[rescue] advice on rescuing an e10k

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

Hi folks,

I've recently been offered a working E10K for Aurora (Fedora Linux on
SPARC) at no charge, but the catch is that I have to either get it or
get it delivered. They quoted out a delivery charge of ~$3200.00 US.
While this is probably a pretty decent bargain for a functional E10K,
its a LOT of money for Aurora, which isn't even a non-profit, and would
have to solicit the funds from donations.

I was considering renting a truck and trying to get it myself, but I
have no experience doing this. Does anyone have any advice to offer
here?

~spot
--
Tom "spot" Callaway || Red Hat || Fedora || Aurora || GPG ID: 93054260

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always
that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence
and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We
will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in
our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended
from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to
associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
-- Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
Hi folks,
I've recently been offered a working E10K for Aurora (Fedora Linux on
SPARC) at no charge, but the catch is that I have to either get it or
get it delivered. They quoted out a delivery charge of ~$3200.00 US.
While this is probably a pretty decent bargain for a functional E10K,
its a LOT of money for Aurora, which isn't even a non-profit, and
would have to solicit the funds from donations.
I was considering renting a truck and trying to get it myself, but I
have no experience doing this. Does anyone have any advice to offer
here?

The system weighs about 2000 lbs, and is a nice 3'x3' cube
(approximately). It's important to know if you'll be moving it from
somewhere with a loading dock to somewhere else with a loading dock, or
if you'll need a lift-gate.

I'd suggest that if you do go with a lift gate, get a 24' Budget truck
(I hear that Penske is good too, but I haven't used them, and they
might not be in your area). Skip Uhaul because their service sucks,
and their trucks aren't any better.

Bring at least 1 other person (preferably 2) to help you move the
machine, and be careful of cracks that the casters may get stuck in.
When you load it into the truck, make sure you strap it in securely
with multiple tie-down straps, AND secure the wheels with leveling feet
if possible... if not, wedge some lumber under the rack to lift it up
off the wheels, so it won't roll around. Nylon strapping stretches,
and unless you take the wheels out of the picture, the machine will
still roll around no matter how tight you make the strapping.

I'd also suggest that you (carefully!) remove all of the system boards
and disks from the machine before you transport it. If you hit a good
bump while you're moving it, it's possible you'll end up damaging the
midplane on the system, which will really ruin your day. Pulling out
disks and power supplies is probably also a good idea. Make sure that
you have plenty of boxes and anti-static foam/bubble wrap/bags to put
the system boards and disks in. The system will be much lighter after
you remove all of that, and will be a lot easier to handle (and safer
to use with the lift gate if you have to!).

If you're using a lift gate on the truck, tie some strapping (semi-loose
is ok) around the E10k and anchored to the truck, to keep the system
from rolling off of the lift-gate while you're moving it up or down.
Not all lift gates move in a manner that keeps them parallel to the
ground while they're raising or lowering... losing the machine off the
back of a lift-gate is a good way to ruin your day (or even your
life!). Being carefuly and respecting all of those 2000lbs will
definately be worth it in the end!

Pat
(the guy that moves 2000lb IBM SP gear for "fun" :)

[Phil Stracchino]

Post by Patrick Finnegan
I'd suggest that if you do go with a lift gate, get a 24' Budget truck
(I hear that Penske is good too, but I haven't used them, and they
might not be in your area). Skip Uhaul because their service sucks,
and their trucks aren't any better.

I find myself completely unable to recommend Budget. At least U-Haul
has never charged me when one of their trucks has broken down.

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Phil Stracchino
I find myself completely unable to recommend Budget. At least U-Haul
has never charged me when one of their trucks has broken down.

If you go to Penske as a business, you get cheap rates and good service.
I don't think it was so good as a person....

I'd suggest approaching them as a business.

I rented a 18' truck to move the 4 x J932SE systems.... Good deal IMHO.
Virginia Beach to Pittsburgh and Back... she was loaded tho.

[Joshua Boyd]

Post by Ethan O'Toole
If you go to Penske as a business, you get cheap rates and good service.
I don't think it was so good as a person....
I'd suggest approaching them as a business.

So, do they check if it is a real business or not?

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Joshua Boyd
So, do they check if it is a real business or not?

I think I just told them a company name and address. They added it to a
database and I received mailings. I can't remember having to provide
anything, at worst it would be a tax ID (Use your SS#).... but I'm pretty
sure they didn't. They wanted to know what I was moving.... "Computers"
and proceeded to talk to me about a problem with a computer at home.

I've used Budget this way too... it's how you get access to the trucks
that are dock height and/or have liftgates.

The home trucks suck so much in comparison.

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Phil Stracchino

Post by Patrick Finnegan
I'd suggest that if you do go with a lift gate, get a 24' Budget
truck (I hear that Penske is good too, but I haven't used them, and
they might not be in your area). Skip Uhaul because their service
sucks, and their trucks aren't any better.

I find myself completely unable to recommend Budget. At least U-Haul
has never charged me when one of their trucks has broken down.

The problems I've had with Uhaul have been them sending me to a location
that doesn't have what I rented, sending me somewhere that was closed
on the day of the week (Monday!) that I rented the truck, and refusing
to rent me a trailer.

I haven't used Budget too much, but they've got better equipment
(lift-gates and dock-height trucks), and haven't been unreasonable
about anything. And, they always seem to be open and have the
equipment I asked for when I end up at their store with a rental
receipt...

Not being able to get the rental truck (or trailer) is a whole lot more
annoying than having to spend a few more $$$ to get the job done, IMO.

Pat

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

Post by Patrick Finnegan

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
Hi folks,
I've recently been offered a working E10K for Aurora (Fedora Linux on
SPARC) at no charge, but the catch is that I have to either get it or
get it delivered. They quoted out a delivery charge of ~$3200.00 US.
While this is probably a pretty decent bargain for a functional E10K,
its a LOT of money for Aurora, which isn't even a non-profit, and
would have to solicit the funds from donations.
I was considering renting a truck and trying to get it myself, but I
have no experience doing this. Does anyone have any advice to offer
here?

The system weighs about 2000 lbs, and is a nice 3'x3' cube
(approximately). It's important to know if you'll be moving it from
somewhere with a loading dock to somewhere else with a loading dock, or
if you'll need a lift-gate.

We'd be taking it from loading dock to loading dock.

Post by Patrick Finnegan
I'd suggest that if you do go with a lift gate, get a 24' Budget truck
(I hear that Penske is good too, but I haven't used them, and they
might not be in your area). Skip Uhaul because their service sucks,
and their trucks aren't any better.

Any idea how much the Budget truck costs? Just looking for a round
estimate. Does a lift-gate make things easier for a loading dock, or is
it irrelevant in that usage case?

Thanks,

~spot
--
Tom "spot" Callaway || Red Hat || Fedora || Aurora || GPG ID: 93054260

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always
that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence
and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We
will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in
our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended
from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to
associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
-- Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

[Ahmed Ewing]

A slightly different aspect of E10K rescue advice:

Whatever you do, for the sake of the non-profit effort, *MAKE ABSOLUTELY
CERTAIN* that the donor is also agreeing to transfer the E10K license keys
with the physical hardware. Without the keys you will be unable to create
the virtual NVRAM files and thus be unable to create any domains.

In other words, you'll be spending thousands to transport a large, loud,
power-hungry boat anchor/paperweight. :)

All domain configuration including NVRAM information is stored on the SSP
workstation(s) if a domain is already configured on the frame... but even if
they are donating you the SSP(s) too, there's never a guarantee that the
disks will survive the transport trip. Get the license keys (a very long
hexadecimal string) in writing from the donor, or be prepared to go back to
Sun, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars the first time you need to
create/recreate a domain.

Hope that helps...

-A

[Andrew Gaylard]

Post by Ahmed Ewing
Whatever you do, for the sake of the non-profit effort, *MAKE ABSOLUTELY
CERTAIN* that the donor is also agreeing to transfer the E10K license keys
with the physical hardware. Without the keys you will be unable to create
the virtual NVRAM files and thus be unable to create any domains.
In other words, you'll be spending thousands to transport a large, loud,
power-hungry boat anchor/paperweight. :)
All domain configuration including NVRAM information is stored on the SSP
workstation(s) if a domain is already configured on the frame... but even if
they are donating you the SSP(s) too, there's never a guarantee that the
disks will survive the transport trip. Get the license keys (a very long
hexadecimal string) in writing from the donor, or be prepared to go back to
Sun, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars the first time you need to
create/recreate a domain.

Does this apply to the E6800 too?

I've been offered one for free, but again, the costs of transportation are
considerable...

If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it instead of
Solaris.


Andrew.

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Andrew Gaylard

Post by Ahmed Ewing
All domain configuration including NVRAM information is stored on
the SSP workstation(s) if a domain is already configured on the
frame... but even if
they are donating you the SSP(s) too, there's never a guarantee
that the disks will survive the transport trip. Get the license
keys (a very long hexadecimal string) in writing from the donor, or
be prepared to go back to
Sun, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars the first time you need to
create/recreate a domain.

Does this apply to the E6800 too?

Do you mean an F6800 or an E6500? In any case, they're completely
different from the E10k, and don't use an (external) SSP. The E6500
works pretty much like any other sun workstation/server (just with a
lot more processor slots). You can actually run it off a 15A 120V
circuit, outside of its rack enclosure. I've done it before. :) Just
make sure it's not fully loaded, and you don't have anything else on
the circuit at the same time...

