Things that go bang during an install!

There’s always the unexpected!

With the world of virtualisation here new, we are finding that there are all sorts of issues that we never had before. It’s so easy to create a new machine and to move it from physical box to physical box that one often doesn’t think too much about the things that can go bang while you’re doing it. So it was today, the machine – a solaris container was being moved from one server to an aother. It arrived at the new server and was promptly pronounced DOA, what had happened I wondered – some research quickly pinpointed the problem I’d been too slow. My disk had arrived at the new server only to be appropriated by an other systems admin, one renowned for his ability to make a small change with a big impact and that’s just what he’d done. My disk had arrived just as he was looking for his, it seems that “fmthard” when combined with the “prtvtoc” command works extremely well on a new disk especially when run as root. Although the result was as he expected, there was a certain amount of confusion on my part as the following command sequence yielded nothing of any interest. Firstly lets see what new devices we have with, “devfsadm, powercf -q, powermt config” – woa there’s my disk, OK “zpool import” and it returns nothing.

Still I was in the final day of the workshop with my German colleagues, the day couldn’t have started in a worse way. Having spent some time trying to persuade the Europeans to try the traditional British Kipper for breakfast, something which we were successful with there was massive disappointment in store. The sequence of events went as follows, the kippers are ordered in the normal manner about 24 hours in advance. The order for nine kippers with poached eggs is expected to be ready at half past eight, we arrive in the canteen at the apointed time this morning – pissup and brewery come to mind. There are only six kippers available, OK so three of us back out allowing our first international Kipper Club members to have a fresh kipper for breakfast. The kippers have been part cooked, now to be truthfull this isnt much of an issue for me. As I’m quite happy to eat them uncooked – these are hot smoked by the way, however in my later dealing with the Europeans, it was plain that this hadn’t been an enjoyable experience for them.

On the plus side the workshop was a huge success, my colleagues had provided a solution that almost worked “out of the box” ensuring that we have a workable system. There are only a couple of fairly trivial items to deal with, at that point we should be able to provide a full install for all the systems that will satisfy all the requirements. What I will say is that when the contribution of Michael is considered the contribution from me seems to be pretty insignificant.