Nekochan Net

Hello,
Two weeks ago I received I new toy: a Red Blade 1500. I bought it without power supply thinking to get a beutiful case only.

Surprisingly, after the installation of ATX power supply with no 'supplemental power suply connection' the machine booted fine and I was able to install Solaris 10 8/11.

prtdiag -v shows no hardware errors and DVD-ROM, front and additional PCI USB ports are working. So, Is the supplemental power supply connection needed? Is just marketing to sell original spares?

Another thing: I fell this machine noisy. Similar to my Fuel. Is this normal? I thought these machines were less noisy... BTW after upgrading with 2 GB of RAM (came with 512MB) I feel this Blade is a fast machine, more than I expected! (very happy because it cost 8 euro + shipping!!!!)

_________________
Alberto

http://www.f3b.es
http://unixverse.blogspot.com

My initial guess (based on everything seeming to work, but my not owning a 1500) is that the additional power connection is there because Sun found that the machine can overdraw the capacity of the main power connection. Whether it would do that slightly under normal load or whether it is only with a fully loaded machine is a question for the engineers, but there's a chance that you might be stressing something running it without the additional power connector.

You can probably wire one up with little difficulty and not have to worry about it anymore.

_________________
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

Can't say you regarding 1500, but for 2500 Red i was forced to wire-out (since i didn't have original PSU) supplemental connection, or machine didn't want to start at all. I will join SAQ opinion in case with 1500.

_________________
, and another bits of my collection.

If this was a machine built before the mid '90s I'd be a bit more loose, but anymore companies tend not to put anything into a machine that they don't have to. If they spent the money to put it there, there's a reason - though again it might only be for a fully-loaded config.

_________________
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

Perhaps this is because the DVD-ROM and the hd's are taking power from the motherboard to avoid loose wires.
I checked the connector and seems that cutting an standard ATX 20 pin plug to keep only 12 pins and rewiring it must be enough.
I did some more test tonight: moved the XVR-100 one PCI slot down (33 MHz) and installed a LSI SAS 3080X-R in the upper slot with a 150 GB WD Raptor. The previous Solaris installation detected the hard disk without problems but the DVD installer not

I will do more test this weekend.

_________________
Alberto

http://www.f3b.es
http://unixverse.blogspot.com

How it was on 2500 in my case: http://tinyurl.com/3lvmz7l http://tinyurl.com/3hc3upy

_________________
, and another bits of my collection.

Hola Titox

The machine is likely noisy as the CPU has not power management enabled and running at 100% (you may do a dmesg and see CPU high temp warnings?)

Edit /etc/power.conf so it looks like this.... not exactly like this of course as your disk config may be different.....

#
# Copyright 1996-2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
# Use is subject to license terms.
#
#pragma ident "@(#)power.conf 2.1 02/03/04 SMI"
#
# Power Management Configuration File
#

device-dependency-property removable-media /dev/fb
autopm enable
cpupm enable
cpu-threshold 1s
# Auto-Shutdown Idle(min) Start/Finish(hh:mm) Behavior
autoshutdown 30 9:00 9:00 noshutdown
device-thresholds /pci@1e,600000/ide@d/dad@0,0 900s
device-thresholds /pci@1e,600000/ide@d/dad@1,0 900s
# Statefile Path
statefile /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/dump


This REALLY helped me on my 1500 Red that now sounds quiet.... I worked the above out by googling about Solaris Power management... by default my /etc/power.conf had nothing enabled and it resulted in a really LOUD machine!

Didn't know you could use a standard ATX supply... thanks... I'll bear this in mind if my PSU fails at some stage!

_________________
"Scud" East
Sun Blade 2500 'Silver' Workstation - Dual 1.6 USIIIi, 4GB, 146GB SCSI, Solaris 10U9
Sun V210, 2x1.33 USIIIi, 8GB, 73GB 15K, Solaris 10U9
Sun V100, USIIi 550, 1.5GB, 40GB, Debian Lenny 5.X

Yes, this is what I'm thinking.

