Sun Array Musings - 1

I just know this is going to be an on-going saga. I picked up a Netra A1000/D1000 array cabinet (sans drives) the other day. Originally the plan was to attach it to one of the E220R's at home and fill it with the biggest disks I can get my hands on.

For those who came in late, the difference between the A1000 and D1000 is that the "A" has an inbuilt RAID controller which needs to be configured over the SCSI channel. This seemed like a great score at first, since the "D" is a JBOD enclosure only.

Problem 1
The battery is dead. It's a 2V 5000mA/h SLA (Sealed-Lead-Acid) cell, but there's not brains in it at all.

I pulled it out, and using 6 2000mA/h AA-Sized NiMH cells, I made a replacement that fitted inside the canister. It's 2.4V; but this doesn't seem to cause any drama so far.

Problem 2
As soon as I plug the cabinet into the SCSI port on the E220R, the "Controller Fault" LED on the cabinet comes on.

A bit of digging around shows me that the port on the E220R is LVD (Low-voltage differential) SCSI, while the cabinet is "old-school". I'm going to need another controller for this machine, but it's a Sunday.

Plan B is to attach it to the UE2 I have on hand. No errors now, and I see devices under /dev/dsk/c2... ; so this is looking more promising. Unfortunately all the tools need a GUI, and this is a machine without a frame buffer card. I need to throw together a client now. Sigh...

SunPCI on Solaris 10

Sun say it won't work, and I guess it's not supported. But anyway, so far so good.

Host: SunBlade 100/512MB RAM

1. Download the SUNWspci_1.3.tar.Z package from sun.com


2. Install it with pkgadd and ignore the OBP error. Of course it helps to have OBP up to date anyway.


3. Go to /opt/SUNWspci/drivers/solaris and link sunpcidrv.280 to sunpcidrv.2100 ditto the "64" files


4. Install the drivers with the sunpcload utility in the drivers directory.


5. Boot the SunPCI card with /opt/SUNWspci/bin/sunpci &


6. Install the O/S of your choice!