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Your CIO has never visited the data center that hosts your servers. Here is what he imagines it looks like:

This is what the setup at the data center really look like:

The bottom picture was taken through a cage at data center I was visiting a few weeks ago. I have no idea who owns the cage/server, but when I saw such “hosting ghetto” setup I knew I needed to take the picture with my phone.

Executive Summary: Awesome horse power but a bit rough to get working.

I had a chance today to get back to work on the x4150. When I had left off last week, the Solaris 10 08/07 (aka S10 update 4) installer was running along. Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed when walking back into our lab is that the machine was in a continuous boot -> panic -> boot loop. Not good. I was able to wait for the next boot cycle and get the machine up by picking the GRUB “Solaris safe-mode” selection. The safe mode setting boots the machine with a 32 bit kernel and a special mini-root file system. Since this worked ok, it made me think that there was a likely a problem with booting into the (default) 64 bit kernel. I edited my grub menu to boot into 32 bit mode by default and it came up fine. I then installed the latest Solaris 10 x86 recommended patch cluster and now it appears to boot fine in 32 or 64 bit mode.

This is frustrating because the x4150 Product Notes state:

The Sun Fire X4150 server with Solaris 10 11/06 OS has a number of patches included to support the Sun StorageTek SAS controller. Please note that if the preinstalled image is removed from HD0, you must use the Solaris Recovery DVD supplied with the Sun Fire X4150 server to reinstall the operating system because it includes support for your controller and hard disk drives. This issue will be resolved with the Solaris 10 8/07 OS release. (emphasis mine)

Which clearly isn’t the case.

As mentioned above, once the latest patch cluster went on, it now boots fine in 32 or 64 bit mode, but what a time waster.

If you are running into a similar problem and want to get the machine to boot into 32 bit mode, when you are given the GRUB menu to chose a boot option, use the following steps:

press ‘e’ to edit the boot parameters

press ‘e’ to edit the first line

change the first line from

kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot

to

kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot kernel/unix

hit <enter> to save the line

press ‘b’ to boot

You can also make the same edit to /boot/grub/menu.lst if you want to always boot in 32 bit mode (or just add a new 32 bit mode option)

Lights Out Management

The lights-out-management (LOM) software is similar but slightly different than what ships on Sun’s Opteron machines (x4100/x4200/x4600).

To connect to the virtual console, you use

/-> start /SP/AgentInfo/Console (versus start /SP/Console in ILOM)

To tell what family of processor is installed, use

/-> show /SYS/cpu/cpu0

/SYS/CPU/CPU0
Targets:

Properties:
Designation = CPU 0
Name = Harpertown <— this is what I was trying to figure before to determine if a FW upgrade was needed

Speed = 3166MHz
Status = enabled

Performance

This box simply rocks. I installed a copy of Sun’s Directory Server Enterprise Edition software and did some quick tests. I was able to import a 5 million entry sample LDIF file in about 10 minutes and can run random searches against the 5m entries at about 17k searches/second, which is the fastest I have ever seen. Being able to squeeze (8) 10k RPM SAS disks, 16 DIMMs, 3 PCI-Express slots, and a DVD drive in 1 rack unit with (8) 3+ ghz cores is a pretty impressive feat.

Thursday: Watched Spirit of the Marathon with Mitch. (He looked at me knowingly when Deena Kastor was talking about the importance of stretching as we age). Went to the hotel gym after the movie. Did 5 mins of walking and then 1.5 miles of slow running as a warm-up. I decided to back off from the planned tempo pace to decrease a chance of my hamstring hurting. Inspired by the movie, I decided to try running for an hour at just under my Boston Qualifying pace (7:29/mile). I felt relatively comfortable at that speed, HR was hovering between 151-155 BPM. Just after 3 miles of BQ pace, I could feel a slight twinge in my left hamstring. I immediately switched to a very slow walk to cool-down. After heading back to my room I read a bunch about stretching.

