Sun Fire X4500 and X4540

Revision as of 04:40, 9 January 2009

Hard disks

The Sun Fire X4500 has 48 SATA disks on standard SATA controllers (no RAID). It is hot swappable, and the systems are racked to allow them to be fully extended out on their rails while remaining powered on with network connectivity.

The OS drives are the two leftmost at the front (controller 5, disks 0 & 4), no other drives show in the BIOS during post.

The disks are (currently) configured as a RAID-Z pool in 9 striped sets of 5; total space is ~8TB. It's mounted at /export.

Replace a disk

To replace a disk, it must first be removed from the zpool. The easiest way to do this is to replace it with the hot spare. For example, if c7t6d0 is being removed, and c0t2d0 is the hot spare:

# zpool replace export c7t6d0 c0t2d0

Wait for the resilver to complete (it'll take a few hours; see 'zpool status' for progress). Then remove the disk from the pool:

# zpool detach export c7t6d0

Identify the disk in cfgadm and unconfigure it:

# cfgadm -l | grep c7t6d0
sata5/6::dsk/c7t6d0            disk         connected    configured   ok
# cfgadm -c unconfigure sata5/6
Unconfigure the device at: /devices/pci@2,0/pci1022,7458@8/pci11ab,11ab@1:6
This operation will suspend activity on the SATA device
Continue (yes/no)? yes

The blue LED on the disk should illuminate. Replace the disk, re-configure it, and add the new disk to the zpool as a hot spare:

# cfgadm -c configure sata5/6
# zpool add export spare c7t6d0

OS setup

This is how the OS (Solaris) is set up on the image servers (ms1/ms2).

Solaris 10 5/08 (Update 5) is installed. Docs are at http://docs.sun.com/.

Disks c5t0d0 and c5t4d0 (the two left-most at the front) are mirrored for the root slice and swap. (Reference: Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide)

For software not included in Solaris, we use the Toolserver software repository. This is in SVN at /trunk/tools/ts-specs. These are RPM spec files that can be built into Solaris packages with pkgtool.

$ pkgtool -v build-only --download TSwhatever.spec
$ su
# pkgadd -d $HOME/packages TSwhatever

Most software from this repository installs into /opt/ts. PHP is in /opt/php. (Config file: /etc/opt/php/php.ini)

Service management is done with the Solaris SMF (Service Management Framework) (Reference: Solaris Administration Guide)

List services:

# svcs -a

Find out why a service is in 'maintenance' state instead of 'online':

# svcs -vx <name>

Disable a service:

# svcadm disable <name>

Enable a service:

# svcadm enable <name>

Disable a service but leave it enabled on the next boot:

# svcadm disable -t <name>

Enable a service but leave it disabled on the next boot:

# svcadm enable -t <name>

Service name can be abbreviated, e.g. 'lighttpd' instead of 'svc:/network/lighttpd:lighttpd'.

Lighttpd is the same as amane. Config: /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. It's built from TSlighttpd in the Toolserver repo.

For OS upgrades and patching, Live Upgrade should be used. This creates copies of the running OS. List current LU boot environments:

root@ms1:~# lustatus
Boot Environment           Is       Active Active    Can    Copy      
Name                       Complete Now    On Reboot Delete Status    
-------------------------- -------- ------ --------- ------ ----------
s10b                       yes      no     no        yes    -         
s10a                       yes      yes    yes       no     -  

Re-initialise 's10b' (the inactive environment):

# lumake s10b

List patches:

# smpatch analyze

Apply patches to s10b and reboot:

# smpatch update -b s10b
# luactivate s10b
# init 6

Lights Out Management

The Sun X4500 uses iLOM.

The standard administrative account is root and the default password is changeme.

Common actions

Changing the root password

set /SP/users/root password=password

Serial console

start /SP/console

Power cycle

Reset:

reset /SYS

Power Off:

stop /SYS

Power On:

start /SYS

End the session with Esc-(

Setting an IP address for the network port of LOM

Login to the LOM over serial and run the following:

cd /SP/network 
set pendingipaddress=ipaddress
set pendingipnetmask=255.255.0.0
set pendingipgateway=10.1.0.1
set pendingipdiscovery=static
set commitpending=true

Once that is done, you should be able to connect over the management IP if it is plugged into the management network.

External links

• Sun X4500 documentation
• Sun Integrated Lights Out Manager 2.0 User's Guide