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Nijinski
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 11:46 pm    Post subject: Gentoo on Ultra Enterprise 4000 Reply with quote

I picked up one of these beasts fairly cheap on Ebay without a disk array, 8x167 Ultrasparc 1 procs, just over 4 gig of RAM and a pile of IO boards.

I've booted the 2007.0 Livecd on it and can ssh into the box without any real problems.

Before I start hunting about for a disk array to go with it (probably a fibre channel one) are there any gotchas I should be looking for when installing using a 2.6 kernel.

I checked the hardware compat list at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/sparc/sunhw.xml and the only listing for an E4000 is using a 2.4 kernel
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Ferris
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 11:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm not sure; looking at that page, though, I see that it is somewhat out of date: my own report on U2+kernel-2.6 needs updating (which I'll take care of). I do no that the kernel-2.4 series is deprecated now on sparc, which means we believe kernel-2.6 to be good across the board. I'm surprised if the liveCD is using kernel-2.4, but I haven't looked at it.

You should be OK with a recent 2.6 kernel, but you might be a pioneer. We can hope that someone with experience with a system like yours will respond with more useful information. :wink:
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Nijinski
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 12:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I've got a D1000 array due to turn up tomorrow so I'll probably see about doing something over the weekend with this box.

The 2007 LiveCD offers 2.6.17 or 2.6.20 kernels to boot with, 2.6.20 being the one I've been booting so I'd hope that it would be OK using a copy of the config from that until I get a better handle on the hardware.

Gimme a couple of weeks and I'LL be someone with experience with a system like mine.

I'll try to drop a note on progress and gotchas as I go but documentation has never really been one of my strong points.

Is it just me or is there something profoundly weird about being a pioneer on 11 year old hardware 8O
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Ferris
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 11:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'll leave it to you to answer your last question, but I'd be surprised if very many people here are actually using a system still in production. :wink:
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Nijinski
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 01, 2007 1:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I ran across an instant fatal error, no driver for the SBUS Diff SCSI HBA (qlogicpti), I dropped it into the bugzilla at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190910

There are one or two hints that the driver itself is a bit buggy but nothing definite, anybody got any definite info in this ?

<addition>

Ended up netbooting the Ubuntu 7.04 install in rescue mode seeing as they've already had the "Where is qlogicpti ?" discussion and added it into the install kernel.

Carrying on with the install from there now.

</addition>

<another addition>

Ok, that wasn't too promising either, their tar in the rescue environment doesn't seem to support bzip2 compressed files so no way to uncompress the stage file.

So, the distro I want to install doesn't support my scsi hba and the distro I don't want to install does but doesn't have the tools to let me install the distro I do want to install. Think it's time for a drink, I'm getting a sore head

</another addition>

<yaa>

Figured an odd way round my lack of bzip2 support, it struck me that I was sitting using an OSX iBook to connect to the serial console so I bunzipped the stage3 tar and the portage 2007 tar on the mac then stuck them in the root of the macs running apache, a couple of wgets later I was good to start untaring the files and moved on from there without having to worry about having bzip2 support. Now quite happily compiling gentoo-sources-2.6.22-r5 hoping I got the right options to at least get it to boot.

</yaa>

<the final edit>

Well, after a bit of fiddling about and help from unl0cker on IRC for the kernel config (thanks again). I now have a happily running Enterprise 4000 with attached 12 disc D1000 Storedge cabinet.

Linux e4000 2.6.22-gentoo-r5 #1 SMP Tue Sep 11 01:46:40 BST 2007 sparc64 sun4u TI UltraSparc I (SpitFire) GNU/Linux

e4000 ~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu : TI UltraSparc I (SpitFire)
fpu : UltraSparc I integrated FPU
prom : OBP 3.2.27 2000/08/18 11:15
type : sun4u
ncpus probed : 6
ncpus active : 6

While an error on one of the CPU boards dropped a couple out, for £20 I'm not going to lose too much sleep over it.

</the final edit>
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garak69
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 11:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

@Nijinski:

Would you mind posting your config? I'm at the moment at the same thing. Trying to get my enterprise 4000 to boot gentoo. I connected a scsi-disk via the external connectors and it shows up fine as /sbus@3,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000 Target 4 Unit 0
However after configuring silo and running it, saying that the config seems correct, I'm not able to boot the machine.
'boot disk4' just gives me
Boot device: /sbus@3,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000/sd@4,0 File and args:

and it stays like this forever...

Any hints to this please?
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Nijinski
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 11:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've dropped my config at http://www.billywatt.plus.com/kernel-2.6.22.config for you, hopefully it has what you want in it.

Just a note on your boot parameter, my boot command is boot /sbus@3,0/QLGC,isp@0,10000/sd@d,0:a mainly because I can't be bothered assigning an alias to disk 12 in the D1000 as it's not really the permanent home of the system.

You might try adding the :a to the end of your boot parameter to specify the partition on the disk that you're booting from.
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