[rescue] Sun Systems need to go away

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 09:33:07AM +0000, Peter Stokes wrote:

> Adding arrays to these systems is usually successful and cheap, so curious
> what config you had an issue with?

I was trying to use SAS.

I bought a LSI 1068 (same chip as is in the Sun T2000 and I believe
V245) based PCI-X card (and later a second one in case the first was
bad), two cables (in case the first was bad) and first an active SAS2
array that supported SATA tunnelling and later a passive SATA array.
I also bought two SAS disks and tried 3 SATA drives.

Every combination that could be physically connected would initial
work, but would have read errors, complain about device resents until
it would eventually freeze and require a hard reset.

I tried this with Solaris Express (svn_127) and then later with OmniOS
on Intel hardware with similar results.

I meant to try installing linux on that PC to see if the issue was the
hardware or solaris/omnios drivers, but I never got around to
following through on that.

I suspect I might have had nicer results if I had instead bought a
Ultra320->SATA array, but I couldn't find any affordable with trays at
the time.

I thought I had posted about my experience at the time, but I can't
seem to google it, so maybe I didn't.

At this point, I've moved file serving to a PC running FreeNAS with
Intel SATA on internal drives only.  I'd like to attach more drives,
but I would also like to use a more modern SAS controller than the
1068.  2008s are still too expensive more me, so I'm making do for
now.  I have all the other hardware sitting around waiting for me to
get around to fighting with it more.