Sun Microsystems StorEdge S1
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- čas přidán 8. 09. 2024
- Firing up a Sun Microsystems StorEdge S1 three disk SCSI array from 2001. We'll take a look at the hardware, get a quick SCSI primer, and pair the StorEdge with a SunFire v120. Then we'll setup a RAID0 array across two SCSI drives using Sun Volume Manager.
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Sun Microsystems 3D Printed Drive Tray: www.thingivers...
Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
#sun #raid #retro #retrotech #scsi
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As an old time Sun Systems Admin, those S1 arrays give me a bit of a nervous twitch. It’s single attach, so if a disk failed you’d very occasionally get a SCSI bus reset, which would take the whole array down for a second.
So you needed two, with two scsi cards in the server and mirror across the arrays.
Which, given the were so expensive, that was hard to get the user to understand. Until their server crashed
Yeah I trusted the D1000s or A5200s more. Though you need a lot more space
Supported a few of these disk arrays in production systems, never really understood the use case for them, I guess unless you needed the shallow depth for some kind of telco rack.
@@Codeaholic1the 5200s were the fibre ones right? I had reliability nightmares with some of those. D1000s were solid workhorses though in my experience.
@@MrWelshsean In my experience they had two use cases really.
Either the company had bought a product that required Solaris but weren't used to Sun's pricing and bought the cheapest they could get away with (and probably got a consultant to destroy their future happiness by putting Disksuite on it)
Or that had something that needed a decent amount of storage but could be easily distributed. Which normally means something like IPAM (QIP, that sort of thing)
I still cry for Sun.
You and me both! They had so many amazing g products…Solaris was arguably the best commercial Unix, they gave the world Java, ZFS, Dtrace, StarOffice/OpenOffice…a crying shame what happened to that company.
Sun and SGI… Heartbreaking that they're gone.
The day I sold my personal maxed out Sun e450 I cried a little inside.
I still have a stack of sun4c and sun4m boxes. That old Sun stuff still works, while most of my later sun4u gear failed long ago.
I found the sun logo behind the Facebook logo in their HQ. Not sure if it's still there, but it was really weird seeing that when I visited that place back in 2018
Man, it's always a good day when Claberto uploads lol
Ah yes, our Spanish old tech enthusiast CZcamsr CLABERTO!
😂@@AureliusR
@@AureliusR I gotta be honest I read the name as Claberto until like a month ago 😂😂😂 has a good ring to it
@@realifejon It's amazing, we need Clab to dress up with a mustache and sombrero for April Fool's and do a Claberto video
That Pi on the floor begging for help is so real. And when you need one they magically disappear.
i still haven't found a good use for mine.
@@kyle207 Do you have a pihole in your network yet?
@@utfigyii5987 my “network” is just a isp provided router rn but i used to have it setup for pihole but then i wanted to try some other things. I dont mind having the adblocker just on my browser
@@kyle207 Here are some suggestions:
Pihole
Wireguard
Jellyfin
'HackTheNewsletter' host
HomeAssistant
Onion TOR node
@@utfigyii59875 loose pis and all Pi3s, bought them for a distributed compute project only to have my mass compute needs met better by CUDA compute power. Too slow to use as a PiHole.
Sun was a phenomenal company absolutely packed with a very broad range of engineering talent, and management that was visionary. Sun had an absolutely massive role in building the Internet. And then they got eaten by a boring company with a larger legal department than engineering. Kudos for showing off one of their UltraSPARC systems. I'd never seen this storage enclosure.
There's also the older A1000 and D1000. And IMO, the coolest Sparc machine wasn't even envisioned by Sun... the Tadpole Ultrabook. (I have one.)
In the mid 2000s I had about 20 Sunfire V100s in my home office. I love the look of this gen of Sun.
With all this sun stuff you might need to get a sun server rack
I had one until I gave it to a friend and he proceeded to leave it outside to get destroyed. Ugh I was so mad. I should have kept it.
Great video!! I wanted to add that not only is the Openboot PROM implemented in forth, the "ok" prompt is effectively a forth REPL for the full environment! You can define new functions in there, modify the existing functions loaded from the read only memory, and pretty much do whatever you want with the hardware of the machine. People have implemented additional diagnostic tools in forth that are meant to be loaded from the network inside of OBP which is super cool.
Back in the 90's I worked at an ISP that was solaris based, we had a problem where the root disk on one of our important servers filled up in the middle of the day and and we would end up with a truncated passwd file that didn't include a root login, If you were still logged into the host you could still run commands but if you logged out you were done for.