The F6800 supports some domains (2 or 4 maybe?), but is an awful machine
to try and keep running (or at least the ones we have at work are), and
eats up LOTS of juice. It uses 4 x 208/240V 30A circuits (which are
actually 2:1 redundant, you only need 2 circuits). One of the 5 we've
got seem to always throw a processor board when they are powered off
and back on... the processor isn't actually bad, it just gets disabled
by the firmware, which requires a support call (and a magic string
typed by the Sun support tech) to fix. Our senior hardware guy managed
to wrangle it out of Sun because of the number of problems we've had...
I'm not sure if it varies by machine (based on serial number) or if
it's the same for everything.... I guess in the case of failures,
they're about as reliable as E10k's are. :)

Post by Andrew Gaylard
I've been offered one for free, but again, the costs of
transportation are considerable...

You can probably get shipping costs lowered quite a bit if you have them
ship it to you without the rack... just make sure that they ship you
the key switch module (in the rack) and cable that connects from the
system to the keyswitch with the system. Otherwise, it'll be a bit
hard to turn it on. :)

Post by Andrew Gaylard
If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it instead
of Solaris.

I've done that before. It was my Linux first box with 22-24 processors
and about the same GB of RAM. :) I don't remember any specific
problems with running Linux on it, I think it worked properly

Pat

[Andrew Gaylard]

Post by Patrick Finnegan

Post by Andrew Gaylard

Post by Ahmed Ewing
All domain configuration including NVRAM information is stored on
the SSP workstation(s) if a domain is already configured on the
frame... but even if
they are donating you the SSP(s) too, there's never a guarantee
that the disks will survive the transport trip. Get the license
keys (a very long hexadecimal string) in writing from the donor, or
be prepared to go back to
Sun, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars the first time you need to
create/recreate a domain.

Does this apply to the E6800 too?

Do you mean an F6800 or an E6500?

I'm pretty sure it's one of these:
http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/sunfire6800/index.xml

Post by Patrick Finnegan
I've been offered one for free, but again, the costs of

Post by Andrew Gaylard
transportation are considerable...

You can probably get shipping costs lowered quite a bit if you have them
ship it to you without the rack... just make sure that they ship you
the key switch module (in the rack) and cable that connects from the
system to the keyswitch with the system. Otherwise, it'll be a bit
hard to turn it on. :)

Oddly enough, the reason they're getting rid of it is that the racks "don't
match the corporate colour scheme". (Really.) So I get it it provided I
take the racks too. Not that I'm complaining...

Post by Patrick Finnegan
If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it instead

Post by Andrew Gaylard
of Solaris.

I've done that before. It was my Linux first box with 22-24 processors
and about the same GB of RAM. :) I don't remember any specific
problems with running Linux on it, I think it worked properly

Excellent! Thanks, Pat, for all these tips.

Andrew.

[Ahmed Ewing]

Post by Ahmed Ewing

Post by Ahmed Ewing
Whatever you do, for the sake of the non-profit effort, *MAKE ABSOLUTELY
CERTAIN* that the donor is also agreeing to transfer the E10K license

keys

Post by Ahmed Ewing
with the physical hardware. Without the keys you will be unable to

create

Post by Ahmed Ewing
the virtual NVRAM files and thus be unable to create any domains.
In other words, you'll be spending thousands to transport a large, loud,
power-hungry boat anchor/paperweight. :)
All domain configuration including NVRAM information is stored on the

SSP

Post by Ahmed Ewing
workstation(s) if a domain is already configured on the frame... but

even

Post by Ahmed Ewing
if
they are donating you the SSP(s) too, there's never a guarantee that the
disks will survive the transport trip. Get the license keys (a very long
hexadecimal string) in writing from the donor, or be prepared to go back to
Sun, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars the first time you need to
create/recreate a domain.

Does this apply to the E6800 too?

No. F6800s have their system controllers built into the frame and do not
require additional licensing schemes for domain creation. An F6800 supports
up to four domains, IIRC (A/B/C/D).

I've been offered one for free, but again, the costs of transportation are

Post by Ahmed Ewing
considerable...
If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it instead of
Solaris.

Domains still need to be created regardless of the OS you intend to run,
even if it's a single domain that encompasses all hardware in the frame...
Linux vs Solaris has no bearing on this matter. Also, in case you were
curious, you have no choice on what to use for the control hardware: SSP
workstations must be running Solaris because the SSP software package is
only available for Solaris, and SunFire SCs run a custom embedded RTOS.

-A

[Andrew Weiss]

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Does this apply to the E6800 too?
I've been offered one for free, but again, the costs of
transportation are
considerable...
If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it
instead of
Solaris.

Why would you run Linux on big Sun iron that is current? You can't
get anywhere near the maximum use of that hardware nor can you get
the scalability. I'd understand if it was Sun4d which is no longer
supported by Sun, but the 6800 is a baby in those terms. Running
Linux on any of the large Sunfires 6xxx, 10xxx, 15K, etc. would be
like buying a BMW 725i. (Yes they did exist in Europe). Giant
car... undersized engine.

Andrew

[Andrew Gaylard]

Post by Andrew Weiss

Post by Andrew Gaylard
If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it instead of
Solaris.

Why would you run Linux on big Sun iron that is current? You can't
get anywhere near the maximum use of that hardware nor can you get
the scalability.

Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?
And what in particular makes it faster? (A better kernel? Better
compiler? Something else?) I'm not disputing this, I'm just curious
to know.

If Solaris really is, say, 10%+ faster than Linux, then I'd happily use it.
I was planning to use Gentoo Linux; I've found that compiling for a
particular
CPU does give a noticible speed improvement over vanilla distributions.
This is of course most obvious on register-starved arches like i386 -> P4,
but does also help (though not as much) on SPARC, HPPA, and Alpha.

My main reason for using Linux is that the app I need isn't ported to
Solaris, and when I tried to do the port myself, it wasn't simple.
For instance, Solaris doesn't have
fnctl( fd, O_ASYNC, ...)

Andrew.

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?

Well, first off, Linux doesn't support that hardware.

In general, open source support of large Sun hardware is a dicey
prospect because they system's don't look like typical workstation
hardware. Instead of a processor-to-memory bus multiplexed by a
"north bridge" and a processot-to-I/O bus multiplexed by a "south
bridge" and a system controller to manage cache coherency, you tend to
hvae a far more complicated system when you get past 4 CPUs or 2 CPU
boards in RISC hardware.

E-series Suns (and, I would presume, Sun Fire servers) look more like a
cluster running in lock-step with a shared clock. Linux doesn't support
many systems with an architecture that looks like this (large-ish AXP
and IA64 systems excepted).

Post by Andrew Gaylard
And what in particular makes it faster? (A better kernel? Better
compiler? Something else?) I'm not disputing this, I'm just curious
to know.

Well, Sun's compiler beats GCC in terms of both code size and code
efficiency. I would assume GCC has gotten a little better, but it used
to be that you could look at the assembly output of GCC and laugh at
things like loading dummy values in to registers just before stomping
them with real values, unnecessary NOPs in the branch-delay slot, and
immediate value loads that were obviously generic rather than optimised.

A lot of what "faster" means depends on your point of view. Solaris is
"fast" on large Sun hardware not because any one task runs faster, but
because the SunOS scheduler is optimised for Very Large hardware (much
the same reason Solaris is so much slower than Linux on tiny SPARC
systems). Solaris can get more done at once than Linux above a certain
hardware threshold (that used to be nearly any 4-way SMP system)

Post by Andrew Gaylard
If Solaris really is, say, 10%+ faster than Linux, then I'd happily use it.

It all depends on how you measure it. Will a Solaris system support
10% more threads doing the same workload as on Linux, possibly. Will
any given process run 10% faster? Probably not.

There are other options to consider, too. Large systems (Sun, IBM, HP,
etc.) tend to have embedded management hardware (thermal, partitioning,
lights-out management, hot-swap, and component failover) that are very
frequently only working with the vendor's operating system. If you're
going to run large RISC hardware in such an environment that you lose
all the management features that come with the hardware premium, you'd
be better off running a large fast PC, since that's essentially what
you'll get.

Post by Andrew Gaylard
I was planning to use Gentoo Linux; I've found that compiling for a
particular CPU does give a noticible speed improvement over vanilla
distributions.

I've found that any such benefits are largely outweighed by the
inefficient code that runs on so many Unix and Linux systems today. No
matter how many nanoseconds the compiler trims off a function by
unrolling a loop a few notches, the system still ends up waiting for
things like Mozilla and its runtime-interpreted XUL user-interface,
GNOME/GTK and their propensity for redrawing widgets whenever they want,
and the other mountains of crap we run to slow down our blazing fast
hardware. As the man from SGI once said:

"Do you want to be a bloat detective? It's easy; just pick any
executable. There! You found some!"

That applies more to the modern Unix system than it -ever- applied to
IRIX 5.0.

Post by Andrew Gaylard
My main reason for using Linux is that the app I need isn't ported to
Solaris, and when I tried to do the port myself, it wasn't simple.
For instance, Solaris doesn't have
fnctl( fd, O_ASYNC, ...)

Well, yes. The man page on Linux says:

The use of O_ASYNC, F_GETOWN, F_SETOWN is specific to BSD and Linux.

Hence, they should not be used in portable code. select() or a blocking
background thread would be a more portable solution.

[Andrew Weiss]

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?

Well, first off, Linux doesn't support that hardware.
In general, open source support of large Sun hardware is a dicey
prospect because they system's don't look like typical workstation
hardware. ...

Eloquently said. This is far better than I could ever answer. For
me I was thinking merely of the management and features access.

Andrew

[Andrew Gaylard]

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
E-series Suns (and, I would presume, Sun Fire servers) look more like a
cluster running in lock-step with a shared clock. Linux doesn't support
many systems with an architecture that looks like this (large-ish AXP
and IA64 systems excepted).