Friday: Went down to the gym in the morning to hit the stationary bike for 10 mins as a warm-up , then did a few easy hamstring stretches and called it a day.

Saturday: Did a very slow warm-up on the treadmill at home and I could feel tightness in the hamstring so decided to ride a recumbent bike at the gym instead of running with my friends.   I felt like a bit of a wimp for not joining on the planned run, but I felt like the odds of the hamstring getting much worse definitely wasn’t worth it.

Overall Thoughts:  I’m feeling really frustrated since I am in good aerobic shape, but keep getting these nagging injuries that make me stop/reduce training for a few days at a time.  I’m going to stick with riding the bike through at least mid-week and ease into a regular stretching routine.  I think the bike riding I was doing 2 times every week when following FIRST consistently was probably helping my flexibility enough to stave off a a lot of the muscle/tendon problems that have been cropping up lately.  I’m also hoping that eventually the increase flexibility will help lengthen my short/choppy stride.

The Problem

I’ve been working at a customer’s site for the last few weeks and have been struggling to resist their buffet of free junk food. They have a fridge stocked with iced-tea and sodas as well as baskets full of cookies, candy, rice crispy treats, chips, and similar foods. Over the weekend I was thinking back to the extra ~ 3000 calories I probably ate from the “basket of temptation” the week before and wondering what strategy I could use to help fight the impulse to snack all the time.

The Solution

One of my friends has a system where, if you catch him doing some “self-identified bad behavior” (coming into work late, cursing, bad food choices,etc), he will often give you $1 (although he weasels out about 25% of the time which makes people less likely to call him on it). I thought I’d do a similar system for the snacking, but would up the penalty to something that is more painful. I decided to make it $5 a snack. The next piece was deciding whether to offer it as a bounty for my friends or just handle the accounting internally. I chose to keep my own tally, since it would be pretty clear to me if I had a snack or not, and I didn’t want to drag my friends into watching me or get an urge to sneak in a cookie when nobody was around. The next question was what to do with the penalty amount if I broke down. I first thought I’d give it to a charity I like, such as the Humane Society. But I realized that would allow me to justify snacking with the whole “well, it is going to a good cause” line of thinking. A friend of mine then came up with an excellent suggestion; pick a charity I really disliked. The thought of donating money to a charity whose mission is getting the biblical creation story intelligent design “theory” taught in public school science classrooms as an equivalent to evolution really annoys me.

The Result

The plan worked like a charm. I didn’t have a single cookie or snack all week. Even the aroma wafting from a tray of just-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies at the hotel I was staying at was not strong enough to overcome my resolve.

Monday: 5 min walk, 1.5 mile jog warm-up, 5.5 miles @ 7:00/mile pace (averaged 159 BPM), 10 min walk cool-down. Felt awesome aerobically, but my left hamstring started tightening up a bit towards the end.

Tuesday: Took an easy recovery day of 45 minutes on the stationary bike (averaged 120 BPM) to avoid hamstring stress.

Wednesday: 5 min walk warm-up, 6 miles at about an 8:30/mile pace (averaged 133 BPM), 5 min walk cool-down. No hamstring discomfort.

 Plan for tomorrow: Taking a friend to see Spirit of the Marathon and will do a tempo workout assuming I don’t feel any hamstring tightness.

My employer ordered one of the shiny new dual-socket quad-core 1U Sun x4150 machines to go into our loaner pool. Since we ordered a base model and a bunch of extra components, there was a whole pile of boxes waiting for me when I stopped by the office on Sunday. I spent about 45 minutes opening boxes and putting in the assorted components (added 14 sticks of RAM, 2nd processor + heat sink, 8 SAS drives, DVD drive, SAS RAID controller, extra power supply).

When I first tried booting Solaris 2008/07 on it, the machine hung before getting to the “Configuring devices” section. I went to the x4150 documentation center and looked at the x4150 Product Notes. Unfortunately the Product Notes used chip nick names, so I had to decipher if the CPUs installed were from the Harpertown family. The docs indicated that a firmware update was needed.