I remembered a article in Phrack where Mudge explained how to use Openboot to patch the memory of a process to change the UID of a user, Since I was logged in still and we had console access via a terminal server I was able to issue a break over the serial terminal and use Openboot to do the memory patch elevating my unprivlidged user to uid 0 and giving us root access back without having to reboot the system and go through hoops to fix it.
the console thing and setup was great! please more of it! you could really see where ZFS was born :D
This brings back some fond memories. I was a Sun & Linux sysadmin and oversaw the software for a 72 Ultra 10 workstation lab. The Sun stuff was so reliable compared to Linux in those days, though at times seemed very obscure. I still miss how overly engineered they were. You could throw completely ridiculous workloads with hundreds of simultaneous users and they might slow to a crawl, but simply would not crash. Keep these videos coming!
I was a junior admin on a pair of Sun 8000s (I think, maybe 9000s, it's been a while) that ran all of our state university's email and web. Same thing - the load numbers were monstrous and they'd just keep rocking. They eventually got rid of them ... after replacing two machines with a full rack of Linux boxes. Good times!
I do not work in network engineering, i was born in 2003 and most of the hardware and standards you work with predate me even being an idea and somehow, you are still so dreadfully interesting. keep up the good work!
dreadfully.
Sums up IT in a nutshell. It is interesting. But when you can't fix something, it is indeed dreadful.
@@cromulence yeah that’s the idea i’ve gotten watching these. i watched the one with the cisco hub with automatic failover support, and that looked nightmarish
The sun systems are always very fascinating. Thanks for the vodeo
I see Sun stuff, I click. Simple. Great video clab
Big hugs for showing Sun!!
Always want Sun videos. I was a Solaris SysAdmin instructor for 20 years starting on Solaris 2.4 through to the end, Solaris 11. Early days we hosted classes on Sparcstation5’s. Toward the end I had built out a rack of 8 V240 servers paired into clustered configurations for SunCluster training. I wept at the end when Oracle bought and ravaged the amazing company. Thanks for another great one!
very cool, I really like the v240s
I've been waiting for more Sun Microsystems content, that dive into SCSI and the IBM tape drive was really cool, clab. Can't wait for more
The forth rom monitor is not just about the implementation language, but you can also program it in forth. This could be used for things like testing or configuring third-party bus components although I don't really know how much this was ever done. I worked at Sun (starting as a then very junior sw eng) for just under ten years and never saw it done, other than to show it could be done.
The OpenBoot ROMs on cards were written in interpreted Forth as well, rather than machine code, making them platform independent - i.e a peripheral card with OpenBoot ROMs would work in an x86, SPARC, or PowerPC machine (at least, that was the theory).
Nostalgia time! This brings some good old memories of Sun server builds. Thanks for sharing!
I'll take as much Sun content as you are willing to make. I'm also interested in seeing how your in home cable setup is going? Thank you for the content.
+1
Quite an enjoyable video. I am a hobbiest, and my SCSI experience started in the late 80s, and is confined to the Commodore Amiga systems. It is interesting to see what a system would have looked like in the real world. I am still using my A3000, and A4000 (with added SCSI)
You've been making Sun memory-lane videos in rapid succession. I love it
Great video! Would love to see Solaris Containers added to your list of things to play with since I think some people assume containers were invented by Docker in 2013 :-)
yes! will cover zones someday
@@clabretrobranded zones are also super cool, remember running solaris 8 zones on solaris 10 to keep a shitty old app that the business needed running.
these sun servers are so fascinating! i love how much stuff they were able to pack in these things
Solaris oddity, the backup slice, 2, is the entire disk. Its supposed to be that way.
Also c, t, d, s. T is for target. If my memory doesnt fail me D is for device aka LUN.
On the serial console "break" is the same as stop-a on the keyboard. Useful to interrupt the boot process without setting the boot mode.
was going through this in my head during the video, taking me back to a HP-UX 101 class. I think the LUN allowed you to get past 16 devices on the bus and i’ve always assumed ( but never validated) that’s it’s why storage admins always referred to SAN devices as LUNs.
very nice setup, looking forward to seeing the tape drive again. thanks
Do love me a bit of Sun action. Thanks to your previous videos and some ebay listing's for NOS unopened Sunray 2 and 170s I've got some cool additions to the collection! 👍
That’s an awesome little machine!
I got a pair of Sun StorEDGE A1000 in my collection that i need to setup :D
I love that the foam even has a faux spindle on the bottom.
This reminds me that I also have a V120 in my basement, which is waiting to finally be put into action.
