I don’t normally agree with Steve’s viewpoints or his ideas or his general tone.   The right for him to post his thoughts is important as getting bullied affects all of us.   We as bloggers and independent thinkers do have a right to talk about things that are not company confidential or business sensitive information.  There is quite an outpouring of support from the Web & Twitter for Stevie.

Thankfully Cisco’s very supportive Social Media policy did come into play here and since Steve only mostly insulted the intelligence of the Gartner analyst, a fairly easy target, he has come back online.  His managers and other’s in Cisco’s corporate office have been supportive.   Thankfully Cisco does have some good people there.

So Steve, When are you putting that post back up?

To update this you need to either have a running OS or you can do the following steps using tools you have already downloaded most likely.

bbFirmware CD 1.60
PowerManagement 3.4D Linux install

1. Boot off bbFirmware CD via the iLO Virtual Media
2. At the boot: prompt type in console and hit enter.  Don’t hit the default.
3. Wait for a console shell prompt to come up.  This may take a couple minutes.
4. Mount a Folder (which will show up as a USB device to the OS) via the iLO to the directory you have put the PowerManagement update in.   It is smart to minimize how many files are in that directory.
5. Type in mkdir /mnt/power
6. Type in mount /dev/sda /mnt/power
7. Type in cd /mnt/power
8. Type in ./CP011627.scexe
9. Once this is complete go ahead and reboot the box via the iLO.

That should address this issue.

The SGI purchase I can understand as Rackable wants to be a one stop shop for their customers.  SGI has been on a downward spiral for years.   Who needs to buy a super expensive custom OS/Hardware to do graphics processing or HPC when I can get commodity hardware and do just as well if not better?

The Sun purchase doesn’t make much sense to me.   IBM has no need/want for a new OS and it sure can’t be for the sales force/contacts that Sun has.   I can think two things that it “might” want.   One is to expand their server hardware line to AMD though why?   IBM is well known for their “better than Intel” line of Intel x86 chips and Sun is of the same quality generation in AMD terms.   The other thing I can think of is that IBM wants to take full control of the Java Stack.  They have a heavy investment in WebSphere and is one of their more profitable product lines so why not take control all the way down if you can?

Event Name: (SNMP) Remote Insight/ Integrated LightsOut Interface Error (9006)

URL: https://HPSIM:2381/

Event originator: HPSIM

Event Severity: Major

Event received: 12-Mar-2009, 17:31:02

Event description: Remote Insight/ Integrated Lights-Out Interface Error. The host OS has detected an error in the Remote Insight/ Integrated Lights-Out interface. The firmware is not responding.

As you can tell from my lazy comments, this became a pretty big deal as iLO was completely toasty on these boxes where SIM was generating this alert.  I contacted HP and it was a pretty entertaining exchange.

HP Support: Are you running HP SIM 5.3?

Me: Yes

HP Support: Do you have iLO version 1.60 or 1.61?

Me: Beats me.  The iLOs are not responding so I have zero way to tell.

HP Support: I think I know your problem.

Me: <Silence for a minute.>  Well don’t leave me hanging here.

HP Support: I’m reading an email alert that came through while we were talking.   There’s a hotfix for HP SIM 5.3 and a recommendation to go up to firmware 1.70 for the iLO.

Me: Oh great.  *sigh*

So now I get to physically pull power cords to fix iLOs everywhere.  (Yes this means an OS reboot too.)

* Hey HP.  Put a button onto the servers to “reboot the iLO”.

zfs set sharenfs=anon=0 usbpool/virtuals

I wouldn’t mind having stuff like this if I could figure out how to properly get logging of the issues/connections in OpenSolaris. Anybody know how to increasing logging for the NFS services in OpenSolaris?

“You can’t control what you can’t measure.”