Sun – Week Fourty-Nine

Well, the weekend didn’t go well…The console server didn’t get upgraded as a package caused errors in the new BE…That was most of Saturday wasted…

Monday morning was spent turning everything back on after the weekend, it was a shame as I was hoping for the lab to be silent, but the AC was already on…

Tuesday and Wednesday was spent ironing out issues to do with the lab power cycle.

Thursday I looked at a borked KVM more, it doesn’t seem to be broadcasting anything on IPv4 or IPv6…I also fixed an intrusion switch that someone had broken…

Friday I went home early to catch the train back to Melksham for my sisters birthday.

Sun – Week Fourty-Eight

Monday begins after a sleepless night, it’s so bloody warm here…I spent the morning looking at our console server, remember I was going to upgrade it? After all the preliminary work I was really afraid to touch the real thing for fear of breaking it…Well I fixed a couple of problems with it and went ahead, re-labeling disks and creating volumes and mirrors using SVM. In the afternoon I looked at it a bit more and kicked off the copying of the boot environment (BE).

Tuesday I got in a looked at the console server, my ssh session had dropped…The new BE is currently in a bad state, so I can’t delete it, or overwrite it…I’ll need to see what I can do about that…
We also moved a load of stuff out of the overflow lab, and into the bin/cupboard/main lab…It was all because we were moving the SL700 to the end of the lab. I spent the afternoon cursing the warm weather and cleaning up the mess I made on the console server…

Wednesday was slow moving, warm are irritable.

Thursday I inserted a SCSI card into an ultra 20 among other bits and bobs.

Friday was spent turning off all the machines in the lab as electrical work was taking place over the weekend.  Seeing as the work was going on, the weekend was an opportune time to work on the console server without interrupting anyone.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 Released

It’s finally here! OpenSolaris 2009.06 has been released!

Head over to opensolaris.org to download the new iso, or run `pfexec pkg image-update` (no quotes) as the user you created when you installed your machine to upgrade your current installation.

Exciting new features include:

• Project Crossbow – Virtualise your network
• Firefox 3.1 (Beta 3)
• Elisa – Free media center
• Plus better hardware support and more!

If you are using the development repositories, start reaping the benefits of 2010.02 in the next few weeks!

Sun – Week Fourty-Seven

This week felt really long…And I don’t really recall everything which happened, so like last week, I’ll summarise.

Monday was a bank holiday, which was very lucky for me seeing as I missed my train back from Aber!

Tuesday I was back in the office and working on my booking script a bit more.

Wednesday was mainly spent looking at a problem with the 15k in the lab, it wasn’t playing nice with the console connection.  After some troubleshooting and a cable replacement, we were fine to go.

Thursday I started work with some broken KVM’s.  All of the x86 desktops don’t come with a serial line, this makes them very difficult to manage, so we attach network KVM’s for engineers to use (so they can see BIOS and a GUI if needed).  Several have broken so I spent the day getting them working, didn’t quite get them all done…

Friday I finished up another two KVM’s and looked at what the weekend was going to bring me, I was hoping to have a play with LDAP at hom, and maybe the Sun Ray server software…

Sun – Week Fourty-Six

This week was another short one I’ll just add highlights for this week.

Monday started with me being back on 9am starts.  I then started troubleshooting a problem with a server in America which seemed to sort itself out.

Tuesday I fixed several SP’s which had gotten themselves into a bad state and needed resetting by pulling the main power…

Wednesday I sorted out some net boot problems in the UK lab, one had previously been jump started with OpenSolaris and needed reconfiguring, another had an incorrect MAC address.

Thursday and Friday I was in Aber

Sun – Week Fourty-Five

Monday starts at 5:30 for me, and after getting in from Aber at 12:30, I wasn’t feeling too sharp…
I’m in early all this week so we can support early workers and people in Europe who are an hour ahead of us.
Today was spent doing some tickets, I had a couple about people not being able to install machines. I also had a short meeting with Simon from Aber about the report…

Tuesday I spent again helping install a number of boxes…I also linked up an x2250 to a 6140 and hooked up some gigabit Ethernet connections…

Wednesday was a blur as more tickets came through for help with installing machines. One interesting ticket was to install an Ethernet card into the new x2270 and hook it up t oa different network. I installed the card fine, and hooked the card up to the switch, but didn’t get to change it to a different network…

Thursday morning I came in to find that I get a 26B error on my Sun Ray session. There was some problems with various servers and NFS seemed to have gone away…A hour and a restart later, I was up and running again After all this, I managed to change the network on the x2270. I needed to log into the switch and change what VLAN it was on. Then I plumbed the switch itoo the network.

Sun – Week Fourty-Four

This week is excellent! Monday starts off as a bank holiday, and I have Thursday and Friday off!

Tuesday consisted of me pulling some vmware VM’s from a box in the lab. This shouldn’t have been difficult, but the box was running Linux, the VM’s were on a SCSI array, and the array had been made into one volume using LVM. There is hardly any documentation out there for LVM! Linux people, get your arse’s in gear and take a leaf out of the ZFS book for goodness sake! It reminds me a lot of what SVM used to be.
After finally getting the correct command I found I had to activate the volume, which took even more poking around on the net to find out what to do! After that it was just a case of mounting the volume.

Sun – Week Forty-Three

Monday starts off OK. Coming into work to find some tickets on the queue and some work to be done from last week.
My main ticket is setting up an x4100 over in the 02 lab for an engineer who wants to install VM’s. There is a problem with this, he wants to use Windows and whenever someone says that, there are always groans, why? Because Windows == licensing. He wants to use MSDN licenses, however, he isn’t the only user of the systems-to-be, so he needs to use volume licenses. We have an old VM machine which has valid volume licenses on, but I can’t access the VM files so I can’t transfer them…

Sun – Week Forty-Two

Monday morning starts with us meeting a newtern for next year. Alex is down for a weeks experience to get used to working at sun. As a result, I’ve not actually done that much this week.

Opensolaris Live USB Creator

Just been alerted to this: clicky

Though if you don’t have access to a Windows box, but do already have access (or know someone with access) to an OpenSolaris box, then this method works too.