[snip]

There are other options to consider, too. Large systems (Sun, IBM, HP,

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
etc.) tend to have embedded management hardware (thermal, partitioning,
lights-out management, hot-swap, and component failover) that are very
frequently only working with the vendor's operating system. If you're
going to run large RISC hardware in such an environment that you lose
all the management features that come with the hardware premium, you'd
be better off running a large fast PC, since that's essentially what
you'll get.

[snip]

Thanks for your detailed explanations, you've pretty much convinced me.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
My main reason for using Linux is that the app I need isn't ported to

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Solaris, and when I tried to do the port myself, it wasn't simple.
For instance, Solaris doesn't have
fnctl( fd, O_ASYNC, ...)

The use of O_ASYNC, F_GETOWN, F_SETOWN is specific to BSD and Linux.
Hence, they should not be used in portable code. select() or a blocking
background thread would be a more portable solution.

I know, I know, but this is the world we live in... :-( More & more code is
being written
for a certain OS on a certain CPU family. No names mentioned.


Andrew

[Michael Parson]

<snip>

Post by Andrew Gaylard
My main reason for using Linux is that the app I need isn't ported to

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Solaris, and when I tried to do the port myself, it wasn't simple.
For instance, Solaris doesn't have
fnctl( fd, O_ASYNC, ...)

The use of O_ASYNC, F_GETOWN, F_SETOWN is specific to BSD and Linux.
Hence, they should not be used in portable code. select() or a blocking
background thread would be a more portable solution.

I know, I know, but this is the world we live in... :-( More & more
code is being written for a certain OS on a certain CPU family. No
names mentioned.

Yes, but not the first time in computing history this was how it was.
10 years ago, it was all written for a different OS on a different CPU
family. Doesn't stop it from being highly annoying.

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2006 08:54:33 -0500

Post by Michael Parson
Yes, but not the first time in computing history this was how it was.
10 years ago, it was all written for a different OS on a different CPU
family. Doesn't stop it from being highly annoying.

True... and a lot of what is in BSD and Linux is there for pragmatic
reasons, and much of it was driven by what was found in SunOS and
Solaris. In fact, some of the most incompatible things in them
originally came out of Sun and ancient UNIX and was done to support
software written for Sun and ancient UNIX.

How the world goes round...

[Mike Meredith]

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?

Well, first off, Linux doesn't support that hardware.

Which of course is a reason (for a certain kind of person) for getting
Linux onto such a system ... not only is it somewhat useful in itself,
but is quite often useful in throwing up new problems with Linux that
haven't been noticed on other large systems than Linux runs on.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
In general, open source support of large Sun hardware is a dicey

^^^^^^^^^^^

I don't think the problem is limited to open source. It took Sun a long
time to make Solaris as scalable as it is ... it is a pretty hard
problem.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke

Post by Andrew Gaylard
And what in particular makes it faster? (A better kernel? Better
compiler? Something else?) I'm not disputing this, I'm just
curious to know.

Well, Sun's compiler beats GCC in terms of both code size and code

Ignoring the compiler issue, you will probably find Linux is faster in
some areas and Solaris faster in others.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
SPARC systems). Solaris can get more done at once than Linux above a
certain hardware threshold (that used to be nearly any 4-way SMP
system)

I'm pretty sure that Linux scales quite a bit better that 4-way ...
assuming it understands the underlying architecture. On the Fire series,
it is advantageous to keep processes within a CPU board when possible,
if Linux doesn't understand that it will run a fair bit slower.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
There are other options to consider, too. Large systems (Sun, IBM,
HP, etc.) tend to have embedded management hardware (thermal,
partitioning, lights-out management, hot-swap, and component failover)
that are very frequently only working with the vendor's operating

In principle that's right, however on the Fire systems most of that is
handled by the system controller(s). You'll loose hot-swap and some
component failover (power for instance would be handled by the SC).

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke

Post by Andrew Gaylard
I was planning to use Gentoo Linux; I've found that compiling for a
particular CPU does give a noticible speed improvement over vanilla
distributions.

I've found that any such benefits are largely outweighed by the
inefficient code that runs on so many Unix and Linux systems today.

Indeed. Too many people are inclined to throw hardware at a performance
problem rather than fix the problem.

You'll also find that Solaris does quite a bit of CPU optimisation by
stealth :-

% ldd /usr/bin/ls
...
/platform/SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000/lib/libc_psr.so.1

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:22:15 +0100

Post by Mike Meredith

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?

Well, first off, Linux doesn't support that hardware.

Which of course is a reason (for a certain kind of person) for getting
Linux onto such a system ... not only is it somewhat useful in itself,
but is quite often useful in throwing up new problems with Linux that
haven't been noticed on other large systems than Linux runs on.

Something else to think about is that Johathan's (and other's)
information on Linux is quite outdated.

Linux has not been PC-centric for almost 3 years now.

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:12:47 -0500 (CDT)

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke

Post by Andrew Gaylard
Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?

Well, first off, Linux doesn't support that hardware.

No, but kernel 2.6 laid the foundation for it.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
In general, open source support of large Sun hardware is a dicey
prospect because they system's don't look like typical workstation
hardware. Instead of a processor-to-memory bus multiplexed by a
"north bridge" and a processot-to-I/O bus multiplexed by a "south
bridge" and a system controller to manage cache coherency, you tend to
hvae a far more complicated system when you get past 4 CPUs or 2 CPU
boards in RISC hardware.

Your information is quite outdated.

Yes, Solaris will run better on high end hardware, but Linux isn't as
bad as it used to be either.

Keep in mind that Solaris has never been known as a speed demon and
only recently has been able to scale really large. It's a really hard
problem to solve with UNIX because UNIX was created mostly for small
systems.

Linux has not been workstation/PC-centric for almost 3 years now. In
kernel 2.5 they moved to a sub-architecture organization.

Linux 2.6 was focused on big improvements on big iron systems. Earlier
Linux performance, especially I/O and the scheduler were terrible on
large systems, especially as the number of processes or threads got
really high.

Linux now has an O(1) scheduler, preemptable kernel, new I/O subsystem,
greatly reduced latency in scheduling, task switching, and systems
calls, and in general scales far better.

Linux even has NUMA support now, and some cluster foundations are in.

2.6 is really just the first foundation step to bigger things. It was
a painful but necessary rewrite of much of 2.4's code base to make way
for needed changes.

Just for example, Linux is the OS for the Cray XD1 supercomputer,
supporting 144 CPUs in a clustered architecture layered on top of
Infiniband and HyperTransport.

It's certainly not limited to northbridge PC systems for good
performance.

Perhaps more exciting for the future, 2.6 has laid the basic
foundations for moving to "single-instance-on-cluster" operation. Not
only will this be faster than the high-overhead clusters we have now,
but it should make it a lot easier to manage them.

Think of how Irix runs on Origin, and that's where Linux is headed.

I keep hoping that BSD will get pushed like that too, but Linux is
sucking up all the attention. NetBSD is languishing, OpenBSD really
doesn't care, and FreeBSD only recently came out of the 5.x dark ages.

FreeBSD 6.1, warts and all, does seem to be a good performer, though
I've never had the opportunity to use it on a big system, and don't
know if it has any support at all for non-PC (ish) architectures.
Haven't paid attention.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
E-series Suns (and, I would presume, Sun Fire servers) look more like
a cluster running in lock-step with a shared clock. Linux doesn't
support many systems with an architecture that looks like this
(large-ish AXP and IA64 systems excepted).

True, but most of that is handled by system hardware, not the OS.

Solaris was also not originally designed for a clustered system.

In fact, UNIX in general was never designed for big iron, and for many
years fundamental design issues have kept it from running as well as
some of the old legacy OS on large systems.

That's changing though, so I suppose it eventually won't matter. UNIX
keeps changing rather than admit defeat.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
Well, Sun's compiler beats GCC in terms of both code size and code
efficiency.

gcc isn't too good on any non-x86 CPU.

I wonder what impact Apple moving to Intel will have on gcc? For awhile
they were helping non-Intel code generation.

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
A lot of what "faster" means depends on your point of view. Solaris
is "fast" on large Sun hardware not because any one task runs faster,
but because the SunOS scheduler is optimised for Very Large hardware
(much the same reason Solaris is so much slower than Linux on tiny
SPARC systems). Solaris can get more done at once than Linux above a
certain hardware threshold (that used to be nearly any 4-way SMP
system)

Well, now it is nearly any 144 CPU supercomputer... :)

[Andrew Weiss]

On Oct 24, 2006, at 4:25 PM, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
...

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
Just for example, Linux is the OS for the Cray XD1 supercomputer,
supporting 144 CPUs in a clustered architecture layered on top of
Infiniband and HyperTransport.

This doesn't count at all. This is basically a fancy Beowulf cluster
in a few cabinets... the XD1 is an Opteron box which for arch
compatibility is x86.

If you were talking about either the Cray XT3 or X1E (UNICOS/mp
UNICOS/lc) then you'd have something.

Andrew

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Andrew Weiss
This doesn't count at all. This is basically a fancy Beowulf cluster
in a few cabinets... the XD1 is an Opteron box which for arch
compatibility is x86.
If you were talking about either the Cray XT3 or X1E (UNICOS/mp
UNICOS/lc) then you'd have something.
Andrew

SGI ALTIX

Single Image, Linux... but they cluster them too.

[Andrew Weiss]

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Andrew Weiss
This doesn't count at all. This is basically a fancy Beowulf cluster
in a few cabinets... the XD1 is an Opteron box which for arch
compatibility is x86.
If you were talking about either the Cray XT3 or X1E (UNICOS/mp
UNICOS/lc) then you'd have something.
Andrew

SGI ALTIX
Single Image, Linux... but they cluster them too.

I believe that fits into the category of the Alpha/Itanium group that
was an exception to the rule.

