CPU1 on ROJ experienced an error last night which caused the system to record a crash dump and reboot. I opened a support case with Sun, and this is apparently a problem with the UltraSPARC II chip that is acceptable if it happens once, but further occurrences would warrant a replacement of the CPU.
Sun has recorded this case in their Best Practices Database; the case number is 64806912. They have system logs for reference, indicating the affected CPU. If this happens again, we should reference this case number so that support can determine whether a CPU replacement is necessary.
I just replaced the batteries on PACO and ROJ’s A1000 RAID arrays.
ROJ’s battery had actually gone bad, and both were beyond the expiration date. Both were covered under our maintenance contract.
To replace the batteries, the unit must be powered off. The replacement is simply sliding out the old canister and sliding in the new one. Once the system has been restarted, the command ‘raidutil -c target -R’ must be executed to reset the battery age counter on the device.
I also removed the two extra 36 GB drives from ROJ that we had gotten for the AMANDA backups. These will be used in EYEWI for addition onto the disk storage unit.
Drive [1,3] on the A1000 array failed on 9/13/2003 and the host spare [1,0] kicked in. The replacement drive (Seagate) arrived on Friday and I installed it first thing this morning. The array rebuilt itself and is currently back to normal operation.
Drive replacement on these things is simple: snap out the old, snap in the new. It doesn't have to be powered down or brought into any kind of standby mode.
Testing indicates that future work for these arrays may be battery replacement.
I installed a libxml2 package on PACO and ROJ for development purposes.
Used the GPlxml and GPlxmlx packages, version 2.4.25 for Solaris 8 from Gary Pennington.
I have, or am very close to having, a working Jumpstart system for Solaris 8 servers.
ROJ is the Jumpstart server, and the relevant directory trees are /export/home/jumpstart and /export/home/jump_5.8. The former is the global Jumpstart area (useful for all versions of Solaris), while the latter is specific for Solaris 8.
Much of the Jumpstart system is standard, with slight modifications as described by Hal Pomeranz. The local modifications are in the post-install script and the Solaris 8 extra packages directory.
The post-install script is in /export/home/jumpstart/Drivers/5.8/sparc-v120/post. It's somewhat complex and governs the fine-tuning of the Jumpstart installation. Its first task is to ask the admin for a local profile (currently Generic and DirectoryServer are supported). It uses this profile to set various options, including which package sets to install and what rcs.mgr profile to load (see below). Some profiles may also request RADIUS client information.
The best documentation is in the post-install script, however the overview is that it installs various packages, creates some further startup scripts to run security stuff (fixmodes, the rcs.mgr, disabling rc?.d scripts) and then exits. The system reboots, and then runs the startup scripts created by the post-install script. One of these will likely be the installation of the latest recommended patch cluster, which will take a long time and force another reboot. The rcs.mgr initialization will also force a reboot (for things like /etc/system).
After the various reboots, you should have a base system tuned for the purpose indicated by the local profile. Note that you may still need to install software, as some things are best installed by hand (e.g. iPlanet Directory Server, Oracle 9i, WebDB code...).
The Solaris 8 extra packages directory is /export/home/jump_5.8/Packages. I have copied the latest versions of various Sunfreeware.com packages here, along with a few packages maintained by me (ECS*) and the DiskSuite packages. These are in filesystem format. The post install script selects various packages from here for installation.
The other part of this directory is the rcsmgr-snap directory. This contains rcs.mgr initialization files for each of the post-install profiles. There is one directory within here for each profile (or a symbolic link pointing to the Generic directory). This directory has tuned install files for rcs.mgr for that profile. The post-install script copies these, along with the initialization script and configuration file to the Jumpstart client so that they may be installed after reboot.
Upgraded Samba on all systems except MIR on Friday morning.
PACO and ROJ are using Sunfreeware.com packages (requires the popt package). All others are using FreeBSD packages built on my workstation.
On installation on SHANTI, it somehow overwrote all individual entries in the smbpasswd file such that passwords were null and accounts were disabled. Restored from previous night's backup.