Solaris - now with less FAIL!

Although I’ve had no joy with OpenSolaris on the DL160, we recently picked up a six-bay stock Intel server off of eBay. Although the wrong server was delivered (yay!) I used this as an opportunity to learn a lot about the SR2520 boxes and where to get spare parts for them. I was also pleasantly surprised a how little effort was required to get OpenSolaris on to this box, even ‘though it didn’t come with a CD-ROM drive - the process for making a bootable USB disk (from another Solaris box) was both simple and effective. Making things even better, two chapters of the OpenSolaris Bible were released, giving me some background reading. Unfortunately that’s where my good luck seems to have run out…

Having built a RAIDZ array I started benchmarking with some large files copies. The copies were being done while I was SSH’ed in from home but seemed to stop in the middle of testing - I couldn’t SSH in again and sure enough, when I checked in the morning the server had hung. Giving it the benefit of the doubt I restarted the server and rebuilt the array as RAIDZ2. Again, the server hung in the middle of a file transfer. By this time (bearing in mind the hours spent trying to get OpenSolaris just to boot on the ProLiant), I’d lost all patience with OpenSolaris and put Ubuntu on the new server.

Not two hours into some more benchmarking the server hung again. I did some searching and found out there was a small possibility that a recent Linux kernel bug was the problem here (which I won’t describe to prevent Google from suggesting there’s any correlation) . The bug was definitely occurring in the storage system. Was it possible that something similar yet unrelated was causing a similar problem in the Solaris kernel? Yes it was possible, but pretty unlikely. However, I installed the only older Linux distro I had kicking around - CentOS 5.2. Sure enough, it hung in the middle of some transfers but this time the logs were showing two different smartd failures on both of the brand new disks we’d bought to fill up the vacant slots on the server. Sigh. Hardware all along…

So after all of that, chances are that the Solaris install was probably OK after all. My copy of the OpenSolaris bible finally arrived, so now I’ve got some reference material to work with I might five it another shot - third time’s a charm?