[rescue] Sun Netra X1 musings

[Steve Haavik]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2007, Magnus wrote:

> Not sure if anyone else here has one of these.

I've got a couple dozen of them running Debian linux right now. From my 
binder of notes on the install, it looks like I had to do a "modprobe 
tulip" (before it autodetects the ethernet) and delete the DaveCom driver 
(dmfe.ko) before the first reboot. That was with a net install image 
running a 2.6.8 kernel. I haven't had to do an install on one in a long 
time so I don't know if the new images are any better. Although now that I 
just checked again, I see that they all appear to be running 2.4 series 
kernels. It's a pain to crack these things open (they're all racked and I 
don't have a cdrom drive I could use anyways) so I just network boot them 
for installs. It saves me the trouble of finding blank cds too.

Hmm. According to my notes the gotchas with running linux on them are:
The ethernet ports are numbered backwards compared to Solaris. And for 
some reason my NTP servers are running fine, but my old nameservers (we 
just use them for resolvers) will randomly lockup if I leave ntpd running 
on them. If I just use nptdate to resync the clock every so often they 
work fine for light-weight server use.