Andrew

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Post by Andrew Weiss

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Andrew Weiss
This doesn't count at all. This is basically a fancy Beowulf cluster
in a few cabinets... the XD1 is an Opteron box which for arch
compatibility is x86.
If you were talking about either the Cray XT3 or X1E (UNICOS/mp
UNICOS/lc) then you'd have something.
Andrew

SGI ALTIX
Single Image, Linux... but they cluster them too.

I believe that fits into the category of the Alpha/Itanium group that
was an exception to the rule.

How about the IBM Blue Gene/L?

Peace... Sridhar

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Sridhar Ayengar

Post by Andrew Weiss

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Andrew Weiss
This doesn't count at all. This is basically a fancy Beowulf
cluster in a few cabinets... the XD1 is an Opteron box which for
arch compatibility is x86.
If you were talking about either the Cray XT3 or X1E (UNICOS/mp
UNICOS/lc) then you'd have something.
Andrew

SGI ALTIX
Single Image, Linux... but they cluster them too.

I believe that fits into the category of the Alpha/Itanium group
that was an exception to the rule.

How about the IBM Blue Gene/L?

A BG/L is a cluster of dual proc PPC machines with way too little memory
per processor (512MB/processor pair IIRC), and a few (3 if memory serves
correctly) different interconnect networks sticking the nodes together.
It's not really a single-system-image architecure, at all.

Neat, but hard to use, and not a good match for many HPC applications.
Except for linpack, of course, which I'm convinced is what IBM really
built it for.

However, the fact that they can shove over 1000 processors in a single
CPU rack is pretty cool.

Pat

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Post by Patrick Finnegan
A BG/L is a cluster of dual proc PPC machines with way too little memory
per processor (512MB/processor pair IIRC), and a few (3 if memory serves
correctly) different interconnect networks sticking the nodes together.
It's not really a single-system-image architecure, at all.

That's what the Linux 2.6 kernel is supposed to bring.

There *are* some single-instance versions, but they are custom hacks.

The idea is to make it a supported sub architecture so it can be made
routine.

Some people believe there is no reason for creating a single-instance of
any OS, and that it is better to have an OS per machine.

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
That's what the Linux 2.6 kernel is supposed to bring.
There *are* some single-instance versions, but they are custom hacks.
The idea is to make it a supported sub architecture so it can be made
routine.
Some people believe there is no reason for creating a single-instance of
any OS, and that it is better to have an OS per machine.

The real question is... did the dude get the e10K home? If so, where are
the pics?

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
That's what the Linux 2.6 kernel is supposed to bring.
There *are* some single-instance versions, but they are custom hacks.
The idea is to make it a supported sub architecture so it can be made
routine.
Some people believe there is no reason for creating a single-instance of
any OS, and that it is better to have an OS per machine.

The real question is... did the dude get the e10K home? If so, where are
the pics?

No, I'm still trying to decide whether to try and raise the funds to get
it or not.

~spot
--
Tom "spot" Callaway || Red Hat || Fedora || Aurora || GPG ID: 93054260

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always
that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence
and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We
will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in
our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended
from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to
associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
-- Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
No, I'm still trying to decide whether to try and raise the funds to get
it or not.

How far away is it?

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
No, I'm still trying to decide whether to try and raise the funds to get
it or not.

How far away is it?

Its in Ohio, I'm in Chicago. Total distance, about 310 miles.

I'm just a bit uncomfortable trying to "do it myself" with a rather
large truck, having never driven such a truck before.

I'm also reluctant to try to beg the Aurora community for $3000 to have
it moved by "professionals".

~spot
--
Tom "spot" Callaway || Red Hat || Fedora || Aurora || GPG ID: 93054260

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always
that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence
and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We
will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in
our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended
from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to
associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
-- Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

[Erie Patsellis]

Tom, it shouldn't be that bad, they're not much bigger, footprint wise,
than a pickup.
after the second or third car you sideswipe, you'll get the hang of it ;)


erie

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
No, I'm still trying to decide whether to try and raise the funds to get
it or not.

How far away is it?

Its in Ohio, I'm in Chicago. Total distance, about 310 miles.
I'm just a bit uncomfortable trying to "do it myself" with a rather
large truck, having never driven such a truck before.
I'm also reluctant to try to beg the Aurora community for $3000 to have
it moved by "professionals".
~spot

[Erie Patsellis]

Tom, just had a thought, are there forklifts at both ends?

erie

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
No, I'm still trying to decide whether to try and raise the funds to get
it or not.

How far away is it?

Its in Ohio, I'm in Chicago. Total distance, about 310 miles.
I'm just a bit uncomfortable trying to "do it myself" with a rather
large truck, having never driven such a truck before.
I'm also reluctant to try to beg the Aurora community for $3000 to have
it moved by "professionals".
~spot

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

Post by Erie Patsellis
Tom, just had a thought, are there forklifts at both ends?

Should be, but I can't speak for the donor's dock area.

~spot
--
Tom "spot" Callaway || Red Hat || Fedora || Aurora || GPG ID: 93054260

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always
that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence
and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We
will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in
our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended
from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to
associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
-- Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

[Erie Patsellis]

Tom, IF you can unload boards and drives, and bolt it to a pallet, you
should be able to get an LTL freight broker to get you a rate of less
than $2.00 a mile, especially in Chicagok, as alot of drivers hate
deadheading into chicago. If you cnat' find somebody, I can call a few
friends and see if anyone has space on an air-ride trailer.

erie

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway

Post by Erie Patsellis
Tom, just had a thought, are there forklifts at both ends?

Should be, but I can't speak for the donor's dock area.
~spot

[Mike F]

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
No, I'm still trying to decide whether to try and raise the funds to get
it or not.

How far away is it?

Its in Ohio, I'm in Chicago. Total distance, about 310 miles.
I'm just a bit uncomfortable trying to "do it myself" with a rather
large truck, having never driven such a truck before.

I wouldn't worry about the truck part too much. When I moved across
the state in '95 I went to Ryder and the only truck they had was a
big 23' TopKick. You wouldn't likely need anything that big, but that
truck was actually pretty easy to drive. Of course it only went about
70mph with my foot to the floor...

As others have said, the hard part will be loading and unloading the
E10k. If you can get that part figured out, the driving should be a
piece of cake.

- Mike

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
Its in Ohio, I'm in Chicago. Total distance, about 310 miles.
I'm just a bit uncomfortable trying to "do it myself" with a rather
large truck, having never driven such a truck before.
I'm also reluctant to try to beg the Aurora community for $3000 to have
it moved by "professionals".
~spot

Dude... from experience... I bought a "cray system" from a gov't auction.
It was 4 CPU cabinets, 5 drive cabinets. The weight came out to (estimate)
1000-1400lb for each CPU cabinet, and the drive ones were less. It was in
a data center that was secure. The gate guy greeted us with a machine gun.

I got a few friends to help, and rented a large penske truck. It was an
automatic, and it was EASY to drive! Seriously. One friend wouldn't drive
it, and he is the car enthusiast. The height really helps in vision, and
the mirrors and everything... it wasn't bad. Just BE SURE to do a better
job than we did/I did in securing it. You might be able to nail boards to
the floor of the truck to prevent it from rolling around.

The truck I rented was dock height, and 18' long. My trip was from
Virginia Beach, VA to Pittsburgh, PA!!! Left one morning, got to PA by
eve, got hotel room, went to Bectel next morning, got system (wasn't
terribly hard at this point), then headed out. Lots of issues iwth the
stuff rolling around. That was the only major difficulty.

Then when we got back to Virginia Beach, it was too heavy to get in the
door :-) But once we figured out *how*, it was always easy past then.

This is back in the day:
Loading Image...
Loading Image...

Back door looking into truck:
Loading Image...

My friends have pics of the truck, but I don't seem to have any online.

One thing that they had at the data center that helped, was this "breaker
bar" thing. It's a wooden handle that goes down into a "j" shaped ordeal,
that happens to have wheels. You can slide it under something heavy, lift
it up, and roll it on the bar.

I won't lie to you, the crays were FJWAER*!@#!@#ING heavy as all hell.
There is a J916 system, that is "normal" depth. It has 16 procs, on 4
boards. To make the 932 system, Cray basiaclly made the cabinet 6' deep
(deeper than almost any cabinet I've ever seen) and jammed a 2nd card cage
behind the first. Wala, 32 processors. So I was getting info from a 916
owner about weight an everything... not realizing that the 32 is ... well
heavier.

The good news is, after moving stupidly insanely heavy stuff.... it makes
the Origin 2000s and such feel light.

I sold 3 of the Crays, most of the money went to covering costs storing
the crays and getting them and all of that. But in the end the trip to get
it (which was a very long trip) was less than $1G. I gave friends money
after the sale of the 1st system too, cause they helped me out.

So ... when I sold the 3rd one, there was issues getting the heavy ass
cabinet on the lift gate. So whats the damn shipping company do? "Hold
this, and we will back the truck up under it"

I'm like... IF THIS FALLS, IM GETTING OUT OF THE WAY AND YOU BOUGHT IT!

It didn't fall... I got to work really tired tho :-)

Alot of it comes down to getting familiar with moving the thing. Once you
figure it out, it falls into place and is easier in the future.

Pulling out heavy stuff helps too.

[Ethan O'Toole]

A few more notes to my story:

IT was EASY driving the truck. Automatic, new, nice truck overall. Once
you get back in a car and you can't see clearly over SUV's and pickups,
it's a bummer.

Bring boards, Nail them around the system so it doesn't roll. That was the
difficulty.

Loading it was EASY as pie. The liftgate on the dock height truck was
about 4" higher than the dock... so with the lift gate up all the way,
backed it over the dock just a bit, dropped it... Jbar'ed the thing onto
the liftgate, up, into the truck (my stuff was on wheels, the E10K
probably will be too).

