Remote install
Well, a bunch of things have happened since my last main post. One of them is something that caused quite a stir at the time, which I will not go into now. Suffice to say that I hope it has all been resolved now.
Obviously yesterday CompSoc received a surprise delivery of a top-of-the-line Sun Fire T2000 2u server. This beast puts CompSoc’s “noisy” to shame (about ten times over). It has just one CPU, but this CPU has eight cores, each clocked at 1GHz, and each core is capable of running four threads at once (not sure how that works). RAM… yep, it has that too—16GB of it. Dual power supplies, a full remote management interface (that provides telnet and possibly SSH on top of the regular serial interface), etc. It’s a seriously impressive piece of kit. I’ll be sad to see it go at the end of the 90-day trial but in the meantime we’re trying to think of some things to do with it.
If you have something capable of testing an 8GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM to its limits then let me know.
But what I wanted to talk about was how I have just installed Solaris 10 1/06 onto a Sun Blade 100 CompSoc has. Nothing special, sure, but this is the first time I’ve installed a whole machine remotely over the Internet. It’s all very impressive… I just wish that PC manufacturers would stop messing about and hurry up and provide something that works as well.
Time to get patching the rest of the stuff. The aim is to get the Sun T3 RAID array (9*36GB disks in RAID 5) hooked up and doing something useful. I’ve scheduled downtime for noisy tomorrow to allow me to install a dual FC card. We are considering using the T3 in a production role as a replacement for the two 200GB SATA disks in RAID1.
Tags: CompSoc