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!

Well the entry is done...

I know I haven't updated this for a while, but for once I actually managed to send my contest entry in early! The contest doesn't close for 6 days, and I'm done.

Cool!

OK, so I know what to make

I want to make an autonomous vehicle of some kind. Something that can navigate to a predetermined location and deal with what it finds along the way.

Now... what kind of vehicle?

The apps get more complex

Did I mention I like being able to Code in C on a microcontroller?

I do! and I have to add that so far the Luminary Micro driver library is making it easy for me. Only simple stuff for now, flash the onboard LED, increment a value on the OLED display and so on, but it's a start...

My first simple "hello world" app runs on the EK38S11.

I like the little OLED Display, need to work out how to drive the graphics on it, as it could be quite useful for a mobile platform.

A new competition entry

At the moment I am still looking for a suitable project, but I have received from Luminary Micro (http://www.luminarymicro.com) one of their LM38S11 evaluation kits, and it seems pretty schmick.

Except that when I try to install the drivers for the USB interface, it barfs on Device B with "not suitable for this operating system version"

But seriously, this thing is an embedded ARM processor with plenty of memory and I/O. Maybe I should finally build that robot...

gvinum musings

Over the weekend I decided that I needed more space on my development system.

I have a "spare" Compaq disc chassis and 9 x 18.2GB Drives in it. Now, I needed more than 18.2GB of space, because I want to host both 5.x and 6.x source trees for FreeBSD, as well as some sundry Net/BSD trees AND my own projects. If only I had a spare PCI RAID controller.

But I didn't, and I'd read about vinum on FreeBSD for a while now. This looks like a good time to give it a try.

Unfortunately, I don't think the handbook is all the clear. www.vinumvm.org is your friend here, because it has some more thought out examples.

Secondly, FreeBSD has support for both Vinum and GVinum (geom vinum). Some more knowledgable person can no doubt tell me they are based in the same place, but I found that no matter what I did with vinum the disk configurations would not be readable after a reboot. gvinum on the other hand, was... Looks like gvinum is the way to go.

There's another catch... Nowhere in the handbook did it really make clear what to put in the disklabel information. Originally I had them raw (it worked, but corrupted the hell out of itself on reboot), "4.2BSD" (didn't recognise the disk when I ran fsck)

I stumbled across another entry somewhere that said "make sure you mark them as "vinum". Eureka! 127GB of RAID5 storage is online and serving away under NFS.

Thus far, performance is very acceptable with the small number of clients I have hitting it.

Project Update

I realised that I didn't have a good way of measuring road speed. So I had to rearrange some of the I/O components.

Now, Timer1 (8-bit) is being used for Road Speed counting as the Mega16 gives me an external clock.

I'll use Timer0 with a crystal to provide me a timebase. It also gives me a regular interrupt which I can use for scheduling.

Timer2 is the PWM output.

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Also I created a workshop board for some basic testing. This will be constructed in the next few days I hope.