sun – DoogieLabs

Getting PCRE to compile on Solaris 9 SPARC

doogie

So there are some folks who are still trying to run modern things on old SPARC machines still. I pulled out my old Solaris server that I used to host a backup of my website back in 2013, dusted it off and booted it up.The web services came up flawlessly, just as they had worked then. However since a whole host of security vulnerabilities and code fixes had created a

E2900 / V1280 Enable GUI

doogie

I have a XVR-100 and a USB card installed in my E2900. To enable the graphical console login in Solaris 10 I have done the following post installation: #/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -e # svcadm enable # ln -s /dev/fbs/pfb0 /dev/fb # fbconfig -xserver Xorg # reboot I did repeat these steps after another install, and had some trouble. There may be a step missing but it might provide a clue to someone

SUN NVRAM / HostID: Re-programming SUN NVRAM after replacement.

doogie

This was originally posted at this address: http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.html (more…)

Time for a new workstation, well… old new

doogie

It has been a really long time since I've had a new desktop. Actually, because of the mobile nature of my life, being on the road and all; I have to use a laptop much of the time anyways. After being in North Carolina for an extended 2.5 year hiatus I returned to a workstation that wouldn't boot until after the third or fifth attempt. Eventually after it got used

“Military Rack”: Deployable servers and full network with wireless in a flight case.

doogie

One thing is for sure, we love our data. In modern society people use / need their data for various reasons. I have always been an advocate for personally keeping all my data and working from local copies versus storing stuff online. I have no problem with interacting online and sharing that information here, but if for some reason I were to no longer have an internet connection for any

Adding a service for a custom program in Solaris 10

doogie

This is another thing that I managed to forget, and then I had to remember what I was looking at all over again. Instead of init scripts, Solaris 10 uses services, or SMF. It uses a combination of XML and Shell scripts to start and stop services. In practice, it's actually really slick and I enjoy using it. When Debian and most other Linux flavors adopted something similar

Converting a non raid root filesystem to a RAID 0 or 1, and SPARC

doogie

This isn't a how to post, so much as a reminder for myself on how I was able to accomplish this. I have Debian wheezy installed on one of my SunFire V240 servers, and I didn't setup the RAID root initially when I was tinkering around with the server. After some research and fidgeting I was able to get things working swell. Debian dropping support for SPARC is saddening, especially

August Announcements!

doogie

You haven't been hearing from me because I have been busy as a MoFo. I have been packing up and making arrangements to move to Grand Rapids and take up my new position at The Geek Group as Director of Vehicular Sciences. I pick up the moving truck on the 15th of this month, and am leaving on the 19th of this month. I have been catching up on

ffmpeg on Solaris Sparc, is very useful!

doogie

SO I had a video that I took while filming the stuff for the Talon, it was a camstudio encoded video that I filmed of the data logging software so I could sync the logs with the video. Since my video editing PC balked at opening the format, I decided to break out the Ultrasparc processors to have them stretch their legs on a little video exercise. I fire up

It’s going to be a busy month!

doogie

New Online Shopping Cart has been setup! I have been working hard at getting a real online store front end setup on this site. To a point it is for testing and self education, if someone needs a site with a good online shopping cart and doesn't want to pay a pretty penny, I have figured out just the solution that will work. With that being said, the online store

Doogie, what the shibobbies are you doing to your site?

doogie

If you read my last post (if you were even able to) you'll notice that things have been slated for a change here on the server. Before moving any other websites to the virtual host configuration scenario I must do some testing first. I figured in this case it would be easiest to just monkey around with it on my production site, and it has produced some rather, well, interesting

Happy New Year! / Janurary Update

doogie

Happy new year! With 2013 now here and the fact that we're all still alive, we can focus on things other than holiday stuff. Back to the grind. What's up with me? It has been sometime since I've blabbered on about some sort of update. I thought about making a video one but at the same time I'm not sure that people would enjoy my YouTube being cluttered up with

New DoogieLabs Solaris Tools!

