Monday, October 23, 2006

Problematic Printing

I've just migrated an important service off an old Solaris 8 machine onto a new(ish) server running Solaris 10.

Everything went pretty smoothly, with the exception of a few little printing problems. (I'm not a printer person, really. Whatever happened to the paperless office?)

I had just used lpadmin to set up the printers. I've read that printing in Solaris 10 is much better than it used to be (and that may be true) so that it can drive printers properly out of the box without the need for extra products like the HP JetDirect (what used to be JetAdmin) printer driver. Indeed, to the point that you're not supposed to use JetDirect any more.

In our testing we had ended up setting the type to any (rather than postscript) and using the netstandard model script. Anything more sophisticated and it mangled some of the printouts (specifically, we had some plaintext reports that had embedded characters to switch the printer to landscape that didn't work).

What we discovered today was that printer tray and media selection weren't working. I had been told that this was done in the application, but what that actually meant was that there was a wrapper shell script that called lp with some options that the jetdirect software can understand. And clearly the vanilla print system under Solaris doesn't grok those options.

So what I've had to do is to install the latest version of the JetDirect software that I can find (E10.34). And then add the specific model scripts for our model printers (and these are on the HP website, although they're a devil to find and the HP search is almost useless). And then using that to drive the printers made everything work flawlessly.

I'm sure there must be a way to pass the appropriate printer options to select the correct media type without running everything through JetDirect, but I've yet to find it. (Oh, and it would be nice if it used the same option names, to save having to track down every wrapper script that might be involved, although that's not absolutely necessary.)

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Network Corruption?

I've just started seeing corrupted files on one of my X2100 M2 boxes. The visible indication is that I'm unpacking gzipped tar files from an NFS mounted disk, and was getting crc errors and invalid compressed data. Testing indicated that if I used rcp to transfer the files then I was also getting corruption. (I can check the md5 signatures, rather than just rely on gzcat to barf.) There wasn't any other evidence - I'm not seeing corruption of local files (basically, of Solaris itself), nor any network errors on the machine or the switch, and it's just the one machine that's affected.

How to test? SunVTS runs on Solaris x86, so I tried that out. Which wasn't encouraging:

INFO: Host System identified is "X2100 M2"
This Platform is not supported by SunVTS.

However, if I edit the platform.conf file it does at least run. And, so far, no memory or network errors.

Mind you, the errors I was seeing earlier seem to have disappeared...

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Keeping the T2000 busy

Like many organizations, we use old computers for lightweight tasks - Sun systems just keep going. (Which can be a problem, as you can be tempted to keep them for too long when replacing them with a new cheap system would actually be a much better bet.)

So I'm putting together a couple of SunBlade 100s. They're more than powerful enough for the tasks in hand, and it saves cash. But building the software on them can take forever. Especially when you have to do it a few times before you get it right.

Enter the T2000. Type gmake -j 32 and boom! Build over.

If only ./configure could be parallelized...

Friday, October 06, 2006

T2000 - more performance

I've managed to do a couple more performance tests on my loan T2000.

the first was kicked by by the announcement that pbzip2 is available on sunfreeware. Now, bzip2 is pretty cpu intensive, so if there's a way of making it go faster then I'm all for it.

So here are some figures - in seconds - for pbzip2 as a function of the number of cpus used. I've used a small blocksize (100K) rather than the default, which helps as the test file isn't all that big.








# cpusTime
116.444
28.686
44.287
82.791
161.821
321.784

That's pretty good. I would expect to get approximately a factor 8 gain here: it's a cpu intensive application and there are 8 physical cores. So we see about a factor 9, which is pretty good.

My next test was to load up an apache/php/mysql combo and see how that goes. The comparison machine is a SunBlade 2000 with a pair of 1.015GHz processors. (Note: this is using the same binaries - not optimised code on the T2000. Yes, Sun have optimised binaries, but that isn't really helpful in comparison, as with most applications a recompile wouldn't be feasible.)

For a simple database query operation, the T2000 took 0.160s as opposed to the 0.112s. For generating a graph, the T2000 was again slightly slower - 9.538s against 7.167s.

Again you see the single-threaded performance is at about the 60-70% of a regular UltraSparc cpu of the same clockspeed. But, this thing has 8 cores, how well does that work?

So I fired up the apache benchmark ab. And just for the database retrieval report I can get about 30 pages per second out of the SunBlade, but (with 32 concurrent requests) about 100 pages per second out of the T2000. And - according to top - the T2000 is only 50% busy. In fact, my server (apache/php/mysql) setup croaks if I push it much harder (but then it's a reporting thing designed for 1 page a minute).

So, on this test the T2000 is at least as good as 3 SunBlade 2000s. Or,equivalently, it's better than an 8x750MHz V880. Which is pretty good, as it's a fair amount cheaper and smaller.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Server Wars: The M2 Strikes Back

And I thought I was getting somewhere!

Having actually installed my X2100 M2 servers, I want to mirror the boot disk.

As an aside, I found Sun Infodoc 83605. This says:

It is recommended to use Hardware RAID controllers for the Root disk mirror, for performance and reliability reasons.


and then a little later, being consistent:

Sun Fire x2100 uses an nVidia RAID controller. Solaris OS doesn't support the nVidia driver as of now, so Solaris Volume Manager is the only option for mirroring the root disk.


OK, so I can't use hardware raid at the present time, which means (I think) that I can't hotswap the drives.

But anyway, I do the regular thing to mirror the boot disk with SVM. Works fine. I installgrub and use eeprom to define an alternate boot path. I reboot both servers. One comes back all fine and dandy.

The other one is dead. Faulty boot archive. Can't start console services. Remember that I'm having a wee bit of trouble controlling these machines, so getting to a failsafe system is a bit tricky. I fiddle for a bit, but rebooting doesn't help.

I was going to reinstall anyway, so pxe boot away. This time, I can't even see the console output. Oh dear, it's getting worse....

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

The M2 submits

As I have previously documented, I've been setting up a Sun X2100 M2.

It's not been the smoothest ride. And I wouldn't say that everything is completely solved, but having got it installed I followed the instructions for serial redirection and I can now ssh to the SP and get console access. That's probably all I need, although I still have a slight lack of confidence in the system - I can imagine ways in which it could get itself messed up where I get no access, but for most of the administration tasks I'll ever need to do I'm sorted.

Still can't get Serial-over-LAN to work, though. Never mind, ssh is good enough for me.

Monday, October 02, 2006

The M2 comes alive

I'm getting somewhere in my ongoing battle with the Sun X2100 M2.

I still haven't got the dratted thing to give me console access. But I have managed to install the beast in such a way that I can finish the install and log in.

The first step is to ensure that you have ipmitool installed. If you have Solaris 10, you may have it, and if so you need to patch it (119764 or 119765 according to your system). Then I can tell it to do a pxe boot next time around:

ipmitool -U root -I lanplus -H 1.2.3.4 chassis bootdev pxe

And I can power cycle it and it will do a jumpstart install.

Then in my finish script I have

sysidconfig -b /a -r /usr/openwin/bin/kdmconfig

which stops it asking me whether I want Xorg or Xsun at boot (questions which I can't answer because I have as yet found no way of typing back at it).

And I have a working system I can access using ssh. With luck I can get the installed system to play nice with the console, which is going to be essential when we move this box into production use.