If you would like, I will email a friend and find out how heavy his E10Ks
were :-) He has a few in his collection. Unfortuantely, his are missing
those crypt hashes that allow the domain stuff.

I wouldn't fear it that much. Call the people with the computer and ask
about the height, if a high truck with a lift gate can get the gate over
the dock or what... The place we went, the people there all helped, and
it was all loaded very very rapidly.



--
Ethan O'Toole - 757 Technologies - www.757tech.com
http://www.HRConnect.com - Connecting Hampton Roads
http://www.HRGeeks.com - Forums and event calendar for Hampton Roads
http://www.RockTheSkillCrane.com - The latest completed project

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

Ah, the memories!

In December of 2003, I helped Dave McGuire move house by about 130
miles. Among the things we moved:

* A DEC PDP/11-70
* A Cray J916 w/ two additional cabinets (I/O and disks)
* A couple (maybe three) Cray EL94s.
* Two or three VAX-7000s plus a couple racks of Storageworks kit.
* A few racks full of PDP/8e systems.

The J916 is an impossibly heavy piece of machinery. It was roughly a
half-ton, and the liftgate on the truck Did Not Like That At All,
especially as neither Dave nor I are particularly light, and at least
one of us had to ride up/down with it. It and the 11/70 were the most
stressful pieces of equipment to move. The Cray due to its sheer weight
(never mind the thought of having ruined a Cray if you dropped it), the
11/70 because it was a decdatasystem style machine, vaguely desk-shaped,
hard to get a grab on, and populated with -core-.

I think we did the whole move (all that plus household goods, lab
equipment, and more pedestrian RISC systems and storage hardware) over
the course of three days. I certainly recall it being less than a week.
We had assistance for two trips, but Dave and I did most of it
ourselves. "Grueling" would be a good term.

The only mishap we had was loading one of the 7000s. The end of the
the liftgate was tapered, as per usual, and the truck was parked on a
very slight grade. Dave went up on the liftgate, and I stayed on the
ground to apply force to keep the 7000 upright as the lift went up.
We'd underestimated the grade, and not long after the liftgate
straightened out, the little bastard lept right into my arms.
Thankfully we'd pulled almost all the cards and all the (very heavy)
power supplies.

I caught it, and Dave was fast enough on the switch to lower the gate so
that I didn't topple over, but that was very nearly a brown shorts / red
shirt moment.

So yeah, you can do this sort of thing yourself, but keep your wits
about you. Also, I have no idea how far you can break down an E10k for
transport. If you have to ship the whole thing assembled, I would
suspect it makes a J916 look like a PC. I would suspect that the Sun
site-planning guide describes uncrating and assembling the system, which
would give you a good idea of how far it breaks down.

Speaking of 7000s, I have a pair of DEC-7630s that I've been trying to
be rid of for some amount of time. IIRC each has 512MB memory and more
than enough SCSI / Ethernet / CI to keep most folks happy. I've just
come to the conclusion that I'd rather have my truck in the garage than
a bunch of equipment I never use.

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
In December of 2003, I helped Dave McGuire move house by about 130

I actually visited his Laurel, MD place once. Met a few others as well
(Mike Nicewonger, James Sharp, etc).

Pretty wild environment.

My big issue is space. Our area is bubblelicious, and the real estate is a
pain. The residential rental properties are being pushed up, and the sale
prices are all absolutely nuts. So it will be a few years before it all
unwinds and all of the get rich quick dreams are replaced with adjusting
loan on overpaid for property. The commercial side is a bit weak though.
I just can't wait until I can score something with a garage, or place to
put one. Apartments and large computers don't mix.

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Jonathan C. Patschke
In December of 2003, I helped Dave McGuire move house by about 130

I actually visited his Laurel, MD place once. Met a few others as well
(Mike Nicewonger, James Sharp, etc).

Same here - my wife and I were honeymooning in Baltimore, and MikeN was
cool enough to drive up and get us, and we spent the evening BSing with
he, James, and Dave at Dave's place.

Bill

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:56:03 -0400

Post by Andrew Weiss
...

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
Just for example, Linux is the OS for the Cray XD1 supercomputer,
supporting 144 CPUs in a clustered architecture layered on top of
Infiniband and HyperTransport.

This doesn't count at all. This is basically a fancy Beowulf
cluster in a few cabinets... the XD1 is an Opteron box which for
arch compatibility is x86.

No, it isn't.

The machine might well boot with x86 kernels, but it certainly will not
run properly.

Post by Andrew Weiss
If you were talking about either the Cray XT3 or X1E (UNICOS/mp
UNICOS/lc) then you'd have something.

Not necessary.

Linux kernel 2.6 moved to sub architectures almost three years ago and
has no problems going outside of PC architecture.

It runs on quite a few machines, and runs well, that are nothing like a
PC.

[Andrew Gaylard]

Post by Andrew Weiss

Post by Andrew Gaylard
If it makes any difference, I'd prefer to go with Linux on it instead of
Solaris.

Why would you run Linux on big Sun iron that is current? You can't
get anywhere near the maximum use of that hardware nor can you get
the scalability.

Is Solaris really that much faster on this hardware? And what do
you mean by "maximum use of the hardware" and "scalability"?
And what in particular makes it faster? (A better kernel? Better
compiler? Something else?) I'm not disputing this, I'm just curious
to know.

If Solaris really is, say, 10%+ faster than Linux, then I'd happily use it.
I was planning to use Gentoo Linux; I've found that compiling for a
particular
CPU does give a noticible speed improvement over precompiled Linux
distributions. This is of course most obvious on register-starved arches
like i386 -> P4, but does also help (though not as much) on SPARC,
HPPA, and Alpha.

My main reason for using Linux is that the app I need isn't ported to
Solaris, and when I tried to do the port myself, it wasn't simple.
For instance, Solaris doesn't have
fnctl( fd, O_ASYNC, ...)

Andrew.

[Lionel Peterson]

Date: 2006/10/19 Thu PM 06:44:07 CDT
Subject: Re: [rescue] advice on rescuing an e10k
Whatever you do, for the sake of the non-profit effort, *MAKE ABSOLUTELY
CERTAIN* that the donor is also agreeing to transfer the E10K license keys
with the physical hardware. Without the keys you will be unable to create
the virtual NVRAM files and thus be unable to create any domains.
In other words, you'll be spending thousands to transport a large, loud,
power-hungry boat anchor/paperweight. :)
All domain configuration including NVRAM information is stored on the SSP
workstation(s) if a domain is already configured on the frame... but even if
they are donating you the SSP(s) too, there's never a guarantee that the
disks will survive the transport trip. Get the license keys (a very long
hexadecimal string) in writing from the donor, or be prepared to go back to
Sun, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars the first time you need to
create/recreate a domain.

Off the top of my head, I have a few things to share/reinforce what others said:

- loading dock to loading dock is great, but make sure you can smoothly roll the system from the loading dock to the truck

- I'd remove as much out of the system as possible, if only to make the transport more manageable

- I'm very concerned about how to keep the system in the middle of an otherwise empty truck

- how are you going to sustain the E10K once it arrives? I assume there are very particular infrastructure requirements (A/C, power, etc)...

- what are the locations (from/to) we are talking about? What is the distance? To rent a truck is typically a $1/mile, give or take - not too bad for a local move, but over 500 miles it gets pricey (IMHO) and the original quote may be reasonable (when you add shipping materials, insurance, and other expenses)...

- Is the system palletized, or is the shipper you quoted including packing up the machine in the price quoted?

I hope it does work out, I'd love to help, but I am in NJ, and suspect this is too far away...

Lionel

[Peter Corlett]

On 20 Oct 2006, at 03:50, Lionel Peterson wrote:
[...]

Post by Lionel Peterson
- what are the locations (from/to) we are talking about? What is
the distance? To rent a truck is typically a $1/mile, give or take
- not too bad for a local move, but over 500 miles it gets pricey
(IMHO) and the original quote may be reasonable (when you add
shipping materials, insurance, and other expenses)...

Wow, that's expensive.

Were it the UK, I'd possibly suggest using the likes of Taxi-Vans. I
used them to move house - it was 300 quid and two blokes turned up
with a van, piled my house into it at one end, drove 120 miles, then
filled the flat up at the other. Despite running out of packing boxes
and some stuff travelling loose, nothing broke in transit. Call me
impressed.

I think I'd trust them to move an E10k for me. If I wasn't too fussed
about when it arrived (they'd wait until they had a vanful from other
customers and do a same-day collection and delivery), it'd probably
only set me back about a ton to move it across the UK.

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
I've recently been offered a working E10K for Aurora (Fedora Linux on
SPARC) at no charge, but the catch is that I have to either get it or
get it delivered. They quoted out a delivery charge of ~$3200.00 US.
While this is probably a pretty decent bargain for a functional E10K,
its a LOT of money for Aurora, which isn't even a non-profit, and would
have to solicit the funds from donations.

How many miles? I've shipped two CS6400's to Oregon, one from Texas and
one from Northern Cal, for less than $1k each. Obviously fuel costs have
gone up a bit in the last few years... But $3200 sounds like a
cross-country trip!

You might even ask Sun for assistance, although they may have cooled on
Linux a bit since the Solaris 10 release...

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway
I was considering renting a truck and trying to get it myself, but I
have no experience doing this. Does anyone have any advice to offer
here?

I called SunMOVES - the group at Sun that coordinates these things. That
$3200 sounds like a quote from them. :-) Their group will not only ship
the box - they can (optionally) decommission, pack up, unpack, and then
re-commission the machine at the destination. $3-5K for that service for
what was a multi-$M machine was a great bargain.

