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2x E450, + 2x A1000 storedges, any tips before i get started
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killercow
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Joined: 29 Jan 2004
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:30 pm    Post subject: 2x E450, + 2x A1000 storedges, any tips before i get started Reply with quote

Hi,

Im planning on setting up gentoo on my two E450's (not doing anything right now), and my two A1000 StorEdges,

Since i only got Gentoo running on one sparc (ultra5 creator), and i recall it not being 100% straight forward to install it, i would like to consult you guys for some info on installing those E450's.

I was thinking of setting each E450 up with one StorEdge giving them both 24 9.1 GB disks, and maybe run them in raid 5, to give me the desired speed and redundancy.)
Since i'm not super familair with the StorEdges (there are stilll in their boxes) im not sure what the clustering option means. They both have their own raid board with exra memmory, and ir ead you could attach both storedges to both sun's. and have them handle requests from both sun's. I also read i need to create the partitions on a normal sparc installation, since the tools required for this are not available on linux.

Both machines have FB devices, and i have a monitor, also have a terminal for on the serial port, but i hate those keyboards, and rather use SSH.

I have one seperate Sparc5 with solaris 7 installed but no scsi controller to setup the storedges if needed, but i'd need to install the scsi card first, and solaris 7 sucks big time.

The systems are used for some research for my company, and i can take some time to get everything up and running since im not finished completely with writnig the program.

I'm planning on running a custom web-spider on them, multi threaded etc, and im not sure if im going to run a custom thread handler or that im going to use a clustering tool like openmosix to ake them run in datem. The spider and most underlying software is self-writen so any changes in how it should work would not be a really big problem as i could change it.)
(im familiar with LVS on gentoo, and have a 6*Dl360 cluster, but that is not a technique usable for this program)

What kind of design considerations would you recommend? (hardware and software), or should i maybe just use Solaris 10 instead? with solaris 10 i know for a fact that my storedges will work, and that i get the most out of my hardware.
But since i allready have around 15 servers on gentoo (and my desktops) i'd like to stick to gentoo. It just eases on the SysAdmin part of mu job.
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Risk
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Joined: 05 Mar 2004
Posts: 38
Location: Zoo York City

PostPosted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 12:03 am    Post subject: soc driver is completely worthless with GNU/Linux Reply with quote

Well, if you're like me and want to get your A1000 devices working, you'll need the services of the soc.o driver. Sadly, soc.o is extremely underdocumented and yields the sum total of one irritating delay and one grammatically incorrect error at boot time. In other words: completely worthless. :(

See: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-224575-highlight-soc.html

This problem has rendered Gentoo (well, all GNU/Linux distros) quite useless for the businesses I'm involved in as the servers all use these unsupported fiber optic interfaces.

I wasted quite a bit of valuable time trying to get the soc.o driver to work.8O If you would like some information on what I tried, feel free to email me and I'll be glad to share it with you.

Cheers,

Lee

lee at zone dot net
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killercow
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi,

My StorEdge's are not as fancy as yours, and don't have FiberCannel connections, they are just connected on a normal scsi 2 controller (i know the raw speeds sucks, but i can do millions of super speedy head seeks since it has 12 X 10Krpm disks.)

I have a Symbios Scsi controller in my E450, which i can install fine on my Suse 9.0 machine (so i guess gentoo should be able to use tht card anyway.)

I also have spare HP NetRaid 3I card which i could use. My main concern with th storEdges is the partitioning, how did you partition yours?
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Risk
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 8:45 pm    Post subject: partitioning Reply with quote

Normally, I partition large arrays so that there is a spare drive every six to eight RAID drives. This helps to reduce the incidence of complete array failure (an instance of which I'm going through right now).

Since all our arrays are fiber optic connected, I have been using the sadly fallible Solaris Online DiskSuite for array setup and configuration. In most cases RAID5 with hotspare drives have been the best of all possible hell-on-earth situations.

Best of luck
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killercow
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 8:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks,

I had a chat with a person of sun Benelux, and while he thinks its should just work under linux, he's not sure.
He'l check the A1000 in their lab en see if they can get it working on gentoo (yes the use gentoo too, the actually had a gentoo system running in VMware on a V40z on their stand)

Il try and setup both parts of the storEdges as raid 5 arrays with a sixth spare drive. (the A1000 is split in two seperate 6 driver arrays by hardware.)
Il see what i can get out of sun, they seemed interested in providing good tools for all their Storedge products for linux, so il hope they send me a nice linux program soon.
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josh
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Did you ever get this working? I recently obtained a Sun Enterprise 420R and StorEdge A1000. I'm kind of curious what I'm going to be getting into.
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biggyL
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Joined: 31 Jan 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 2:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hello,

I'm installing Gentoo on sun4u Sun Fire 280R (UltraSPARC-III+) connected to "StorEdge D2" 218GB rackmount with SCSI cable.
The thing is that I can't see it with fdisk, I don't know what device should I make fdisk on?

May be there is a need to load some special driver?
How should I partition this StorEdge?

Please Help.
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