[SunRescue] SPARCserver+SSA Questions (lots :)

[sparcy]

Hey people,

> > Sorry for the late reply, I've been working my butt of the last couple of
> > days :(
> 
> I know what you mean. I have been working my ass off extra-time, 15-20+
> extra hours/week.
> I'm beginning to notice the difference in efficiency daytime. :-(

Don't you hate it ? We have been getting a lot of new users on our system
(I'm a HP-UX sysadm in a university hospital, Neuro Imag. dep) and they
tend to do all the things they are not supposed to, this along with the
usual tasks (e.g. me screwing up another root partition ;) tend to keep
you working looooooooong hours ... it sucks :)
 
> > > Another thing which might confuse you is that the SM61 and SM81 have a
> > > huge heatsink which covers both the CPU and the cache controller,
> > > assuming (visually) 'just one CPU'. Atleast some (or almost all) of the
> > > SM41 and SM51 have two seperate heatsinks, one on each chip, which could
> > > confuse things. (visually looking as 'two CPUs')
> > > Sounds like you have the 1000-model, without the 'E'.
> > 
> > Hmmm, well there are 2 black 'circles' for each CPU (e.g. the cpu and the
> > cache controller) and then there are 2 additional silver 'plates' - these
> > are the extra heat sinks ? (since they are quite far away from the actual
> > chip)
> 
> They might be heatsinks for the voltage controlles, which might get
> awful hot because of these CPUs.
> I really have no idea.

Hmm, I don't know either, there isn't any text on them so it's hard to
figure out from the board itself, they are 'true' heatsinks tho so
they must be cooling something ... I did find the same things on one
of your pictures, look at the SPARCserver_1000E_3.jpg image, the 3 shiny
round things are the same things.

My sister has one of those digital camera things, when she gets back
from her holiday I'll steal the thing and make some pictures myself
of all this stuff.
 
> > All disks are Seagate Barracude except those 3 which are Quantum disks,
> > this probably explains it too, I always found Quantum disks to be of
> > poor quality. (I crashed 2 quantum bigfoot's in one year in my PC)
> 
> I have had no problems with Quantum drives, although Cuda's here at work
> tend to die one by one now. :-(
> All Digital/Compaq disks are now Quantum Atlas IV disks, so I guess
> they've temporarly left Seagate for a while. (RZ26 1GB were Quantums,
> RZ29B 4GB were Seagate Barracudas and now RZ1EF 18GB are Quantum
> Atlas-series)

Somebody else also mentioned that Quantam drives seem to be okay, so maybe
it's just some series which got made for PC's which stank. I'm serious I've
blown 2 new drives here within a year this is waaaay too much. I'm buying
Conner drives now which seem to be quite good (up til now). The only
positive thing about the Quantum drive's is that one of them had a head
crash and since I never heard how this sounded I kinda took that as a
"learning experience" - it's an incredibly loud 'tok' - amazing that such
a small disk can make this kind of noise ! :)
 
> > > Have you seen the drives in the front, behind the plastic cover and that
> > > metal plate?
> > > There you have a SCSI-controller which hangs directly on the XDBus, thus
> > > providing a "systemwide" controller without depending on either
> > > systemboard. Looks like it has a serial-port too. Neat stuff.
> > 
> > I'm not sure, what I thought (but this doesn't seem to be the case) that
> > the controllers were actually located somewhere in the tray, but I can't
> > find anything there (except disks) - should I look elsewhere, or am I
> > just missing the obvious (again :)
> 
> You're absolutely right. The SCSI-controllers (with an external
> SCSI-port) are indeed sitting on the motherboards. If you check at the
> front, where the CDROM sits, there is this "internal" SCSI-controller,
> which holds the CDROM + one 5.25" device, along with maximum 4 x 3.5"
> disks. Many SCSI-controllers. :-)

Aaaaaah, you mean on the server and not the SSA ? Ah okay my mistake,
now I understand.
 
> > > Please report back to our S.H.R (Sun Hardware Reference) maintainer.
> > > This is useful info.
> > 
> > I'm not sure what you mean, who's the S.H.R. ?
> 
> Sun Hardware Reference.
> Check http://sun-ref.sunhelp.org/
> 
> I'm trying to gather info, documentation, tips & tricks and all sorts of
> stuff, to hand over to Gregory Leblanc, the maintainer of the 'new' Sun
> Hardware Reference.

I just send the sun-ref mailing list a note about that serial number,
although it is quite specific info I guess if somebody does have a SSA
and wants to know what that number is it is quite usefull.
 
> > > I haven't found any sticker either, just looked at the FEH, telling me
> > > that there were two models with either MicroSPARC or MicroSPARC-II. I
> > > think I even have the "-110" mark on my arrays, which further proved the
> > > fact.
> > 
> > Yeah, the ssaadm told me it was a 110.
> > 
> > To be exact :
> > 
> > SSA110, Rev 1.0, firmware Rev: 3.6
> 
> Congratulations. You are a proud owner of the 'faster version' of the
> SSA. :-)

Cool! :)
 
> > > As for now, we've invested in a Compaq (Digital) RAIDarray 8000 with
> > > FC-AL interface, hubs and some servers. Cool to the the massive
> > > throughput of this baby. Just formatting a RAID-set keeps the controller
> > > busy with 45MB/s throughput. :-)
> > 
> > Wanna trade ?
> > 
> > :)
> 
> Equipment for $55.000? I'd bet my boss would love that. :-)

Okay, at least I tried :)

I actually found an old price list on the SparcServer (it doesn't have a date 
on it, but it says the introduction date was '93 - so it's probably from around that
time), I calculated what this piece I've got here went for in that time. I
almost fell from my chair. Hold your breath: $ 111646.00 bucks. Exsquueze me
? you can buy a house from that kind of money (or a damn nice BMW :). And this isn't 
even with the SparcStorage Array added. Kind a neat to know that I'm typing
on this thing with my unexperienced hands (mkfs ... heh neat, let's see what
that does :)

> > I always loved Digital (still got a little cluster of 4 digital PC boxes
> > running, in fact this email is going through one of them, the mail server)
> 
> We have one Digital PC-box, and somewhere around 100+ Alphas
> (workstations and about 10 servers), all running VMS and Medusa CAD
> software. Infact, Digital claimed that we have Swedens biggest
> VMS-cluster. :-)

*Wow* What the heck gets done on those things, 3D rendering ? Meduse CAD
doesn't ring a bell, I guess a lot of CAD design is going on there.

We just got one VMS box at our place (an old one, haven't got a clue what
type it is) It's connected to our GyroScope (MRI scanner).
 
> > Again, thanx for all the great info, it's really cool to get this kind
> > of help!
> 
> No problem. There aren't that many guys here with SS1000+SSAs, so it's
> nice to be a little helpful with someone unexperienced.
> :-)

How do you know all this stuff about the SSA ? Did you own one once ?

Thanx again, it's always a pleasure talking to experienced guys !

Cheers,
Sparcy.