Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Nevada b23 on IBM Blade HS20 or trading swap for DVD

Well, I recently started at new place. There are many Linuxes here and quite few Solarises. Exactly one. And I had an interesting experience installing Solaris Nevada b23 on it. The machine is a IBM Blade Server HS20 (Nice thing, BTW). The DVD it equipped with is conected via USB and trust me - it is slooow. So when I installed b22 on it a week ago I just burned CDROM 1 of 4 and did a minimal installation. Now, when b23 is out I downloaded all 4 images and setup_install_server'ed it into this machine. At this point I realized that it would be not so simple to upgrade this machine - I didn't want to go through CDROM installation once again (I didn't even had 4 blank media for burning all the images!). And there is some weird problem with mounting NFS share from Linux on Solaris. To make it worth I was running out of time on that specific evening. So I had to come up with some idea pronto. And here is what I did:
I released swap partition (~ 2GB - I was lucky!), newfs it and copied the installation image into it. Then I booted off CD1 and when it asked for starting the installation I umounted the CDROM and mounted my ex-swap partition on /cdrom. Then I continued with installation and choose [currently mounted] swap partition as "preserved" and not mounted anywhere. That appeared to be enough. The installation went happilly on and I went home. Next morning I found system installed.

And here is what prtdiag tells about it :


# prtdiag
System Configuration: IBM IBM eServer BladeCenter HS20 -[8832M1X]-
BIOS Configuration: IBM -[BSE120AUS-1.07]- 09/27/2004

==== Processor Sockets ====================================

Version Location Tag
-------------------------------- --------------------------
Intel Xeon Socket 1 CPU 1
Intel Xeon Socket 2 CPU 2

==== Memory Device Sockets ================================

Type Status Set Device Locator Bank Locator
------- ------ --- ------------------- --------------------
DDR in use 1 DIMM1 Slot 1
DDR in use 1 DIMM2 Slot 2
DDR in use 2 DIMM3 Slot 3
DDR in use 2 DIMM4 Slot 4

==== On-Board Devices =====================================
ATI Rage XL
Ethernet 1 Broadcom 5704 Ethernet Controller
Ethernet 2 Broadcom 5704 Ethernet Controller
IBM Automatic Server Restart - Integrated System Management Processor
Q-Logic FibreChannel Card

==== Upgradeable Slots ====================================

ID Status Type Description
--- --------- ---------------- ----------------------------

1 comment:

napobo3 said...

nice trick, huh !..