Hobbes gets a hardware upgrade

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted something, in fact it was last year! πŸ™‚ So, it finally came the time to upgrade the old Intel P4 1.8 Ghz to something a little more pokey to cope with all the crud that I run on it. As I wanted to continue running Solaris, I had to look at the OpenSolaris HCL as I wanted to use my existing Sata II disks and add some additional ones. I ended up choosing a GigaByte motherboard which supported AMD processors and SATA II. I ended up with a 4 core AMD processor, some additional memory dimms and two additional 1Tb SATA II disks which should last me a fair number of years powering my home services. πŸ™‚

hippy@hobbes~$psrinfo -vp
The physical processor has 4 virtual processors (0-3)
x86 (AuthenticAMD 100F23 family 16 model 2 step 3 clock 2500 MHz)
AMD Phenom(tm) 9850 Quad-Core Processor

Everything sort of went to plan putting it into my old Enlight case although cooling might be an issue with all the additional CPU horsepower and disks. Perhaps I need a newer case with some decent fans in to keep everything cool……

So, when everything was built, I used a usb stick with OpenSolaris on to allow me to boot from so I could rejig my ZFS filesystems with the newer ones. Saying that I didn’t actually need to do anything special with booting it other than import the additional pools as ZFS thought they were from a different system.

Once things were hunky dorky and I got a bit of stability I live upgraded to build 106:

hippy@hobbes~$more /etc/release
Solaris Express Community Edition snv_106 X86
Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 13 January 2009

As I run sunray services on hobbes, I immediately ran into CR 6795892 – “Sun Ray X servers (both Xsun and Xorg) suffer network problems in snv_106” and had to install some internal binaries to get round the problem although there is a workaround mentioned in the CR details.

Ah, once all that was done I had a working system with a lot more horse power…….so time to play with getting some VirtualBox systems up and running….