2005-10-27 23:00:00
Back from Alexandria and SNL
Well I got back from Alexandria late Wednesday night. It was a cool three days. Actually, interesting is a better word. When I got into the office and looked at the servers they looked like regular Sun's. I booted one up, the usual white screen appeared, and I proceded to hit STOP+A so that I could boot from the dvd. STOP+A didn't work. It just sat at the white screen... doing nothing. I rebooted it again, but this time I paid attention to the POST and what followed. I noticed that the BIOS detected two AMD Opteron processors. I thought, "That's not SPARC." Then it hit me, these aren't SPARC's, these are the brand new servers from Sun. These are the new x86 servers. That threw me for a loop. I knew a little about how to use a Sun on the SPARC platform, but when I found these weren't SPARC's, I was starting from scratch. So I got out the install dvd, popped it in, and rebooted. I booted to the disc and off it went. So from there I had to learn how to install Solaris for x86 and use it. During all of this I realized that Sun is stupid and can't send us identical hard drives for a RAID 1 confguration. So after I got all 6 servers installed I played a game of hard drive swap to get matching hard drives in the servers. Then I setup RAID 1 on each of them. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm an idiot and said everything backwards, cause everyone knows you set up RAID first and then install the OS. Well, Sun is bassackwards. You install the OS on one hard drive, then issue the command raidctl -c c1t0d0 c1t1d0. That's it. The builtin RAID controller does the rest. Pretty cool.So I did all that I could do while I was there, but I still have a little more work to do. Anyway, before I left I ordered some dvd's. They arrived while I was out. So I had that to look forward to when I got home. I got School of Rock, Gold Diggers, Elf, Alias Season 4, and 5 SNL dvd's: Mike Meyers, Adam Sandler, Jimmy Fallon, Will Ferrell, and Chris Farley. I love those dvd's. SNL is the greatest show ever. Now I just have to get some of the older ones, like Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, etc.
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