Re: Sun Fire X4140

[Gerard Lally <gerard%netmail.ie@localhost>]

At date and time Tue, 18 Nov 2014 21:30:18 +0300, Dima Veselov wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> > I was very, very impressed to see an oldish (mid-2013) NetBSD 6 install
> > on this machine (I didn't have a more recent CD to hand), with hardware
> > RAID, network adapters and video all working. 
> 
> I have bunch of this servers and yes, NetBSD support it almost fully. 
> You seem to be lucky getting X4140 with LSI SAS adapter, because some 
> of them has Adaptec, which is not supported.
> 
> > I tried a recent Linux as
> > well but it failed to set up the network adapters.
> 
> X4140 has strange NVIDIA bridges and network enumerator devices, 
> which can cause problems. My configurations has many of them 
> including Debian 6/7 and NetBSD 6 working for years in production.
> 
> > I plan to put NetBSD 7 on this over the next few days.
> 
> Don't forget to update server firmware, because X4140 has nice but 
> weak service processor and it is most vulnerable part of this server.

Thanks for the advice Dima. I did indeed go searching for firmware
updates but it seems we would need a support contract with Oracle, which
is out of the question for this business. I might be able to get the
person who supplied the server to download the firmware.

> Stock ILOM version can brick itself if it work for long time unattended.
> Still don't know reasons, but I have 3 bricks for past 5 yrs. Maybe 
> they get offended without human attention?

An expensive brick!

> Also don't be surprised if serial port speed between server and ILOM
> will change to default by itself - it's okay for any ILOM version :))


-- 
Gerard Lally