unixwiz » X2100

What the heck is going on part deux

unixwiz — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:28:24 +0000

Here is the beginning… tonight I looked at my AMEX, and it looks like Sun credited me $480.00 instead of the $559.32. And THEN they charged me 3 times of $508.00… Don’t have a clue what that is for. But needless to say, [in marvin martian voice] I am getting very angry [end marvin martian voice] …. I hope this gets fixed soon, as now I am up to $2,083.32 in charges that I did not want any have only been credited $480. So I still need $1,603.32 back…

Please Sun fix this now…. the way it is going now I may have to cancel the card just to quit getting charged.

Site on new hardware

unixwiz — Thu, 04 May 2006 03:29:18 +0000

I have completed the move of the domain to the new Sun X2100 server… So much nicer owning the machine that my web site runs off of. This way I can control the OS and every aspect of security about it.

Make sure you install the Sun Studio Patches

unixwiz — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 02:53:23 +0000

So I was going along compiling IMAP, PHP, Apache, etc.. and start Apache up with SSL enabled and everytime I try to go to an SSL page I see this in the error log:

[Sat Apr 15 22:21:42 2006] [error] mod_ssl: SSL handshake failed (server sungeek.net:443, client 10.0.0.138) (OpenSSL library error follows)
[Sat Apr 15 22:21:42 2006] [error] OpenSSL: error:1408F455:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_RECORD:decryption failed or bad record mac

To make a long story short, it appears there is a bug in the Sun Studio 11 compilers when compiling OpenSSL. If you are on Solaris x86, you need to have patch 120759-04 installed to fix this problem. (The problem will also show up if you do a make test, you will get an error on the test_evp). For Solaris on Sparc the Patch is 120760-03. Now if it off to recompile all the software again. At least I have gotten everything in 32 bit mode now.

Update to the 32bit vs 64bit problems

unixwiz — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 01:41:27 +0000

After reading the entire CC man page for Sun Studio 11, I think I had figured out what was wrong. All was well until I got to compileing OpenSSL.. It appears that OpenSSL does not pay attention to the CFLAGS environment variable. But if you run

Configure solaris-x86-cc

instead of the “config” command it will force it to compile it as 32 bit instead of 64 bit which the config command does.

I also set these environment variables to force 32 bit compile on some other stuff:

CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc
CFLAGS=-fast -xarch=generic
CXXFLAGS=-fast -xarch=generic

Not more than 10 minutes ago while I was doing this, Chris Quenelle posted an Article about 32 versus 64 bit programs that explains some more of the issues..

To 64 bit or to 32 bit that is the question

unixwiz — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 03:04:21 +0000

Well, I started last night trying to get my Apache+PHP+MySQL+OpenSSL+IMAP compiled to run on the new X2100. What a nightmare. For some reason some of the software compiled as 32bit, some as 64 bit and nothing would link together right. I ended up putting Sun Studio 11 on the machine and trying it all again. Got OpenSSL, MySQL and IMAP to compile as 64 bit. Then was gettext and libxml2. gettext refuses to do the whole compile as 64 bit. Part of it does 32 bit and I can’t find out where. I keep getting those little “wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64″ or “wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32″. I tried striping everything out of my path and environment variables and still does not work. Any one out there know exactly what needs set to make it all 32 or all 64 bit? I found that if I had /usr/ccs/bin in the path that it was trying to use the 32 bit linker, so I had to put /usr/ccs/bin/amd64 before the /usr/ccs/bin. I also added the CFLAGS environment variable of “-xarch=amd64″..

I even tried compiling everything on a Dual Pentium 3 machine (which is not 64 bit) and copying it over, but that failed too.

/Silently goes to bed with head down and wishing I could have afforded a T2000.

Overhead of Software raid.

unixwiz — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 04:15:59 +0000

Well as I posted the other day about the E25K domain and creating zones. I have started to create some zones on the X2100 tonight. With 2 SATA drives mirrored, and the machine idle it takes 6:32 minutes to create a zone. So almost twice as long as the E25K machine with the 1.1TB file system stripped across 17 drives and 6 SCSI controllers. Compared to the V890 which has a 3 disk raid 5 array, it would appear that using the SVM software raid is a real performance hit. The drives in the V890 are even fibre channel drives, but it still takes 30 minutes to create a zone on that machine. So how do we speed it up? not sure at the moment. On the one v890 I have Solaris 10 on, I have to quit using Raid 5 for the zones file system and went to Raid 10 (1+0) to get it to speed up, but unfortunatly I did not have enough drives in the second V890 to do that. If any one has any good tips on how to speed up SVM Raid 5 array’s let me know.

X2100 server install

unixwiz — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 03:23:39 +0000

Well after having to search all over town to find some place that sells a Null-modem cable (actually did not find one, had to buy a regular serial cable and a null modem adapter. Most expensive thing I bought at over $23.00 for the both. They even had to move stuff out of the way at Radio Shack to find the cable.) Anyways, I hooked the cable up to the X2100 and my other Solaris box, and yippe I get a console on it.

So, for all those who buy an X2100 here are some notes:

By default console redirection is set to ON. This means that even it you plug in a monitor/keyboard/mouse, you will only get to the first Solaris boot screen, it will then appear to lock after that. You can instantly tell when the machine boots if the console redirection is on, if the display “paints” extremely slow, (a la 9600 baud), on the monitor.
There are 2 network cards in it, one is an nge and one is a bge. The nge card is the primary card.
Hardware mirroring of the two SATA drives is NOT supported by Solaris
According to the Release Notes, Hot Swap of the SATA drives is NOT supported by Solaris. It is only supported by Microsoft Windows XP. (Boo!)
If you plan to run the server in your house, watch out as it is somewhat loud. On initial boot, the fans spin at over 15,000 RPM. After the BIOS has control they spin down to around 6,000RPM. But it is still rather loud (I currently have it running in my family room and it is too loud for there.)
Even with Console Redirection on, if you plug in a Keyboard/Mouse and Display you can control the bios on the machine.

As I write this it is half way thru reinstalling Solaris 10 U1… (I did not like the disk layout that it came with and I wanted a more recent version on it.)

SunFire X2100

unixwiz — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 02:16:21 +0000

Well the server came in today. I took it home, and put the additional harddrive and dvd drive in it. Hooked it up to a montior/keyboard and mouse and booted it, man the initial boot is loud with the internal fans going at well over 12,000RPM, they then quiet down a little to about 6,000 RPM. So up pops up the begining of the Solaris boot screen, and then it just goes blank. Nothing on the screen at all. Great, now what? Started going through the 4 little books that came with it, and no where in there did it say that by default that it uses serial redirection! I have played with a V20Z at the office and it did not do that. So I think in my attempts to figure out why there was nothing on the screen, I corrupted something on the boot disk. I was able to boot off of a Solaris 10 GA disk, but that is not supported by this hardware. I could see the disks in the machine, but that was it. So now I am in the process of downloading the Solaris 10 x86 U1 dvd so I can burn it and try to boot and install from it.

Another major gripe I have is this from the release notes for the server:

SATA Hot Plug for Windows XP OS Only
SATA hot plug is supported only for the Windows XP Operating System (OS). If you wish to change hard disks with Linux or Solaris, you must rebooth the system.

What the F****…. I mean no where on Sunsolve does it say this, in fact on this Sun Solve Doc #83605, it talks about the X2100 server and near the bottom you will see:

If the primary root disk fails, the system will continue to run from the
secondary boot disk. There will be SCSI errors on the console, about the disk
failure.

“Primary root disk can be replaced online without bringing down the system”

Note: It is not necessary to remove the failed disk using the cfgadm or devfsadm
commands. If a new disk is installed in place of the failed disk, just
execute the devfsadm command, so that the OS can recognize the new disk.
Then the “format” command will show the new disk. If the new installed
disk installed has no fdisk partition, then create the fdisk partition
from the format program, so that the new disk can be used for mirroring.

So I am confused, which is it? Can you or can’t you hot swap the drives? And why on earth would I want to run Windows XP on a server? I hope this little “feature” is fixed real soon.