Wednesday, September 19, 2018

The History of why I shouldn't buy things I don't know too much about or how I learned to configure a Sun Server SunFire v100


Introduction:

This paper contains information regarding the initial opening, setup and deployment of a Sun Server SunFire v100. The paper may or will contain technical terminology including detailed information regarding every step taken on how everything was performed.

Opening:
The server came wrapped in bubble wrap, packing peanuts, air bags and was inside a cardboard box, the item is as described and as shown in the pictures provided by the eBay seller, it is a SunFire v100 Server, no rails included, has mounting ears, one of them has some oxide, on the back there is a Sun card which is used for configurations, the inside is in great shape and clean, seems as if it had been recently pulled out of production. Inside there are two IDE hard drives, 40 GB each, with 2GB of PC133 RAM split up in 4 modules of 512MB each one. The processor seems to be mounted with the heatsink but to avoid moving or messing with anything at this point, no cable has been included or any other accessories are available with this item. Final cost of item was 35 USD on July 2018 of which 12.50 USD was the cost of the item itself, the rest was for shipping and handling. This item was opened on July 14th, Saturday, 2018.

Setup:
Connecting the server to a light source did not turn it on as it is with most servers nowadays, there is a switch but it was not flipped, to connect to the console a Toshiba Satellite machine with Windows 98 and serial port was used, a DB9 to RJ45 cable was used to connect to A/LOM on the back of the server, as it turns out LOM indicates that the server is on stand by mode through most of the commands and can power on through this method, doing so does power on the server and a full boot up took the server onto Solaris 5.10 which was configured with an AT&T business IP address, there was no information available or anything critical leftover on the server two hard drives.

Rebooting the server did not bring the system back to its original mode, it would seem as if the server has fallen back into net mode for no apparent reason and wants to forcibly boot into a PXE Server or some other server that will provide it a kernel so that it can work (this seems to be normal from back in the day on what Sun was doing). Going through the options it seemed logical to install another OS into the Server since Solaris was not working properly and the version, while still supported, was of no use to me and I would rather have anything else than this, such as Debian or Gentoo.

One of the initial issues found with the system, aside from the problem of not booting up, was making the Sunfire v100 stop trying to boot through net and go into anything else, on the LOM prompt this can be done first typing on the LOM prompt bootmode forth, this will stop the current boot process and take us to the OpenBoot prompt, in order to get to this prompt the Sunfire v100 has to be powered on (LOM>poweron).

Once the server has been halted it is easy to boot from the CD (or DVD, depending on what you may have on your machine, by the looks of it this has been somewhat rigged to use a slim CD-ROM but it could easily use a CD/DVD Burner from the looks of it, while I do have some slim readers/burners I have no intention of burning any CD/DVDs from this machine at this point), type the command boot cdrom and it should go into the CD, in my case it would not read the CD or would give me the error Fast Data Access MMU miss with, by all means, could mean that anything is not working properly inside the server and thus this is why it is not booting up.

Following some instructions I first disabled the auto-booting, this can be done (as indicated in this link: https://it.toolbox.com/question/fast-data-access-mmu-miss-in-sunfire-v120-061010) by doing setenv diag-level? max, then, setenv auto-boot? False, then, reset-all. If all commands are followed correctly the server will throw up all the things that it is currently doing and will not boot towards anything, it will simply reach the OpenBoot prompt and stay there (I have yet to find a way for ALOM to forward logs to a SIEM or any other log storage method so that these can be read elsewhere).

While doing so I got a warning about a possible issue with RAM, DIMM0 was the probable culprit per the initial boot-up so after shutting it down I removed it and booted back, the error still came up but I ignored it, at this point I wish I had not lost a whole day figuring out what to do when the error was in front of me the whole time.

Booting to a CD worked, I had issues probing for the drives but I decided to ignore it (later this issue would be resolved through a different method as provided by Oracle on some documentation they still have on their website). It took about a whole day for Debian to run the installation and in the end crashed, OpenBSD and NetBSD did the same, I had looked at a YouTube channel, Backyard Tech, in which he explains to another user the possible issues he could be facing with a Sunfire v120 (originally I had only intended to buy the Sunfire v120 but I found the Sunfire v100 at about the same price so I also went for it, the Sunfire v120 is another story that required a whole different document to explain the ordeal it will be to get it to work). One of the things he had mentioned was to burn the CD as slow as possible to have the least amount of errors, one of the steps I took to make sure that the system would load, but had mixed results. Having the Sunfire v120 at hand I changed the CD-ROM but found the same results with the CD which made me suspicious of the internal controller.

Since I had no way to change the controller or do anything else at this point I went back to square one and removed all the RAM, in the end the problem with the server was indeed the RAM, it would seem that either some of the sticks or ports were not working properly, leaving only one stick of RAM, on DIMM 3 (remember that RAM is inserted from back to front not the other way around, this is important and is notated on the documentation and the images provided on the cover plate of the Sunfire v100). At the moment 512.

A link with assistance on configuration of OpenBoot can be found here, the website contains all the necessary information to properly configure OpenBoot to boot to the correct disk once formatting has been performed and also to troubleshoot properly since I was originally not able to probe for SCSI or IDE drives, once the procedure was followed everything was showing up and working fine, boot up now takes me directly to Debian when turning it on so there is no real necessity at this point to go through the Windows 98 machine to work on LOM, this is being used only to monitor resources consumption at the moment: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2731/gkkvd.html.

With Debian installed there is another issue, installing it was no issue, interestingly it would not pickup the repository for sparc64 from the ports repository, could not add it manually either at that point so running with whatever the netinst CD had was what needed to be done at this point, the site for the sparc64 port indicates that some commands need to be run in order to get the proper software installed once the source.list file is corrected (all the information can be found here: https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64). The problem in the end is that the security repository for sid is not working, not sure why this is, and there is a considerable lack of packages available for the platform. While I could install apache2 and the compilers through build-essential, python3 and pip3, the packages for MariaDB Server 10.1, MongoDB or any other database aside from PostgreSQL are missing, as a matter of fact most of the libraries required to build MariaDB are missing from the Debian repository, for the last two days (Thursday 19th and Friday 20th) I have been compiling libraries to get MariaDB to run on the Sunfire v100. I know I could use SQLite or PostgreSQL but I would like to have MySQL/MariaDB available in my current Debian build

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