Hey Clab, never apologize about the cli bits. You make great content and I would argue that the cli and config setup is equally if not more so entertaining than your hardware review. Can't wait to see another Sun and Solaris video from you. Also can't wait for a vid on the IBM tape drive!
Agree, this was the highlight, must be 15 years since i thought about the metadb command or solaris slices (“full hog slice” 😂)
really love your content and seeing this old gear that I worked with years ago
Aw hell yes its a good weekend when Clabretro uploads!
Thank you so so so so so much for all these videos, they absolutely make my week when you post!
Nice! I used to be a Solaris admin, so this brings back memories 🙂 We used to do a poor mans cluster using a non-supported method - disk sets within disk suite with two hosts and a dual ported jbod array. A script would do the failover by changing the disk set owner, very clunky. It's a secret tho, so shhh! But we had some Sun Fire 6800's, big EMC arrays for the storage and with Sun Cluster running Oracle and WebLogic as app groups.... you think the V120 was slow booting! 😀 Sun Cluster is great fun, until you get into quorum joys! Keep up the good work!
Full post on a fully loaded E10k was………frustrating 😂😂😂😂
I once had the sun storedge T3, with a whole set of fibrechannel disks, and a sun Netra T1 1U server a bit like this one to interact with it, with fibrechannel card. I never could get the T1 working, and eventually just had to get rid of it. It was a chonker, weighed 60lbs "dry" and almost double with disks in! I did run the Netra for about a year with debian potato for sparc on it though, it was fun!
New Sun Microsystems hardware content at last!
I worked with those storage arrays back in the day.
SCSI powa!
Thank you very much
Love the sewage pipe in the middle of the bench.
a classic look
Sun, gone but never forgotten.
Oh the memories, I still have some HVD drives mirrored in a P. Pro. Thank god for SAS lol!
So much hardware for 3 drives amazing. Just a few years later they would have systems with a dozen or more.
I remembered that the termination can be at the bottom of the SCSI hard disk and in that case it is the removable resistor network components. The SCSI ID jumpers can also be on the bottom of the hard drive. There may also be other jumpers that affect the operation or activity of the hard drive. I have used several SCSI hard drives in Amiga computers. SCSI disks have a significantly larger connector than IDE hard disks.
Sweet another clabretro Sun Microsystems video!
SCSI was really good, the USB of it's day. There were several classes of device that could work with scsi - primary storage (both physical disks and also managed arrays) and optical storage, tape, and scanners. Modern disk standards like SATA and SAS (literally Serial Attached SCSI) are based on SCSI and use similar command set to control the devices. I used to look after NCR RAID arrays that would have 20 SCSI disks (hot swappable) and present these via SCSI to the host. These hosts could run Unix or Windows NT (or DOS) and the configuratation of RAID was done in DOS - DOS boot disk with driver and utility typically, you could set up the LUN (logical unit number) which was a way to partition up a larger array into smaller ones should you want to do this. on SANs today the parcels of disk allocated to hosts are still called LUNs. We also still use iSCSI which is a network based variant of SCSI that allows block storage devices to be connected via IP protocol. In fact, the machine I am writing this on has the bulk of it's storage provided via iSCSI.
SATA isn't based on SCSI per se, but supports ATAPI to tunnel SCSI over SATA (and PATA/IDE) for optical drives for example. SATA can also be tunneled over SAS (STP) to allow SATA drives to be used in SAS backplanes.
FireWire and USB also use SCSI for disk drives.
Man, that is a massive unit considering it carries only three drives and zero compute!
i love when i refresh youtube and i see some random sun server video from you, pretty sure ive watched almost all of your sun-related videos, love the amazing work
Made my Saturday morning having this video to watch ❤
You were wondering why you needed to do a reset-all, I think that was because you powered on the other devices on the SCSI bus after the server.
Seeing the SVM aka Solstice Disk Suite commands took me way back. It might be a fun video to use SVM to encapsulate and mirror the boot disks in a server.
BTW you can drop to the OK prompt from the OS on the console by sending a break, the incantations necessary to do this depend on the model. In workstations, it’s just stop-A
BTW if you build a sun cluster, presumably you’ll need a shared scsi bus (not sure, never worked with Sun Cluster). Top tip is to make sure that you move one of the controllers to an ID other than 7 or you’ll have a “fun” time. Speaking from experience after making this mistake building an MC-Serviceguard cluster on HP-UX servers 😂
Any plans to play with Veritas Cluster Server and/of VxFS/VxVM?
