Author: Cody

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Solaris 8 containers with nested filesystems

I am working with solaris 8 containers on solaris 10 at work. Today I was working with a container that had some zfs partitions mounted in it and wanted to move it to another machine. When I tried to detach the container I received the following error message.

T2000# zoneadm -z myzone detach
zoneadm: zone ‘myzone’: These file-systems are mounted on subdirectories of /zone_roots/myzone.

zoneadm: zone ‘myzone’: /zone_roots/myzone/vol0

zoneadm: zone ‘myzone’: /zone_roots/myzone/data

T2000# umount /zone_roots/myzone/vol0/
T2000# umount /zone_roots/myzone/data
T2000# zoneadm -z myzone detach
T2000#

I googled to see if there was an obvious answer but found none. It turns out I simply had to unmount the two filesystems before detaching the container. Simple fix but it caused me some serious head scratching for a few minutes.

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My Subaru battery keeps the site alive

On Sept 29th 2003 hurricane Juan struck the atlantic provinces of Canada. At the time I was living in PEI and telecommuting to Montreal for sysadmin work at an e-commerce company. By the time the storm struck Charlottetown it had been downgraded to a tropical storm but still packed a serious punch. I spent a couple hours out exploring and taking pictures having never witnessed such an event before. By the time I got back to my apartment at 2am the power was out so I went to bed.

When I awoke in the morning the power was still out, not an ideal situation for a telecommuter. Of course, not 10 minutes after getting up I got a call complaining about problems with the website. No power = no high speed internet so I fired up the laptop and connected to a dialup account.

This worked for about an hour until my crappy Tecra 8200 battery started to give out. At this point I had diagnosed the problem but another hour or two was needed to get the site fully operational again. At this point I knew I needed to find some power. I remembered that I had an old 250 watt 12V DC to AC inverter. Instead of working in the car I opted to take the battery in the house.

At this point I had my laptop charging off my Subaru’s battery. I began to wonder if my high speed provider had a generator at the head end. I plugged my cable modem in and presto, high speed. I started to get cocky and even plugged in my old 13 inch color TV and satellite receiver! It all worked perfectly but after 10 minutes of TV I opted to just run the laptop and cable modem to have more run time.

To gauge my run time I put my multimeter on the battery to keep an eye on the voltage. Every 5-6 hours I would have to take the battery out to the car and go for a 30-40 minute drive to charge it up. It was totally inefficient and ridiculous but it worked.

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Humble beginnings

I was looking through old backup media and stumbled upon this picture.

This is a picture from my office at my first computer job in the 1990s. This is where my career started and I put my first Linux server on the internet.

I worked as a tech for a small computer services company that had downtown offices. Conveniently, due to the location of our office, a local ISP offered us free access to their T1 in exchange for a place for them to locate some of their equipment. For my employer this meant free access to the internet. For me this meant my own static IP on the internet on a super fast connection for free! At a time when consumer grade high speed connections didn’t exist and 56K dialup was the only way to get on the net it was amazing to have such high speed access.

My first Linux server can be seen in the picture, it’s the tall tower to the left. This machine was cobbled together from spare parts and as a result wasn’t exactly blazing fast (486 @66mhz) but it sufficed for running a Linux server. I remember staying after work until the wee hours of the morning exploring Linux and the still evolving internet.

I carted that machine around with me for years until I finally got rid of it in 2003, long after it had any practical use. I have nothing but fond memories of those times, it was a great time to be a geek.

Those that know me will spot the Tim Hortons cups and see that nothing has changed.

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New life for my old Sun Ultra5

I acquired my little Sun Ultra 5 in 2003 for $100 from the asset auction of a dead .com company. I didn’t really realize it at the time but I got a pretty good deal, the system was in mint shape and looked as if it had never been used.

Over the years I’ve played with Solaris on it and various *nix sparc ports. It’s served as a desktop machine and a server for me and always worked well. Last January my group did their annual storage room cleanout where we go through our storage area and recycle all the equipment and parts that are just taking up space. One such item was a Sun Ultra 10 with a bad CPU module and no nvram.

