< Project:Infrastructure < Developer Machines

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.

Machine NameIPDNS HostnamesConsole ServerConsole Account
bender140.211.166.184bender.sparc.dev.gentoo.org10.0.0.176admin

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.

  • console - switch to the active software connected to the console (OpenBoot, SILO, Linux terminal)
  • #. - when connected to the console, escape back to ALOM
  • poweroff - request the system shut down gracefully and stay turned off
  • poweroff -f - hard power off the system
  • poweron - power on the system and let it start booting
  • break - 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).

Common OpenBoot Commands

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

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

Common SILO Commands

Once you see the boot: prompt, hit Tab to list all the available kernel images. You can even append kernel command line options here like init=/bin/bb to get a recovery shell.

So to boot an old kernel whose image name is 3.6.17 (as specified in /etc/silo.conf), you can type 3.6.17 init=/bin/bb.

Kernel Management

sparc systems use the silo tool from the sys-boot/silo package to manage booting of kernels. Things to remember:

  • Make updates to /etc/silo.conf.
  • No need to run silo after making changes to kernels or silo.conf -- the boot loader will process on the fly.
  • Make sure to run silo after upgrading sys-boot/silo.
  • The bootable linux kernel is created at arch/sparc/boot/zImage (e.g. under /usr/src/linux/).
  • The make install shortcut should work OK.

Machine-specific Notes

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
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