I have never seen a foam disk blank before - I've only ever seen fully populated chassis before - that's very neat!You got a slimSCSI PCMCIA card!!!! I'm seriously envious! I had one a long time ago, and purged it during one of my (many) house moves. I've lost much old nostalgia from moving house. Kinda sad about that, and there's still a desire to re-obtain an AlphaStation and more purple Sun hardware. I have a V120 still, and will hold it dear for a long time to come, even if it's nearly dead now (password-locked iLOM, that I've not cleared away yet)
Solaris' hardware management is actually consistent and sane, unlike Linux' which is hella confusing and device mapping can change during reboots. Gods I miss cfgadm.
Babe, wake up! Another clabretro video just dropped. Sun Microsystems StorEdge S1 sounds cool!
Man i used to manage sun servers and fiber san on solaris and ibm servers on bsd, it was horribly expensive to provide storage and zfs was in its infancy. It was replaced with debian and glusterfs, scaled 100x at 1/100th cost.
So apparently the fork of OpenSolaris is still getting some love and one of the distros is very much in the current cloud computing space.
I so wonder how big Sun could have grown if they weathered the market crashes a little better. Solaris feels like it was ahead of it's time from my seat.
it's almost time for a sun rack!
11:33 W.O.W.! A scsi pcmcia card! They didnt even make those on aliexpress Wow! :)
The second server I ever bought was a Sunfire V20Z, the first of the AMD ones, and it had a fun screen to program on the front, it Sat next my HP DL380 G3 with a piece of foamboard as a lid haha The sun server always looked so cool, I used to look at there giant storage arrays that where like 8 Ru I think ? and just held a boat load of drives.
Three, count them, three whole hard drives!
Edit: it's nice that they have a dedicated key to give props.
When the server already has two bays itself. This seems like one of the most pointless products ever. haha :-D
I'd love a video on tape streamers or what have you, i have an old DAT one, and some tapes, would be fun to play more with, great vid as usual^^
I remember seeing a dumpster full of that stuff back in 2010 or so.
Solaris and SCSI, no, never again please. Great video, nice nostalgia bait, but these are two tech areas I will be happy to never re-visit.
yeah I don't know if I'd wanna be responsible for this in production lol
Rest in peace Sun Microsystems.
business tips, hopping on the moneybus®
Sun had the best logo ever created
This brought back so many memories of my Sun servers and SCSI tape libraries. I still recall throwing out boxes of coiled up SCSI cables and thinking "no one will ever want these." Low and behold nostalga is kicking in - I should have saved some of them. Oy vey
this video strait bussin frfr
It's a shame Sun Microsystems isn't still going, I really like the OS.
Only SCSI I've touched is the VMWare virtualized one with a nice dropdown menu for ID, but I would've preferred a mechanical wheel :D
I'd love to see some tape stuff, it looks cool
Another brilliant video.
The SCSI era was peak 10.000 and 15.000 drives, it was glorious. And LOUD 😂 yes, until 2010+ 10K and even 15K drives were widely used, but it all started in the 90s and enthusiasts ran those 10K / 15K drives in their home PC because it was the only way to improve storage performance 😂 (latency). It’s why I bought a 73 GB WD Raptor 😢
I lost my mind in the end of the video when I looked behind you and saw that the linksys tower was still growing
more on the way, it'll be load-bearing soon 😂
Every time a SUN system get pulled out, i get excited lol
Sun stuff, always pricey, but what a cool color on the box😁
19:09 - May the _Forth_ be with you!
How complicated it is to set up a RAID array on that Sun stuff makes you appreciate Linux + BTRFS even more.
Yay, more Sun content! Wish Oracle never bought them.
Ironically back here after trying to install unsuccessfully a particular version of early Solaris (2.2, aka SunOS 4.5) (for reasons) (and managing to install SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 7 but not the one I wanted) and learning a lot more than I could have expected about Sun machines and OSs, not to mention a incursion into NetBSD.
Edit: on QEmu and TME/NME
The SCSI ID lights is basic binary counting from right to left.
When I was with Sun Professional Services, we never recommended Sun Cluster (I think the product name was slightly different). T his would always piss off the Sales Team. We always recommended Veritas Cluster manager.
VCS is a whole ecosystem in itself, a lot of fun. I think Sun also used to bundle VxVM licenses with some storage arrays?
please do a vid on the ibm tape drive ...very cool ...so was this video...good job clab!
Nice use the sun cluster with the sun thin clients
Fond memories of hacking away on a surplus V120 I picked up in college to run a music streaming server in the days before Spotify.