doogie

DoogieLabs Solaris Tools v0.2 has been officially released! Solaris Tools now includes Solaris Backup Utilities version 0.93! After some more adjustments the program now sits just over 3,000 lines of code. most features are working and just needs further testing and ironing out of bugs. Actually short of the logging and a couple of minor things it's almost time for version 1.0! There are a couple of additional menu options,

Vintage Collection: Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000

doogie

Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000 [DoogieLabs Vintage Computer Collection] I picked up an Enterprise 3000 that had been sitting at the recycle for a few months. Everytime I saw it I passed it up because I couldn't spend a great deal of money on something that's well, useless. However, this very last time it was made available to me for what basically amounts to scrap value so I finally accepted the

News and ramblings 11-27-2012

doogie

The site looks a little bit different? Indeed, I was actually able to take some time and get some material posted up which is very nice. I basically sat at home over the entire holiday weekend and messed around with computer stuff. I did some performance tweaking on the server, a little bit more programming, installed an OS on an old Alpha machine, and a few other things. It was

Solaris ZFS Fun!

doogie

I have been working to make some fundamental changes to the DoogieLabs site and server. It was recommended to be by a friend to check out ZFS, he said I had no idea what I was missing. He was very right indeed, and after some research I uncovered something additional. No standard RAID 5 is actually reliable, especially the metadb version that I was using with ufs. CLICK HERE for

DoogieLabs Solaris Tools

doogie

DoogieLabs Solaris Tools & Utilities Current Release: Download Solaris Tools v0.2 / December 2012 Older Releases: Download Solaris Tools v0.1 I have been using some of these tools with my Solaris box ever since I got it initially, and now that I've worked hard on a backup program I figure I can release it and allow for people who want to use it on their Sparc Solaris box. How to

HOWTO: Setting up the RSC Console

doogie

Setting up the RSC Console Some sun servers include what's called an RSC Card. RSC stands for "Remote System Control" and provides a way to "white switch" a server without actually having to be at the facility it's located at. The RSC Card is basically a self contained computer containing serial ports, ethernet, and a modem. One serial port is linked to the system directly, and allows access to the

Upgrade for the V880!

doogie

I got the cable in that I have been wanting for a very long time. . I decided to make a video of the installation process, pretty neat! I ran a UnixBench routine at the end for a real world filecopy example. I have noticed that there is a slight performance hit when copying to the raid versus a a single disk. I suspect that this is because it is

Late Sept News Part I and SGI Woes

doogie

SGI, HPC with cost as no object; but what did reliability cost? SGI has been a very interesting new road for me, it was the better part of 10 years before I was able to clinch ahold of Octane2 un-obtainium. After gaining a better understanding of how the Octane / Onyx racks work with their NUMA Link and Crossbars, I knew that I wanted to have one as a server.

News and Blog for September 5th, 2012

doogie

With the Sun Server at home, work has been a bit crippling especially when combined with moving. As some of you know, I have been using SunRays in my shop ultimately consolidating the number of full computers I would need running around the place. Now I have found myself in a situation where I'll be working in a separate place completely on electronics design, computer issues, etc. I want a

pbzip2, Multithreaded bzip2 application

doogie

Since I have a MASSIVE amount of parallel processing at my disposal it can come in real handy when working with extremely large files. This week I recovered a full terrabyte drive that had a completely hosed NTFS partition on it. After dd'ing the entire disk into an image and recovering the files it's time to format the drive an put our recovered data back onto the disk. The corrupted

Blog and news for Sunday, August 6th 2012

doogie

Well hello hello Not too much to report, started moving stuff out and scrapping that last of the junk that's laying around here so I don't need to take it with me anywhere. I have been working on potentially securing an office space downtown but with both bank accounts empty I really don't know how things are going to work out. Maybe a miracle, maybe I'll make it on my

Blog and news for Friday, July 22nd 2012

doogie

Maintenance Notice! The Icebox server will be moved to a new location no later than August 31st, 2012. We expect the move to take a few hours and there will be minimal service interruption. We expect the move to take place on a Sunday evening. Please continue to check back and I'll post an exact date and time once arrangements have been made. Whats up! Things have been very busy

How to read and write data from and to tapes in Solaris / Unix / Linux

doogie

I did not write this myself, This lovely howto was originally located at: http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/hvoss/TapeHowto.html .. However since it was wiped clean off their website I decided to re-post everything in its entirety here. Thanks Hauke for writing such a wonderful how-to probably a very long time ago. To everyone else, enjoy :-) This How-To describes the commands to be used to write data on a tape and how to retrieve

News and Blog for Monday, June 11th 2012

doogie

PAYPAL SHOPPING CART UPDATE: I have been made aware of an issue with the PayPal shopping cart where when you click on the checkout button you are left with a blank page. After combing the server logs on this issue and finding nothing, I finally caught a break last night when testing in the latest internet explorer, it gave me an error message regarding opening a secure page in a

News and Blog for Tuesday, May 22nd 2012

doogie

Working away getting more done. I have some new stuff to share, I have picked up some vintage computer goodies. I am now the proud owner of a pair of functional Silicon Graphics machines (Octane 2 and O2) which [caption id="attachment_606" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="I may be in windows, but most time is spent in Solaris"][/caption] I also haven't really shared my new alarm panel

SunFire V250 Power Supply Repair is complete!

doogie

Here is the video of the repair, I liked how fast the time lapse turned out, it's really cool;

News and Blog for Thursday, May 7th 2012

doogie

Back after a very hard week! Some of you may have noticed that last week the icebox server was down and unavailable for use. This was actually a result of my boneheadedness in thinking that a 25watt PCI card is some how hot pluggable. Compound this with being sick at the beginning of the week, so that brings us to story time: As many of you know I have been

Doing more work, more goodies coming!

doogie

Quick silly random update / preview of some stuff coming down the pipeline since I'm off this weekend, whooray! If anyone needs this done on their Sun Machine, please get in touch with me. This will also be added soon once I get the shopping cart all working and in order; Play safe, Doogie

Power supply cap order list

doogie

So this is more my personal notes, buuuuut then I thought about it and this may actually be handy to someone else wanting to fix an expensive power supply. This is the list of Capacitors and values that one would need to order up when recapping this power supply. Use your ESR meter, you'll likely find the larger filter caps okay, but the small 2.2µ, 4.7µ, and 10µ will not

News & Blog for Tuesday, April 3rd 2012

doogie

Whats up everyone! Summer is getting closer, its nice to see it consistently warm outside. Then with yesterdays snow, I was reminded how much I REALLY like it when it's warm outside. I really hope that it's here to stay. Does anyone remember Pine, or alpine? This may seem a little weird but I'm still a fan of using the txt console for everything. Burning CDs, e-mail, web pages, its

March Video Blog! whaaa

doogie

That's right, I've got a video setup that finally seems to work a treat, so I've been stepping it up. I figured it out, I could sit here and talk all day long in text that I can do this or that, or I can on the other hand film what I'm actually capable of, and then when I post my ads on Craigslit or hand out a business card

Critical Mass

doogie

So I found out that more rent is owed at the shop than I was expecting since my partner backed out. I am ready to sign the new lease, but need to get this paid first. Time to kick it into high gear! I am a bit of a slacker in getting the tour video of the mobile PCs finished, but have listed them on Craigslist. I have listed the

New Video! Tour of my SunFire V880

doogie

I decided to post up a video showing the ins and outs of my Sun Server. I am actually almost finished up with everything on it. IF YOU KNOW ANYONE THAT HAS THE SUN PCi II Drivers PLEASE LET ME KNOW ASAP! I cannot find them anywhere online thanks to a once awesome computer company going out of business. Anyways, enjoy: I am also working on a video for the

New Server!

doogie

So with the Server issues that I have had it got me thinking about more expensive hardware, the good stuff. Computers that are meant to be servers, designed with fault tolerance and built with decently branded components to avoid the cap explosion that killed the Powerhouse server, and the generation of server before that. I do get that to some degree I will never be able to avoid these issues,