Since I was doing this as a hobbyist/collector/rescuer/crazy person, with
my own funds, they gave me the number for North American Van Lines
directly, who they contract with to move big Sun iron. I explained the
situation, and NAVL gave me a phenomenal discount (the second time I
called up I mentioned the "crazy person" discount, and they remembered me
:-), and I got the machines delivered (shipped three SC2000Es and two
CS6400s with them) via padded van with no scratches. Even inside delivery
to a building that required a liftgate truck.

If you've never secured a large heavy item like that, I sure wouldn't want
to risk having your E10k land on its pretty purple face with a great big
thud - potentially damaging the truck, and smashing up your machine... I'd
really recommend calling SunMOVES and see if they'll put you in touch with
the pros. They can give you the weights and specs so that the movers can
give you a reasonable quote, if nothing else.

Good luck! I'm jealous... I'd love to have a Starfire to play with, and
I've stupidly let _three_ from the local area get away in the last year or
so - but I don't *yet* have a space suitable for the older machines, and
couldn't commit myself to buying _another_ huge machine until I had a
place to set it up - having it gather dust in a storage unit seemed silly.
Sigh. Someday... stupid real estate bubble. :-)

-- Chris

[Joshua Boyd]

Post by Skeezics Boondoggle
You might even ask Sun for assistance, although they may have cooled on
Linux a bit since the Solaris 10 release...

Didn't Sun help finance the FreeBSD and Linux ports to niagra?

--
Joshua D. Boyd
***@jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

Post by Joshua Boyd

Post by Skeezics Boondoggle
You might even ask Sun for assistance, although they may have cooled on
Linux a bit since the Solaris 10 release...

Didn't Sun help finance the FreeBSD and Linux ports to niagra?

To some extent, yes. They provided hardware, for which we're all
grateful.

~spot
--
Tom "spot" Callaway || Red Hat || Fedora || Aurora || GPG ID: 93054260

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always
that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence
and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We
will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in
our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended
from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to
associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
-- Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Joshua Boyd
Didn't Sun help finance the FreeBSD and Linux ports to niagra?

Sun has been very liberal with handing out Ultrasparc T1 systems to
the community (see the T1000 they donated to SunHELP, which ships to
the colo facility this weekend...)

Bill

[Kevin Loch]

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Joshua Boyd
Didn't Sun help finance the FreeBSD and Linux ports to niagra?

Sun has been very liberal with handing out Ultrasparc T1 systems to
the community (see the T1000 they donated to SunHELP, which ships to
the colo facility this weekend...)

If only we could get something running on sun4d. NetBSD claims to have
"partial" support but I don't know what further work is required. I have
a 20 proc sc2000 I can bring online (it is getting close to winter) with
serial/network access if anyone wants to work on that. I also have
several ss1000/1000e's if that would help.

- Kevin

[Steve Hatle]

Post by Kevin Loch
If only we could get something running on sun4d. NetBSD claims to have
"partial" support but I don't know what further work is required. I have
a 20 proc sc2000 I can bring online (it is getting close to winter) with
serial/network access if anyone wants to work on that. I also have
several ss1000/1000e's if that would help.

I would like that as well; it's been a low priority want, but I'd like to
know there are some alternatives to earlier Solaris.

I also have SS1000 stuff I'd donate to the cause. I've never made the effort
to find the folks who could use the gear to make it happen. :-(

The SC2000 is sitting in the garage while I ponder how to either get it down
the basement stairs, or con someone into letting me put it at their place...

Steve

[Carl R. Friend]

Post by Phil Stracchino
I find myself completely unable to recommend Budget. At least U-Haul
has never charged me when one of their trucks has broken down.

For what it's worth, the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island
have moved plenty of pretty big iron on Ryder trucks and have had
good luck each and every time. We're talking dock-height trucks
here, and trucks with lift-gates -- which you don't want to be
without if you have more than about an inch of vertical gap at
either end that cannot be made up with dockplate.

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA |
| mailto:***@rcn.com +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+

[Kevin Loch]

Post by Carl R. Friend

Post by Phil Stracchino
I find myself completely unable to recommend Budget. At least U-Haul
has never charged me when one of their trucks has broken down.

For what it's worth, the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island
have moved plenty of pretty big iron on Ryder trucks and have had
good luck each and every time. We're talking dock-height trucks
here, and trucks with lift-gates -- which you don't want to be
without if you have more than about an inch of vertical gap at
either end that cannot be made up with dockplate.

I have also had great luck with Ryder _commercial_ trucks (the white
ones). They also have them with E-track vs the loops that the consumer
trucks have. The rates were very reasonable too. You have to find a
Ryder commercial rental place though, it's a totally separate operation
from the consumer (yellow) places. When I used them they did not have
any problems renting to an individual with a credit card.

- Kevin

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Kevin Loch

Post by Carl R. Friend

Post by Phil Stracchino
I find myself completely unable to recommend Budget. At least
U-Haul has never charged me when one of their trucks has broken
down.

For what it's worth, the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island
have moved plenty of pretty big iron on Ryder trucks and have had
good luck each and every time. We're talking dock-height trucks
here, and trucks with lift-gates -- which you don't want to be
without if you have more than about an inch of vertical gap at
either end that cannot be made up with dockplate.

I have also had great luck with Ryder _commercial_ trucks (the white
ones). They also have them with E-track vs the loops that the
consumer trucks have. The rates were very reasonable too. You have
to find a Ryder commercial rental place though, it's a totally
separate operation from the consumer (yellow) places. When I used
them they did not have any problems renting to an individual with a
credit card.

In case you didn't realize it, Budget bought out (part of) Ryder a few
years ago, and now, Ryder has a lot fewer locations, and only does
Local truck rental now (no more 1-way moves).

Pat

[Lionel Peterson]

Date: 2006/10/23 Mon AM 08:23:50 CDT
Subject: Re: [rescue] advice on rescuing an e10k

<snip>

Running Linux on any of the large Sunfires 6xxx, 10xxx, 15K, etc. would be
like buying a BMW 725i. (Yes they did exist in Europe). Giant
car... undersized engine.

Speaking of european BMWs, I saw a Z1 in Germany last week that had the neatest doors I've seen in a while - the doors slid up/down like an older American station wagon! They were electric, and the "door handle" was a button on the car body...

It was cool - wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Z1

Lionel

[Robert Pasken]

Post by Sridhar Ayengar

Post by Andrew Weiss

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Andrew Weiss
This doesn't count at all. This is basically a fancy Beowulf cluster
in a few cabinets... the XD1 is an Opteron box which for arch
compatibility is x86.
If you were talking about either the Cray XT3 or X1E (UNICOS/mp
UNICOS/lc) then you'd have something.
Andrew

SGI ALTIX
Single Image, Linux... but they cluster them too.

I believe that fits into the category of the Alpha/Itanium group that
was an exception to the rule.

How about the IBM Blue Gene/L?
Peace... Sridhar
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

Linux is certainly a better choice than windows, but Linux is the answer to a
question that nobody asked. There are just too many problems with linux to
trust it to a mission critical app.

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Robert Pasken
Linux is certainly a better choice than windows, but Linux is the
answer to a question that nobody asked. There are just too many
problems with linux to trust it to a mission critical app.

And that's why IBM ported it to their mainframe gear.

Uh huh.

Great, another flame war coming on...

Pat

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Patrick Finnegan
And that's why IBM ported it to their mainframe gear.

Well, they had to prove that even mainframes crash once in a while. 8-)

Post by Patrick Finnegan
Great, another flame war coming on...

Actually I've been looking for some sort of *recent* and up-to-date
tutorial on getting Linux (any distribution that supports it) up and
running under Hercules emulator, just to be a sick puppy. Any suggestions?

Bill

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Post by Bill Bradford
Actually I've been looking for some sort of *recent* and up-to-date
tutorial on getting Linux (any distribution that supports it) up and
running under Hercules emulator, just to be a sick puppy. Any suggestions?

Is it even possible to run Linux under Hercules without VM?

Peace... Sridhar

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Sridhar Ayengar

Post by Bill Bradford
Actually I've been looking for some sort of *recent* and up-to-date
tutorial on getting Linux (any distribution that supports it) up
and running under Hercules emulator, just to be a sick puppy. Any
suggestions?

Is it even possible to run Linux under Hercules without VM?

Of course it is. I can run it on the bare hardware[1] without running
it under VM, and most people I know running it under hercules aren't
gonna spend money on a VM license to do so...

[1] It still needs its SE to be reinstalled so that it believes its a
real machine, not a CF, and can use the ESCON, Parallel Channel, and
ENTR/FENET channel adapters in it. :( Still need to find software for
that...

Pat

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Patrick Finnegan
[1] It still needs its SE to be reinstalled so that it believes its a
real machine, not a CF, and can use the ESCON, Parallel Channel, and
ENTR/FENET channel adapters in it. :( Still need to find software
for that...

Oops, didn't make it clear, *my* S/390 G5 needs its SE reinstalled.
Don't need to do that on normal machines to run Linux.

Pat

[Patrick Finnegan]

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Patrick Finnegan
And that's why IBM ported it to their mainframe gear.

Well, they had to prove that even mainframes crash once in a while. 8-)

They aparently didn't need Linux for that. Purdue's mainframe (the
whole box, not just one VM) aparently

They aparently didn't need Linux for that. Purdue's mainframe (the
whole box, not just one VM) aparently crashed last week, for reasons
unknown. I was rather suprised to hear that, actually..

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Patrick Finnegan
Great, another flame war coming on...

Actually I've been looking for some sort of *recent* and up-to-date
tutorial on getting Linux (any distribution that supports it) up and
running under Hercules emulator, just to be a sick puppy. Any
suggestions?

Yeah, there's a good "debian on hercules" tutorial, but it's a bit out
of date (and Hercules has changed its file formats somewhat).
http://www.sinenomine.net/node/336

There's some info on the changes that are necessary to work with current
hercules in this mailing list thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-s390/2004/11/msg00003.html

There's also a pre-installed system image and config file here:
http://people.debian.org/~mdz/hercules/

And, the Debian/S/390 install guides for sarge and etch, respectively:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/s390/
http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/s390/

Pat

[Jochen Kunz]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:41:07 -0400

Post by Patrick Finnegan

Post by Robert Pasken
Linux is certainly a better choice than windows, but Linux is the
answer to a question that nobody asked. There are just too many
problems with linux to trust it to a mission critical app.

And that's why IBM ported it to their mainframe gear.

IBM didn't use / port Linux for fun. They did it because customers
created a demand for it. They did it because Linux has become a buzzword
and they can exploit it for marketing reasons.
I.e. they did it because they can make money out of it.
--


tsch|_,
Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

[Wesley W. Will]

Post by Jochen Kunz
I.e. they did it because they can make money out of it.

Has nothing to do with "it works" ... Nah. It's just another marketing
scheme.


--
www
(Along with a lot of others, been using Linux for "mission critical"
apps for not quite a decade.)

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

The point I would make is that there are different levels of critical.

When Sun was presenting their ZFS, one guy spoke up and said , "I can
get a TB of useful hardware RAID for under $20K, so why bother..." his
data was worth more than $20K so it wasn't an issue for him.

Meanwhile, I was looking at ZFS and drooling over the thought of having
a TB of snapshot-able, fault-tolerant ZFS for under $1k.

Linux has a decent amount of features that make it useful. Myself, I
prefer Solaris mainly because the apps I use are multi-threaded and
Linux has been mucking around with the thread implementation and
causing me grief.

--Patrick

Post by Wesley W. Will

Post by Jochen Kunz
I.e. they did it because they can make money out of it.

Has nothing to do with "it works" ... Nah. It's just another
marketing
scheme.

[velociraptor]

Post by Patrick Giagnocavo
Linux has a decent amount of features that make it useful. Myself, I
prefer Solaris mainly because the apps I use are multi-threaded and
Linux has been mucking around with the thread implementation and
causing me grief.

Solaris is not perfect, but I know where the issues are, and know how
to work around them, and everything pretty much works. With Linux, I
spend far more time hunting down the answers when I have problems due
to the sheer volume of crap info vs. good info, sifting for proper
distro, etc.

Never underestimate the power of known vs. unknown when you are called
at 0200 for that "mission critical" box.

If you have a large datacenter and have built the infrastructure to be
able to swap out any broken machine and have things keep running along
without a glitch, more power to you, your penguins, and your
pocketbook. But most IT shops are not built like that. They start
out as these tiny flower beds and morph into full-blown gardens
without any real regard for sanity and structure. In a situation
where there's 1-5 admins and they are dealing with a mish-mash of
systems, apps, and infrastructure and the concommitant legacy kludges,
the admins are going to be a hell of a lot more sane in a Solaris
shop, imho.

Post by Patrick Giagnocavo
Tell that to Sun, as lots of Sun shops migrate to Linux + Oracle on Dell &
HP.

Sun, as usual, isn't marketing their hardware and software well. The
ease of use for patching and updates is not obvious even to most
long-time Solaris admins--their new patching stuff just works and
requires no downtime except for kernel patches. This could be a huge
win if they just got out there and proselytized like they did with
Jumpstart. And they haven't properly advertised their low-barrier to
entry (i.e prices better than Dell) for x86 Solaris, either.

=Nadine=

[Nick B.]

So you're saying people need to ask better questions?
Nick

Post by Robert Pasken
Linux is certainly a better choice than windows, but Linux is the answer to a
question that nobody asked. There are just too many problems with linux to
trust it to a mission critical app.

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Robert Pasken
Linux is certainly a better choice than windows, but Linux is the answer to a
question that nobody asked. There are just too many problems with linux to
trust it to a mission critical app.

Tell that to Sun, as lots of Sun shops migrate to Linux + Oracle on Dell &
HP.

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Robert Pasken
trust it to a mission critical app.

Another thing that sort of bugs me, is "mission critical." Have you
encountered cases where when you step back, Mission Critical isn't? It's a
mere inconvienience? Mail will still get there if the mail server is down
for a minute. People will live if the web app is down for 4 minutes.

Sure, productivity is lost, money possibly wasted, and it forces people to
think about disaster recovery and planning... but I think often mission
critical isn't so mission critical.

[Dr. Robert Pasken]

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Robert Pasken
trust it to a mission critical app.

Another thing that sort of bugs me, is "mission critical." Have you
encountered cases where when you step back, Mission Critical isn't? It's a
mere inconvienience? Mail will still get there if the mail server is down
for a minute. People will live if the web app is down for 4 minutes.
Sure, productivity is lost, money possibly wasted, and it forces people to
think about disaster recovery and planning... but I think often mission
critical isn't so mission critical.
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

Actually I'm talking about collecting and processing Doppler radar data
from 89 NWS radars across the country. The raw data is transmitted as it
is observed at the site and then broadcast to archive sites. If I don't
catch it and save it as it comes in I lose the data permanently. At some
radar sites the raw data is still being written to 8mm Exabyte tapes,
but NWS is moving over to a pure broadcast system. I gave up on Linux
and am running x86/freebsd and Sparc/Solaris systems in parallel now,.

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Dr. Robert Pasken
Actually I'm talking about collecting and processing Doppler radar data
from 89 NWS radars across the country. The raw data is transmitted as it
is observed at the site and then broadcast to archive sites. If I don't
catch it and save it as it comes in I lose the data permanently. At some
radar sites the raw data is still being written to 8mm Exabyte tapes,
but NWS is moving over to a pure broadcast system. I gave up on Linux
and am running x86/freebsd and Sparc/Solaris systems in parallel now,.

Ah. I worked at NASA Langley at a facility that was doing something
similiar, and now work at a different place that has requirements
similiar. In both cases there is enough cache between instrumentation and
storage to cover a short outage... but yea.

Speaking of weather radar... I had an idea some time ago. Basically, a
reciever and an antenna pointed at the local news channel's doppler radar
dome. The idea being, a program running on a computer clocks itself to the
radar, as it rotates. Then transmits "interference" ... the goal would be
to print text/graphics on the TV as the radar spun... so the weatherman is
standing there talking, and as the sweep goes down a funny picture or text
shows up. How possible is such a thing? My assumption was that being close
to the radar antenna array you could cause the intereference with very low
power (as I'm sure the radar array has to be sensitive)....

Perhaps easy in theory, hard in real life... a prank I've wanted to pull
off for a while.

- Ethan

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Dr. Robert Pasken
the raw data is still being written to 8mm Exabyte tapes,

Woo, write once, read never! 8-)

Bill

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Dr. Robert Pasken
the raw data is still being written to 8mm Exabyte tapes,

Woo, write once, read never! 8-)

And if you wonder why I hate 8mm tapes, a lot of it comes from when I had
to drive a minivan to Austin (from Houston) and pick up all the tapes that
we had in storage at Iron Mountain. I'd hoped that we had some (still
usable) DLTs in the bunch, but 90% of the load was 12 and 13-year-old
8mm tapes.

(pictures) http://www.mrbill.net/tapes/

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of tapes..."

Bill

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Dr. Robert Pasken
the raw data is still being written to 8mm Exabyte tapes,

Woo, write once, read never! 8-)

Have you had that bad experience with them?

I use them for backup tapes on machines where the data is completely
useless unless it's newer than about a week old. The Exabyte tapes
don't seem to have any trouble in that scenario.

Peace... Sridhar

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Sridhar Ayengar
Have you had that bad experience with them?

I've never had good experiences with 4mm or 8mm DATs.

Bill

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Post by Bill Bradford
I've never had good experiences with 4mm or 8mm DATs.

My experience has been that 4mm DAT tapes were 99% reliable. Meaning
in plain English that out of 100 blocks, you loose the one that you
need.

geoff.

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Post by Geoffrey S. Mendelson

Post by Bill Bradford
I've never had good experiences with 4mm or 8mm DATs.

My experience has been that 4mm DAT tapes were 99% reliable. Meaning
in plain English that out of 100 blocks, you loose the one that you
need.

You got them to work that good?

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
You got them to work that good?

SGI "Python" drive could read + write audio over scsi bus to the 4mm
drive.

Bad. Ass.

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
You got them to work that good?

SGI "Python" drive could read + write audio over scsi bus to the 4mm
drive.
Bad. Ass.

And this is practically useful HOW? 8-)

Bill

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Ethan O'Toole
SGI "Python" drive could read + write audio over scsi bus to the 4mm
drive. Bad. Ass.

And this is practically useful HOW? 8-)

Lossless audio capture from your workstation, rather than having to
purchase a deck, back in the days when 2GB drives were "huge"?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Ethan O'Toole
SGI "Python" drive could read + write audio over scsi bus to the 4mm

And this is practically useful HOW? 8-)

At one time that's how you sent audio files to a CD pressing plant.

I never did it that way, but you could also send CD-ROM images.

My first experience with recordable CD-ROMs was in late 1991, so
I never bothered, but someone I know had a "digital studio" that did
as late as 1996. I lost touch with him then, I don't know how much
longer he used it.

The one CD ROM I was personably responsible for was in Feb 1992, and was done
by mastering it on a CD-ROM recordable on a PC and sending them the
recordable as a "master". Saved a $500 mastering charge which cost
almost as much as the production run of CDs.

Geoff.

[Phil Stracchino]

Post by Ethan O'Toole

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
You got them to work that good?

