and scalable
systems, Sun is saying it loud and proud. We do Unix. Bring it on. I
just hope I can contribute.
posted at: 22:05 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
Everybody's at it now...
At last, there is a Solaris blog aggregator - Planet Solaris the perfect place
to feast on all things Solaris from such luminaries as Casper Dik, Jeff Bonwick and other
Sun employees and of course, the non-Sun-rabble such as Rich Teer, Ben Rockwood. I'd add
"and me" if I'd done any meaningful Solaris blogging yet...
posted at: 21:26 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
YAWAS (Yet another weblog about Solaris)
Seems like everyone's doing it, so I thought I'd do it too.
I am a member of the Open Solaris pilot program, which is a precursor to the full public launch of Solaris as an open source project.
I'm a big fan of all things Unix, having used various Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X systems over the years. I have a particular fondness for Solaris having been working with it for about 10 years now, mostly in the area of GUI programming. Currently I work for a financial data firm in Manhattan.
I was a technical reviewer of "Solaris Systems Programming" by Rich
Teer which was just published this year. See here for Rich's home page
and a link to buy the book.
posted at: 19:55 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry