[rescue] SPARCcluster 1?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 04:26:12PM -0500, Brian Hechinger wrote:
>> Of course, the ideal would be a home SAN, but I'm not going to be able to 
>> afford one of those for a long, long time.
> 
>why not??  cause you wanna make it outta fiber?  sure, that would be cool, but
>you can very easily build a SAN out of stuff you have now. sure, NFS is pretty
>evil, and maybe not the most stable thing around, but at work they have a SAN
>that is nothing more than a private 100M ethernet segment on a nice fastswitch
>and a NetApp.  sure, you don't have the NetApp, but any NFS server will do.
>just the NetApps a little better cause they F******* RULE.  anyway, it's not
>so unreasonable to use ethernet for a SAN.  just keep that in mind before you
>are so quick to give up on the idea.

Hmm.  Well, I'm already having the boot server pull all of it's data off of the
NFS server (though it does have a local hard drive).  I'm thinking that the 
router/file server machine shouldn't use NFS at all.  That leaves the 
javastation of the stuff I currently have.  I'm going back and forth between
making it a squid cache, or a internal apache server.  I could do both, but it 
only has 16megs of ram.  Of course, it is going to have to pull everthing, 
including OS from the NFS server.
 
>although personally i'd use FDDI, but that's just me.

I've been slowly gathering the pieces together to start using FDDI.  At this 
point I have 1 SBus FDDI card, unsupported past 2.6.  I'm thinking that
maybe after the new year, I will try to aquire a quad SS10 or 20 to run 
Solaris 2.6 on, then use this card.

I also have an ODS FDDI concentrator.  It is assumed working.  I also have
a LanPLex 2500.  It is an ethernet switch with a pair of FDDI ports.

So, I want to buy one DEFPA or SkyKonnect FDDI card for my lintel workstation,
and try to get in of FDDI connected to the switch, and then when that works
satisfactorily, I will try to connect the lintel machine to the concentrator,
and get the concentrator to work happily with the lanplex.

But, 2 things stand in my way.  First, I can't get the lanplex to work happily
with NFS.  I've narrowed the problem a bit.  I've now figured out that while
the problem affects both reads and writes, it is only triggered by writes.
I've also been able to fully duplicate the problem between a NetBSD/Sparc box
and the NFS server, so I no that it isn't a linux client issue only.

Also, everything else works flawlessly, except for NFS, so I don't think it is 
a hardware failure in the switch.  I've obtained some info on NFS tuning, so
maybe smaller packet sizes will fix it.  But, I don't feel safe trying to
migrate to FDDI until I have the lanplex operating absolutely flawlessly.

Of course, the bigger thing that stands in my way is money.  I'm having 
desperate problems with needing car repairs that A) I can't afford, and B)
it seems silly to spend another grand on repairing a car that I've already
spend more than the book value repairing in the last two years.  So, I try
to look for a new car, and things aren't going well on that front. 

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd