Project:Infrastructure/Developer Machines/sparc

sparc Admin Notes
These are various notes mainly targeted at people administrating Gentoo dev machines, although most things are probably generally useful. These are not general "how do I administrate a Gentoo box" notes.

Hostnames
These are the current systems we have available. See machine specific notes at bottom for more details.

Console Access
You connect to the console over ssh. Ask infra@ for the user/pass. ssh dev.gentoo.org; ssh 10.0.0.176

You can use this to:
 * Interact with the Advanced Lights Out Management (ALOM) -- the software that can control the system
 * Interact with OpenBoot -- the software that launches SILO (the bootloader)
 * Interact with SILO -- the software that boots the kernel
 * Log in directly to recover
 * Boot alternative media

Common ALOM Commands
Once you're interacting with ALOM, here's some commands you'll use a lot. Note that ALOM stays running even if the main system is powered off/locked up/whatever. You can also talk to ALOM w/out interrupting the main system.


 * - switch to the active software connected to the console (OpenBoot, SILO, Linux terminal)
 * - when connected to the console, escape back to ALOM
 * - request the system shut down gracefully and stay turned off
 * - hard power off the system
 * - power on the system and let it start booting
 * - suspend the current OS and break into OpenBoot; the system must be powered on

Note that the system is often slow during early boot up.

See the ALOM Manual for more details (publication code 819-7991-10).

ILO Commands
When logging into the console, you'll first land at the ILO.

Booting to cdrom
There should be an admincd already in the box. If there isn't, we'll need to ask someone nicely to put one in.


 * 1)  (allow us to choose what to boot from on next start!)
 * 1)  (allow us to choose what to boot from on next start!)

Once the console starts up, you should see the machine booting. Then type within OpenBoot (simply  should boot from the harddrive).

You'll then end up at a SILO prompt (see below for details). TL;DR: run. The admincd will then start and land you at a prompt.

Once you're all done, exit the console (get back to ILO), and run.

Common OpenBoot Commands
If the main system is broken, try booting from a livecd.


 * - boot the default target (usually the disk)
 * - boot the main hard drive
 * - boot the livecd
 * - show some machine details
 * - resume execution of main OS

Common SILO Commands
Once you see the  prompt, hit  to list all the available kernel images. You can even append kernel command line options here like  to get a recovery shell.

So to boot an old kernel whose image name is  (as specified in ), you can type.

Kernel Management
sparc systems use the silo tool from the package to manage booting of kernels. Things to remember:


 * Make updates to.
 * No need to run  after making changes to kernels or  -- the boot loader will process on the fly.
 * Make sure to run  after upgrading.
 * The bootable linux kernel is created at (e.g. under ).
 * The  shortcut should work OK.

bender

 * Contact: support@osuosl.org
 * IPv4: 140.211.166.184; netmask 255.255.255.224; gateway 140.211.166.161
 * IPv6: 2001:470:ea4a:1:214:4fff:fe2d:5584/64; gateway 2001:470:ea4a:1::1/64
 * System: Sun Fire T200
 * Memory: 16G
 * CPU: UltraSparc T1
 * Disks: 136GB