I did the modification but still very noisy. I have to change the rear fan.

More tests: I labeled the WD Raptor with the format utility and I installed Solaris on it but the OBP doesn't recognize the SATA controller/hd. Updated the PROM from 4.13.5 to 4.17.1 and SATA still not booting. Unfortunately I don't have access to the latest PROM. And now my 2GB RAM DIMMs are not working, I have to stay with the original 512MB.

I tried to go back to 4.13.5 OBP but I can't boot the flash tool (updated before with .sh script). Tomorrow I will install an old version of Solaris and I'll try to flash the PROM with the old version.

Thank you for your answers.

_________________
Alberto

http://www.f3b.es
http://unixverse.blogspot.com

yes, the DIMM CL thingy changed at around 4.15.X I think... this annoyed a *LOT* of people!

_________________
"Scud" East
Sun Blade 2500 'Silver' Workstation - Dual 1.6 USIIIi, 4GB, 146GB SCSI, Solaris 10U9
Sun V210, 2x1.33 USIIIi, 8GB, 73GB 15K, Solaris 10U9
Sun V100, USIIi 550, 1.5GB, 40GB, Debian Lenny 5.X

That's why i never updated PROM on my Sun machines. If everything works, better to not touch it. Sun liked to add limits besides additions

_________________
, and another bits of my collection.

Finally I had access to the OBP 4.30.4a and the SATA disk is not bootable, as expected. I did some searches on the Net and I found some vendors claiming that the SCSI PCI cards from Sun are not bootable too.

I don't understand why Sun did this. I can understand that the Blade 1500 was an -very- entry level workstation and they wanted to sell with IDE, but closing any different upgrade path is a bit malicious. I don't want to chage the actual IDE hard disk but I like to have SCSI or SATA option when it die. Wondering if a FC disk will boot.

Well, I installed Solaris 10 3/05 in an spare disk and then the OBP 4.13.5 patch was run fine, now I have 2.5GB RAM what is better than SATA or SCSI disk.

_________________
Alberto

http://www.f3b.es
http://unixverse.blogspot.com

Sun makes several different types of cards. Some are "semi-bootable" in that the OBP on certain machines has built-in support for the chip. The best example of this is the 53C875 card in the Darwin machines (U5/10 and possibly more, though it has to be a straight reference implementation and not a OEMed one with any changes). On most PCI machines the support is built in to the OBP, so plug it in and your're good to go. If your PROM doesn't have '875 support then you've got a userdrive-only bus.

Sun and aftermarketers also make some cards with OBP extension PROMS onboard, so they'll plug into any Sun with a compatible bus - Sun did this with their PCI Ultra SCSI/Fast Ethernet card (ISP1040 chip, so support not built in on many machines), and I have an aftermarket U160 card in my U10 that uses the same mechanism.

I can't give you a list of SAS cards that have OBP suppport in them, but looking around might net you one, or perhaps a flash trick that will work on a PC card.

_________________
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

I used the raidctl tool to flash the LSI SAS card without success, raidctl only says 'error'. No explanation.

I'm using SAS3080X but Sun/Oracle sells the SAS3801X renamed as Sun SG-XPCI8SAS-E-Z. From User's Guide of the Sun's card only the Blade 2500 is supported. That's has two external plugs and supports up to 8 hard disks while my SAS3080X is all internal. Both ones are made with the same chip so I think they are the same card with differet plugs to connect the hard disks. One is all external and the other all internal but the same system from a logical view. Maybe I'm not using raidctl flash tool correctly.

_________________
Alberto

http://www.f3b.es
http://unixverse.blogspot.com

If only the Blade 2500 is supported then there's a good chance that the OBP firmware resides in the Blade 2500 and not the card.

_________________
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

I got some enlightenment about this theme.


So, Titox, i got fcode image from this guy, if you're need it, let me know, i will give you a link for download via PM.
P.S.: I don't have any info did he get a success with using this controller on this particular machine with Solaris. You should check it by yourself

_________________
, and another bits of my collection.