After my first tries to speak to my SunFire T2000 weren’t exactly successful, I went out and bought a DB9 gender changer. This did cost me €8.19 which is a clear rip-off. I could have ordered it online for far less but what do you do when you want something *now*? Anyway. I connected the gender changer to my homemade cable and finally was able to link the Sun to one of my Linux machines. I hooked up the four gigabit ports to my Netgear GS 524T and did the same with the ethernet management port. Then I connected the Sun to the mains for the first time.
However, other than stated in the manual, there were no characters appearing on the display of the terminal. After checking the pin layout of the cable as well as the general connection I was able to locate the source of the problem. Of all machines available to me I picked the one as terminal where I for some forgotten reason had disabled the serial ports in BIOS. Duh. So after fixing this and giving power to the Sun again, I was finally able to speak to the Sun.
Sidenote: While I found the documentation to be excellent I really missed a note telling me whether it was ok to just pull the plug when I realized that I couldn’t communicate with the management port. Technically, it shouldn’t be a problem since the whole management sits on a card of its own, is flash based and the real machine isn’t powered up at that point of the setup process. Still, a note would have been nice.
This time it worked like a charm. So I went on configuring the management interface as told by the documentation. Only to find out after entering the information about IP address, netmask and gateway address that I could have used DHCP as well (a note about that in the docs would have been nice, too). With the network management port set up, I continued using the terminal of my Mac and telnet to configure the gigabit ports of the Sun. Bad idea. I either picked the wrong terminal type or the Mac does something differently. Anyway, the result was some really messed up screens (sorry, no pictures) but I managed to set the ports up.
First Run
The first thing I noticed after firing up the T2000 using the “poweron” command was the increased noise level. Don’t get me wrong. Sun states that the SunFire T2000 Coolthreads produces less noise than every other Sun server, and that’s true. It doesn’t even produce more noise than my x86 servers. It’s just that the noise is on a different frequency and thus the Sun “feels” louder than my PC servers – but only a bit. So I guess if you would fill a whole data center with T2000s you wouldn’t notice a difference to x86 servers but would notice a big difference to older Sun machines.
Since the machine was basically unconfigured except for the network ports, I wasn’t able to connect via SSH right away. So I reverted to the use of the management console to grab a command prompt using “console -f” and look around on the machine a bit.
Coming from a strong Linux background I found the general directory layout to be familiar enough to easily navigate the system. I tried some commands and found them to almost behave like I expected them to. Maybe it’s best described as a mixture of Linux and BSD with some Sun peculiarity mixed in (I see Sun gurus wincing now ;)). For there were only the bare minimum of services running and no user accounts defined on the box, I decided to leave it at that for the moment and do some serious reading of the Solaris Admin Guide to learn how to enable the services I’d like to run. I guess I could have done this by reading the man pages, too. But why should I waste my time when there’s such a lot of really excellent documentation available online?
[ All posts about my experiences with the SunFire T2000 >>> ]
