Anyone in Boston a Solaris sysadmin wizard?

by philg

Is there among the readers a Solaris sysadmin expert in the Boston area?  The ancient E450 server that ran http://philip.greenspun.com and part of photo.net suffered a system drive failure last week.  This was the only unmirrored disk, ironically enough.  A week-old backup of the server root has been loaded onto a GNU/Linux system and the site is back up.  The guys running photo.net, however, can’t find a Solaris 7 media kit and can’t get the E450 to boot from a CD-ROM.  Is there anyone who reads this Weblog who might have the right mental and physical stuff for booting up the E450 and mounting the working disk drives in read-only mode?  The server is in Central Square, Cambridge.  Your potential reward:  everlasting gratitude, public glory (if you want it), and dinner in Central Square.


[Epilogue:  This posting brought a lot of heroes out of the net/woodwork!  The prize goes to Rob Isaac of Auckland, NZ, who offered to FedEx a CD-ROM and any required chassis pieces, up to and including a fresh SCSI CD-ROM drive.  The photo.net guys were finally able to net boot the E450 from one of the new Linux machines.  So thanks to everyone who commented or sent email.]

9 thoughts on “Anyone in Boston a Solaris sysadmin wizard?”

  3. A dinner? What about an hour sightseeing tour over Boston and the surrounding area?

    –Colin

  4. Just a thought: that CD-ROM drive probably hasn’t been used in years is just busted. Barring a “set-defaults” doing the trick, if a solaris box doesn’t respond to “boot cdrom”, I don’t know what else could be it.

    So my first move would be to try and get a replacement CD-ROM drive.

    But even then, it probably will indeed take a wizard to mount all the meta devices and read from them. (I am assuming those mirrored disk are using Solaris miroring and not a RAID controler)

    Good luck!

  5. In the absence of a replacement drive, someone with a PC or laptop running Solaris x86 would be able to boot it from a local Solaris/SPARC CD over the network (TFTP/NFS). Assuming the drives were only mirrored and not striped or concatenated using DiskSuite, you’d then be able to mount and read any of the submirrors as normal UFS filesystems (one advantage over Veritas in this situation, which overlays a virtual partition map). Any version of Solaris would work for this, so you could even download the free Solaris 10 ISOs.

    If there’s no one who can help, I guess you could try asking Sun for some goodwill and free publicity. (FWIW, E450s weren’t too popular with their engineers either.)

  6. Thanks, all! The machine is back up via netboot.

    Ade: I’m not sure why the E450s weren’t popular. This one soldiered on mightily for something like six years without any real attention.

  7. I guess they don’t like them because they are too damn heavy and servicing them meant taking the out of people’s racks. I remember having to rack these things 3 on top of each other. Even with all 12 disks and 3 PSUs removed it wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

    Left that company before I could experience their longevity. Can get them for good prices on eBay now, so they must not be too bad if that many are still going.

  8. I was able to net boot the E450 from one of the Linux boxes we have in the rack. In fact, I never did get it to boot up to the full single-user environment. There seems to be some incompatibility between the Linux bootparamsd daemon and the Sun net boot code. But by stripping a lot of stuff out of the init scripts, I was able to get the system up to a bare-bones single-user mode good enough for fsck’ing the disks. The fsck took about 30 seconds.

    The E450 is indeed incredibly heavy — more than I could get out of the rack by myself if I had to do that. But the Dell PowerEdge 6650 that sits on top of it, and which essentially replaced the E450 about 18 months ago, is also extremely heavy. In fact, one time I called in a Dell Technical Support guy to do simple work on it that I could have done myself, just because I needed someone to help me get it out of the rack.

    The E450 has been incredibly reliable, though. In the three years I’ve been taking care of the photo.net systems, it has only been down two or three times. Obviously, the CDROM that was used to install it has been collecting dust at the bottom of someone’s closet for years. When we no longer need it as a shelf for the Dell, it will probably get put on EBay, assuming we can find a few muscular guys to help get it out. I hear Philip is trying to get buff like Brad Pitt; so getting the E450 out of the rack will be good goal for him.

  9. Glad you got it working in the end. I would have mentioned net booting from Linux but wasn’t sure if it was compatible – at least we know now. In fairness, my current employer ran half a dozen E450s for several years and they gave good service. It was an acquaintance at Sun who was scathing about their reliability compared to other models. (I always thought the rather flimsy and pointless hatch panel on the front gave a bad impression of the overall build quality.) Yes, way too heavy and a nightmare to service – usually one or both side panels had to come off. For a brief time, they were the only viable 4 way SPARC servers from Sun, which meant a lot of companies bought them in multiples to run as app servers even though the huge chassis would be nearly empty. Sun helped sell a lot of co-lo space…

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