Updating the firmware ended up being a piece of cake. I downloaded and burned an ISO of the Sun Fire X4150 Tools & Drivers CD Version 1.1. You then boot off the CD-ROM and select the menu option which says to update the firmware. After doing this, the Solaris installer seemed to be running fine, but unfortunately I had to head out. I’ll try to test the machine out when I get back from Philly next week.

Google bait: x4150 hang hung failed

Saturday: Ran with Jon L at the Wildwood Lake Sanctuary near Harrisburg. There is a nice ~ 5k loop around the lake, about half of which has rolling hills (although they didn’t feel quite as rolling during the Harrisburg Marathon). One mile of the loop has a nice woodchip covered trail, but on Saturday morning it was covered with snow and a glaze of ice. We decided to stay on the paved part of the loop, and also twice ran the not-scenic-at-all-hence-the-name Industrial Road to go between the two ends of the park. It was a pretty nice distance and hill workout, we ended up covering 12.1 miles and averaged about an 8:36/mile clip.

MotionBased

Sunday: Met Nathan in Carlisle. We tried hitting the Carlisle Barracks, but the trail was too slippery, so we did a street run for 5 miles at about a 9:10/mile pace and then grabbed some breakfast at a diner. In the afternoon I played about 35 minutes of Racquetball with Mark. Mark won the first game (which was really the tie-breaker from last Sunday’s match), and the next game. I picked up the 3rd game of the day and then we had to call it quits.

Picked up a pair of Mizuno Wave Ascend 3′s at Philadephia Runner after lunch. These should give me decent footing at my first trail race, which is two weeks away. The ugly red color sort of goes with my horribly bright red Asics racing flats. There were some other shoes that looked less dorky, but I’ll take fit/feel over fashion for running apparel any day.

Workout: 5 minutes of walking + 5 miles of easy running + 5 minutes of walking

Had a great meal at Fogo with my wife. The meats were scrumptious, cheesy-rolls flaky good, and the chocolate mousse cake was just sublime. That meal probably made up for all the calories I’ve burned with exercise over the last week, but was worth it.

Plan for the weekend: No workout on Friday (need it after 6 days straight running, longest streak in a while). Going for 4 loops around the Wildwood Lake Sanctuary to get some good mileage + hills on Saturday morning. Not sure about Sunday, maybe a short easy run and hopefully some racquetball.

Another horrible weather day in Philly, but had a good tempo run on the treadmill. Definitely am glad I bought the footpod, the treadmill speed readings were optimistic by about 15-20 seconds compared to the footpod.

Warm-up: 5 minutes of walking + 1.5 miles of easy running

Tempo: 3 miles (6:45,6:42,6:31, average HR 168, max HR 179)

Cool-down: 2 minutes of walking + 1.5 miles of very easy running

Plan for tomorrow: 5-6 miles easy and then hitting Fogo de Chao for a Valentine’s Day dinner with my wife (who is traveling out from Harrisburg just to take me to dinner!)

The streets of Philly were covered in an icy slush and it was very slippery, so I was happy I had the option of running inside tonight. I did an easy run on the treadmill at the hotel. My left ankle was bugging me for a few minutes in the beginning, but then loosened up and I felt great.

Warm-up: 5 minutes of walking

Run: 4.5 miles starting at ~ 12:00 pace and working down to ~ 8:30 for last two miles (9:00 average pace, 125 average HR)

Cool-down: 5 minutes of walking

Podcast: Endurance Planet

Plan for tomorrow: 1.5 mile warm-up, 3 mile run at FIRST short tempo pace, 1.5 mile cool-down

I hope that by posting my workouts here and then saying what I plan to do tomorrow, it will help me think through my training plan and be less likely to go overboard.

I’ve stopped following the FIRST program since I enjoy the social aspect of running more than FIRST allows, but I’m still following some of their main workouts.