[Suns-at-Home] 11 quid E450 not surprisingly wont boot..

[Craig Dewick]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Julie Baumler wrote:

> I've seen similar behavior in E450's before and it turned out to be a bug 
> whose fix was supposed to come out with Solaris 10.  We never got to 
> upgrading those machines while I was there, so I don't know.  But as I 
> recall, the workaround is to turn off autoboot, power on, give all the drives 
> plenty of time to spin up, make sure all the green lights are on and then 
> boot.  Basically, the OS goes looking for disks faster than they are 
> available to it.
>
> Also, E450's are particularly picky about being properly grounded and having 
> a fairly stable environment.  We had a problem with machine room humiddity 
> control that led to major biannual shifts in humiity - there was about a 50% 
> chance that any given E450 would crash in the week or two following the 
> shift.  HVAC finally got on top of the humidity issue and boom - stable 
> E450's.

The other thing that kills them is blocked airflow through the front of 
the fan tray. My E450 (2 x 400 MHz CPU, 2 GB RAM, half-full of disks) 
keeled over today with CPU overheating and I tracked it down to the 
perforated metal panel behind the square-holed plastic fascia being 
completely blocked by a layer of dust. I vacuumed all that off and the 
machine's a happy camper again.

I don't have a machine room or any climate control other than opening the 
window on the room - it's a spare room in my house. 8-) I have a couple of 
E250's here now and one has rack-mount rails so I'm thinking of 
reconfiguring my 19" rack to put one of the E250's in that, and use it to 
replace the E450 that's sitting on castors on the floor. It's a 
non-carpeted floor which helps a lot for cleaning, but it would be nice to 
have a bit of climate control. A/C is expensive to run esp. when it's just 
for one room.

Craig.

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