Booting/configuring a SunFireV100 (Sun have made a right hash of this) 1

[red3kgto]

Blimey, either I am getting rusty of Sun have made a right pig's ear with these V100's.

First the damn thing wouldn't boot from it's disk. It kept trying to boot from net but I don't have a boot server.

I did probe-ide and got this:

ok probe-ide
Device 0 ( Primary Master )
Not Present

Device 1 ( Primary Slave )
Not Present

Device 2 ( Secondary Master )
ATA Model: ST340016A

Device 3 ( Secondary Slave )
Removable ATAPI Model: SR244W

Seems strange that they've configured the devices on the secondary IDE channel.

Anyway, as "boot disk" was failing to find a boot device, I did "boot disk2" and fortunately it came up (seems to have set this as the default automatically as it comes up every time now). It would have been nice if Sun had documented this in the V100 user's guide.

Once the thing booted it started running sysconfig, but that failed when trying to configure the network and wouldn't give me a reason why. So I configured it without a network. Managed to log in, checked syslog and it doesn't look like I've got ANY network interfaces. Hmmm, strange coz there's two holes on the back, lol!

Lots of head scratching going on, ifconfig -a only shows the loopback interface. Okay, let's try and plumb one in. Hmmm, now what's the device called.... checked the manual, aha, eri0 and eri1...

# ifconfig eri0 plumb
ifconfig: plumb: eri0: Bad file number

Hmmmm.

Now I go to do something else and find this other book in the box called "Platform Notes: The dmfe Fast Ethernet Device Driver". Hmmm, okay very interesting, took a quick look and it looks like the interfaces are actually called dmfe0 and dmfe1...

# ifconfig dmfe0 plumb

Aha! Bingo.

So obviously sysconfig failed because it was probably trying plumb in the wrong interface and the fact that the user guide is wrong is just plain unforgivable.

I wasted quite a while figuring all this out and was pretty pissed off with Sun. In this day and age, I expected to be able to just plug it in and boot it up, not spend hours troubleshooting Sun's crap config scripts. If all their V100's go out like this they are surely going to be overwhelmed with support calls from people who can't figure it out.

I think Sun need to sort out their act.

 

[alray]

Out of interest, did you read the instructions (User's Guide) that come with the servers before you plugged them in?

I know its easy to be wise after the event but, as I had never seen one of these before, it saved me lots of hassel.

Ray

 

[red3kgto]

Yes, that was one of my problems, the user guide said the system would boot off the disk but it didn't. It tried to boot from the net and just sat there saying ARP/RARP failed. I had to figure out how to get it to boot from the correct disk. Then the user guide said that the network interface names were eri0 and eri1, when they were actually dmfe0 and dmfe1.

So basically, the user guide was next to useless and didn't help me much at all.

I have since found out that you really need Solaris 8 2/02 for V100 support, but mine came pre-installed with 10/01. I guess this is why the sysconfig script failed as this patchlevel didn't fully support the new network interfaces (although the dmfe drivers were already installed).

Pre-installing the wrong OS patchlevel is unforgivable. Don't Sun have a QA department? LOL!

Paul

 

[jumpstart]

Guys, if you can buy a piece of kit like that for just 900 GBP then why bother moaning. One thing you have to ask yourselves is: Has Sun messed me about in the past? If the answer is no, then leave it well alone and go to

http://www.sunsolve.sun.com

to find the fix (and this is there).