The first and only time I ever installed Solaris along with like 90% CPU load to transcode an MP3.
Thanks, very interesting :) Especially the SCSI stuff. I'm currently trying to bring a DEC/Compaq StorageWorks controller and shelf back to life, and the whole SE/HVD/LVD thing can be a bit confusing if it's not documented what type of SCSI is used. I had to take a look at the chips inside to figure out that it is HVD....
New Clab video? Awesome. It’s a Sun video? Even better!!
Super cool!
My DC has a "museum" room dedicated to those kind of archaic devices :D I even used one SUN server as a mousepad ;d
Somewhere around here I've got a gen-u-wine Solaris disc, mailed directly from Sun. At some point soon after I finished high school, around the same time-frame as this Sun box (give or take a year or two), before I figured out what the hell I wanted to do with my life, I thought I needed experience with Unix (just as I thought I needed experience with Linux), and somehow I found out you can get free Solaris discs mailed to you, I can't even remember how that worked, but apparently it did. Never did get around to doing anything with the disk other than booting it and being confused and deciding "I'll look into that later", which apparently never happened.
Anyway, still interesting to see what real Sun hardware was like.
i died seeing the -f on the c1t3d0s7 command hahahaha
"Smells like serious business down here"... I love it!!! And I can totally relate to that!!! :D:D:D:D:D
ClabBus FTW!
it's very funny to me how large this thing is for 3 drives
This brings me back to learning Sun and Solaris trial-by-fire at my first datacenter job. It's not _so_ different from Linux or any other Unix, but there are a lot of things that are not obvious at first. Like that whole Slice 2 thing. Even after I learned that, I still felt like I was missing some essential background info. Why is slice 2 significant? Why does it need to be like that at all? Who knows. It just is.
Stumbling through soft RAID was another adventure. To this day I'm not sure if I just misconfigured RAID 5 or if it was always an utter dog, but performance absolutely s-u-c-k-e-d. The database admins let me know that on a regular basis. haha
I was so glad to get some proper FibreChannel storage arrays installed, and use a pair of small mirrored drives just for the OS. That was yet another "gee, what's this do?" rabbit hole. I learned a whole lot of things at that job. Much of it completely obsolete and useless knowledge now. lol
Oh man I remember these things from HS. Had some SunFire terminal servers as well (VERY large 4U servers), and had some similar sunfire systems as in the video that were web/storage servers for kids to submit homework online. No VGA, No USB, Just power and network and you had to SSH/Telnet, can't remember which, in order to install an OS which had to be from a shared CD drive from another sun server. Took a while to install over the 100 meg NIC it had.
I just picked up a Sun Netra T1 105 that has virtually the same case as the drive array. It's a bit annoying to have to remove the rack ears to open it up. I bought it for $30Canadian on ebay. I was very happy to see it came with a working hard drive with Solaris 10 already installed. It's missing the front cover and it's very scratched up. It's been an interesting few days getting to know Solaris and finding all the little differences between it and Linux.
I also have a very similar tape drive that I'm going to try and get working with the system. I've never used a tape drive so that should be interesting. I may need to find a terminator.
Solaris 10 had a webui where you could setup these drives as ZFS.
I have a t5120 hooked up with fibre channel to a rack full of drives as a cold storage with solaris 10 zfs.
Would be nice to see your V440s in a cluster,
Here in europe storedge systems are pretty rare on ebay still looking for some stuff.
Got mine v440 hooked up to a dell scsi array
finally a new sun video
Those are the same caddies as my Netra T1 AC200. Fortunately mine came with drives.
you should start collecting mikrotik routers now
that drive mounting feels a lot like the older netgear offering theres a model of Chenbro that should work
That one is still on my list ;-)
Hey man! Glad to see more of your Sun videos haha.... Especially after those networking related videos! Side note: I got Solaris 11 installed on an X86 test bench, am receiving a Sunray 3 plus from Australia soon, and lastly am trying to get QEMU to work with SPARC Solaris 11 Express. Lotsa Sun for me haha... Great video as always man.
P. S. Running Solaris 11 Express on your Sun Fires may be a cool video idea too haha... Although the last update was in 2010 :(
Oh my god, I realised. StorEdge, Storage! Great pun Sun...
Again another FIRE video keep it up.
Yeah, drives with caddies are a must. The caddies can cost more than the damn server.
We still have a tonne of Sun systems like this in production at work, I'd say they'll be there forever because they have trying to switch the software away from them for almost a decade and failed every time, the front end of that software on our laptops still use Java 7 too. Gotta love government systems.