SGI "Python" drive could read + write audio over scsi bus to the 4mm
drive.

IMHO, the Archive PythonDAT (from before Conner bought Archive) is one
of the few good DDS drives there ever was.

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

Post by Phil Stracchino
IMHO, the Archive PythonDAT (from before Conner bought Archive) is one
of the few good DDS drives there ever was.

Were'nt they later bought by HP, who produced that line of DAT drives
with the MTBF being as long as it took to load a tape after sticking
it in?

Geoff.

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by Geoffrey S. Mendelson
Were'nt they later bought by HP, who produced that line of DAT drives
with the MTBF being as long as it took to load a tape after sticking
it in?
Geoff.

The nice drives were the storagetek SD-3s. Crazy expensive and built from
VHS deck parts. 500 hours or 1000 hours before rebuild, generally docked
to silos that hold thousands of tapes.

[Phil Stracchino]

Post by Geoffrey S. Mendelson

Post by Phil Stracchino
IMHO, the Archive PythonDAT (from before Conner bought Archive) is one
of the few good DDS drives there ever was.

Were'nt they later bought by HP, who produced that line of DAT drives
with the MTBF being as long as it took to load a tape after sticking
it in?

Nope. Archive was bought by Conner, who in turn got bought by Seagate.

[Steven Hill]

Post by Bill Bradford

Post by Dr. Robert Pasken
the raw data is still being written to 8mm Exabyte tapes,

Woo, write once, read never! 8-)

"What's all that brown stuff coming off the tape?"

"Data, son... Data..."

[Andy Wallis]

Post by Ethan O'Toole
Another thing that sort of bugs me, is "mission critical." Have you
encountered cases where when you step back, Mission Critical isn't?

Before answering, my personal definitions for true "Mission Critical"
are these:
Mission Critical: If it fails, it will be front page news and it
won't be good.
Mission Critical: If it fails, people will be dead and the lawyers
will be lining up around the block.
Mission Critical: If it fails, you will personally have to appear
before a full Congressional oversight committee with C-SPAN and every
news service filming. There will be bonus points if it preempts soap
operas, game shows, or sport events.
Mission Critical: If it fails, we have created an international
incident or inadvertently committed an act of war or treason.

I've run into a lot of situations at work where some dingbat has
stated that their pet application, workstation, or flowerpot was
mission critical. My response has been to recite my four definitions
for "Mission Critical" with my eyes glaring and ready to assume a
barbarian charge. The usual answer is a frightened "no."

Nothing says ego-deflation like seeing a director realize that maybe
he or she is not a high god.

-Andy Wallis

[Bill Bradford]

Post by Andy Wallis
Before answering, my personal definitions for true "Mission Critical"

Mine:

"Production": If it goes down at 3am, I have to get out of bed.

"Mission Critical": If it goes down at 3am, EVERYONE gets out of bed.

8-)

We eliminated a lot of pseudo-"production" boxes by making a policy,
"if its a production machine, it needs to be on a server-form-factor
system in the datacenter, not on a tower under your desk."

Bill

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Post by Robert Pasken
Linux is certainly a better choice than windows, but Linux is the answer to a
question that nobody asked. There are just too many problems with linux to
trust it to a mission critical app.

If you think Solaris doesn't have problems that hurt mission critical
applications, you are painfully naive.

Linux is an umbrella term that is almost useless, but nevertheless there
are "linux systems" that are used in critical applications and they
perform very well.

[Steven Hill]

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
If you think Solaris doesn't have problems that hurt mission critical
applications, you are painfully naive.

I'd expect people would be less likely to deploy Solaris to a mission
critical problem if it wasn't the right tool for the job, purley due to
the costs and skills involved.

If someone is deploying Sun hardware / Solaris to a task it isn't
suited, they're clearly too stupid to be running systems. In which case,
my rates are very reasonable.

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
Linux is an umbrella term that is almost useless, but nevertheless
there are "linux systems" that are used in critical applications and
they perform very well.

Linux is only free if your time is worthless.

[Phil Stracchino]

Post by Steven Hill

Post by Charles Shannon Hendrix
Linux is an umbrella term that is almost useless, but nevertheless
there are "linux systems" that are used in critical applications and
they perform very well.

Linux is only free if your time is worthless.

Because no other OS ever takes up any administration time at all....?

[William Enestvedt]

Post by velociraptor
But most IT shops are not built like that. They start
out as these tiny flower beds and morph into full-blown gardens
without any real regard for sanity and structure.

"Feed me, Seymour!"

I will cheefully suggest that there are lessons to be learned -- and
tools to be borrowed -- from Linux for use in Solaris shops.

'Course, anyone who's so wedded to a single platform that their NIMBY
gets in the way probably has other things wrong in their data center
already.

- Will

--
Will Enestvedt
UNIX System Administrator
Providence, RI

[velociraptor]

Post by William Enestvedt

Post by velociraptor
But most IT shops are not built like that. They start
out as these tiny flower beds and morph into full-blown gardens
without any real regard for sanity and structure.

"Feed me, Seymour!"
I will cheefully suggest that there are lessons to be learned -- and
tools to be borrowed -- from Linux for use in Solaris shops.

What kind of tools/lessons are you thinking of? Personally, I don't
find many *deployment* differences in the sense of methods between the
two. Speaking from the perspective of managing the systems themselves
after they are installed, in my experience, I find that Solaris Sparc
systems tend to be more robust when under-spec'd or overloaded, and
generally act in more predictable ways when they break. So, if the
data center and the infrastructure is a spaghetti bowl, I'd rather
negotiate the mess under Solaris than Linux, that's all I'm saying.

Post by William Enestvedt
'Course, anyone who's so wedded to a single platform that their NIMBY
gets in the way probably has other things wrong in their data center
already.

Would you say that about using Windows for "mission critical"
services? :-) Speaking purely from the perspective of having to
support large numbers of systems, I think there is a lot to be said
for homogeneous configurations, barring over-riding requirements for
some feature in a given application that is not available on your
preferred OS.

In the past, I supported 1000+ systems while on-call[0]--managed by 40
different admins and probably half the boxes were built by hand--and
that would have been a much, much more difficult proposition had there
been anything beyond various versions of Solaris, SunOS, and OnTap
(NetApp) with a scattering of HP-UX (compute farms, very homogeneous
builds).

In an ideal world, IT people would look down the road whenever they
build out something and hedge against future requirements. Most
people are not put into a position where they can do that though.
Generally, we are given ridiculously small budgets and ridiculously
long laundry lists of requirements and are forced to make do.

=Nadine=

[0] "On-call" in this context means you are expected to fix the
problem without contacting the "owner" of the machine, with end-users
(engineers) having the direct # to the on-call phone/pager for 24x7
support.

[William Enestvedt]

Post by velociraptor

Post by William Enestvedt
I will cheefully suggest that there are lessons to be learned -- and
tools to be borrowed -- from Linux for use in Solaris shops.

What kind of tools/lessons are you thinking of?

Oh, I used to have a lot of Solaris 8 systems, and I am sayign that
without 3rd party scipts & code -- that is, only using what shipped from
Sun on the Solaris CDs -- I'd've been stuck writing a lot of tools from
scratch.

Post by velociraptor
Would you say that about using Windows for "mission critical"
services?

Don't make me say something I will regret. (Also, it will be less
"saying" something than making a little animal noise.)

Post by velociraptor
Speaking purely from the perspective of having to
support large numbers of systems, I think there is a lot to be said
for homogeneous configurations, barring over-riding requirements for
some feature in a given application that is not available on your
preferred OS.

Exactly! I'm not speaking against monocultures per se, just against
the mindset that resists ideas that don't come shrink-wrapped from the
vendor. If use of a single platform is a conscious choice, then more
power to you; if it's intertia or fear that keep you from looking
outside your comfortable little world, then I think you're a dope.

Post by velociraptor
In an ideal world, IT people would look down the road whenever they
build out something and hedge against future requirements.

Hahahahahahahahaha!

What galls me is not that people are hemmed in by budgetary
restraints but that they're incurious about the existence of other
options, and use their limited funds as an excuse to take the easy,
feature-limited, proprietary way out.

'Nuff said, my blood pressure is rising. :7) I think we agree.

- Will
--
Will Enestvedt
UNIX System Administrator
Providence, RI

[William Enestvedt]

Post by Bill Bradford
Woo, write once, read never! 8-)

Meh, it's the weather. *Everybody* says of their region, "If you
like it stick around -- it'll change in five minutes."

- Will
--
Will Enestvedt
UNIX System Administrator
Providence, RI

[Ethan O'Toole]

Post by William Enestvedt
Meh, it's the weather. *Everybody* says of their region, "If you
like it stick around -- it'll change in five minutes."

Like the housing market bubble... "We don't have to worry, it's different
here because _________." (Ignoring the fact that housing is unaffordable).

[Larry Snyder]

Post by Tom 'spot' Callaway

Post by Erie Patsellis
Tom, just had a thought, are there forklifts at both ends?

Should be, but I can't speak for the donor's dock area.

If the dock facilities were good enough to get it in, they
should be good enough to get it out. If it were me, though,
I'd prefer the pros as that moves the responsibility to them.
A midplane casualty would ruin your whole day very quickly.

Just a thought.
-ls-

[Lionel Peterson]

Date: 2006/10/26 Thu PM 04:26:17 CDT
Subject: Re: [rescue] advice on rescuing an e10k

<snip>

I'm just a bit uncomfortable trying to "do it myself" with a rather
large truck, having never driven such a truck before.
I'm also reluctant to try to beg the Aurora community for $3000 to have
it moved by "professionals".

If you got it, could you "support" it - I'm talking about environmental considerations, not emotionally ;^)

Lionel