X4200 tips
I’ve been involved with a project that uses about 60 Sun X4200 M2 Opteron servers running Solaris 10. I was initially a bit nervous about jumpstarting using the nge0 interface after reading Ben Rockwood’s blog post, but in general everything went very smoothly (we did have a problem with a single machine, but it may have been cable related). I love working with the X4200 hardware, the machines are very well built.
Here are a few tips we’ve picked up in working with a bunch of X4200s:
To make sure the x4200 boots after a power failure:
In the BIOS setup screen, select Chipset -> Southbridge Configuration
Set “Restore on AC/Power Loss” to “Power On”
To configure HW RAID during jumpstart
Use a begin script that does something like the following (assuming your disks are c3t0d0 and c3t1d0)
raidctl -f -c c3t0d0 c3t1d0
echo “Using cfgadm to reprobe geometry…”
cfgadm -c unconfigure c3
echo “Sleeping to ensure changes took…”
sleep 10
echo “Wiping out any existing fdisk parition…”
fdisk -F /dev/null /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0
echo “Creating a single Solaris fdisk partition…”
fdisk -B /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0
Getting Host WWN Information (For Solaris 10 in general, not X4200 specific)
fcinfo hba-port (look for the Port WWN line)
NOTE: fcinfo hba-port doesn’t return the ports in the same order necessarily across machines, so you need to look at the device path in the output. Out of the 50 some machines we had that were SAN attached (with same HBAs in the same PCI-E slots), 10 printed the slots in reverse order.
Configuring the ILOM to use a static IP address
(assuming you are logged in as root on the ILOM)
cd /SP/network
set pendingipdiscovery=static pendingipgateway=1.2.3.4 pendingipnetmask=255
.255.255.0 pendingipaddress=1.2.3.100
set commitpending=true
Using expect to change the root password of the ILOM
(This works fine using expect 5.42.0 on my MacBook under OSX 10.4)
#!/usr/bin/expect –
if { $argc != 3 } {
send_user “Usage: $argv0 <server> <oldpass> <newpass>\n”
exit
}
set server [lindex $argv 0]
set oldpass [lindex $argv 1]
set newpass [lindex $argv 2]
spawn ssh -l root $server-ilo
expect “Password:”
send “$oldpass\n”
expect “.*->”
send “cd /SP/users/root\n”
send “set password=$newpass\n”
expect “Enter new password again:”
send “$newpass\n”
interact