I grabbed it from the recycling pile and took it home to see if there was any memory in it that would work with my Ultra 5. Luckily for me, there was 1GB of ram installed! The only problem is it was full height memory which interfered with the floppy mount in my ultra 5.

So I stripped both systems down to the bare components. I put my ultra 5 motherboard and cpu into the Ultra 10 chassis. Then I took the memory, SCSI card, and Elite 3D framebuffer from the old Ultra 10 and a 73gb 10K rpm scsi disk and DVD-Rom I had from an old pc and put them all into the Ultra 10. The old leftover parts went back to the computer recyclers, where all electronics waste should be (not in the garbage!).

So here are the specs of the new machine:

System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u Sun Ultra 5/10 UPA/PCI (UltraSPARC-IIi 400MHz)
System clock frequency: 100 MHz
Memory size: 1024 Megabytes

========================= CPUs =========================

Run Ecache CPU CPU
Brd CPU Module MHz MB Impl. Mask
--- --- ------- ----- ------ ------ ----
0 0 0 400 2.0 12 9.1

========================= IO Cards =========================

Bus# Freq
Brd Type MHz Slot Name Model
--- ---- ---- ---- -------------------------------- ----------------------
0 PCI-1 33 1 ebus
0 PCI-1 33 1 network-SUNW,hme
0 PCI-1 33 2 SUNW,m64B ATY,GT-C
0 PCI-1 33 3 ide-pci1095,646.1095.646.3
0 PCI-2 33 4 scsi-glm Symbios,53C875

No failures found in System
===========================

========================= HW Revisions =========================

ASIC Revisions:
---------------
Cheerio: ebus Rev 1

System PROM revisions:
----------------------
OBP 3.31.0 2001/07/25 20:36 POST 3.1.0 2000/06/27 13:56

It’s like a new machine! Solaris 9 is pretty responsive on it, the addition of a SCSI drive to replace the slow IDE made a big difference. Now that’s true computer recycling!

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The commoditization of Sun hardware

The company I work at as a Unix Administrator has a side business supporting Sun hardware for numerous companies in town. I think this side business grew over the years as a way for my employer to subsidize the cost of maintaining a large spare hardware inventory for their own Sun equipment. Before they got heavily into Linux clustering on commodity hardware they were almost exclusively a sun shop.

Having a hardware background I was chosen to support a couple of our clients. One of my clients has several hundred Sun Ultra 40 desktops, some in warranty, some out of warranty. These machines are essentially PC’s designed by Sun. They have a well engineered case and have a good, solid construction. However, some of the items they ship with are complete garbage in my opinion.

These workstations retail for seven thousand dollars or more and yet they ship with a Sun Type 7 rev2 keyboard that is so cheap and flimsy it feels like a keyboard you’d get at the dollar store. Plus, the pre revision 3 keyboards have a poorly engineered USB hub in them that causes the keyboard to become unresponsive.

They also feature Nvidia Quadro FX 3500’s which cost roughly $900 to replace. These cards seem to have an exceptionally high rate of failure, I’ve replaced 8 or 9 of them now since January, all with the exact same problems. The card develops artifacts on the display that appear even at the machine’s post. It appears to be an issue with the memory on the cards and I have a feeling it has to do with the memory being in a BGA type package. Similar to the XBOX 360’s BGA chip issues with heat.

I realize that the market for expensive sun hardware is limited but you can’t expect customers to pay that sun premium for garbage they could buy from Dell or HP for half the cost. By charging the premium Sun price but delivering marginal PC hardware they are going to alienate their existing enterprise customer base who expect a certain level of quality for buying Sun. I know the customers I talk to are not impressed at all with the recent AMD based hardware.

UPDATE: As of July 18th 2008 we have replaced 18 percent of the deployed Sun Nvidia Quadro FX 3500s. Sun has since discontinued that part and replaced it with a Nvidia Quadro FX 4600, which is $1495 USD, twice the price of the 3500s. We have decided to replace the sun part with a generic FX3500. I seriously doubt that those workstations will be replaced with Sun hardware in a few months when it’s time to replace them, a similarly equiped HP workstation is less than half the price and it comes with a 3 year warranty.