[Musings] Its 1am, do I know where I am?

I am having problems getting to sleep. I was tired, but now I am awake, sort of tired, but not really. I decided to occupy myself by doing some work. I am currently attempting to load Solaris 9 9/05 into our JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit) server. I am having NFS issues, I think because of the primary network interface on the JET server. I have switched to an alternate gigE interface and the NFS time out errors seem to have gone away. I set up a static route on the JET server to my workstation that is forcing it to send packets out a faster, more reliable network.

I was also a little worried because I was getting these errors on my solaris 10 workstation (where I am sharing out my DVD-ROM to the JET server so I can load the image remotely):

Feb 9 00:55:56 workstation scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@1e,600000/ide@d/sd@2,0 (sd3):
Feb 9 00:55:56 workstation Error for Command: read(10) Error Level: Retryable
Feb 9 00:55:56 workstation scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Requested Block: 1176 Error Block: 1176
Feb 9 00:55:56 workstation scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Vendor: TOSHIBA Serial Number: 12/15/03
Feb 9 00:55:56 workstation scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Sense Key: Not Ready
Feb 9 00:55:56 workstation scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice] ASC: 0x4 (LUN is becoming ready), ASCQ: 0x1, FRU: 0x0

(hostnames have been changed to protect me in case my boss is reading)

The errors worried me at first until I realized it was just from my DVD-ROM spinning up.

I inherited this JET environment from the previous Sys Admin regime at work and it has never been quite right. I would like to eventually burn it to the ground and rebuild from scratch. But this is not an option at this time due to the high and constant pressure to get systems built and into production (our workload is only a year behind, which is good, when I started a year ago, it was 3 years behind).

Now the damn twirler (what I call the /-\| spinner sequence) is taking a LOOOOONG time to comeback. It is stuck

Copying Solaris image....
Verifying target directory...
Calculating the required disk space for the Solaris_9 product
|

I let it run like this two hours last time and it should only take a few minutes. I wonder if the issue is because I made have a flaky DVD-ROM, or possibly issues with the DVD-R that the image is burned on to (SUN rarely ships product media anymore, you have to download it and burn it yourself), as we have had problems with certain DVD-ROMs reading media.

Its been 20 minutes...still spinning...YES! It is now showing what I have been waiting for:

Copying the CD image to disk...
-

Now I hope it finishes before backups run at 3am and destroy any network bandwidth I had.

Hot tea has not helped me get back to sleep or even get drowsy. I keep processing the mental to-do list of things I have to do for work. Things keep popping in and out of the list. I am having a mental buffer overflow, I have at least 20 major, complex projects I need to be working on. Two of which I know can drop off due to age. About six are high priority should have been done a year ago. Four are new mission-critical issues. About a million are infrastructre/interest projects that I want to implement or help to implement but customer project work keeps me from them.

Progress is being made, just slowly.

Tea is finally starting kick in as is the relief this thing is finally copying. I need to get this thing installed because we have a couple of new Sunfire E25k domains that are running the Ultra-Sparc IV+ (US-IV+) procs which require Solaris 9 9/05 (Update 8) or higher. Our previous Solaris 9 standard was Solaris 9 9/04.

Tomorrow it is time to patch my Solaris 10 workstation to our latest patch bundle level (November 2005). Hope I don't h0rk anything like I did when I first patched it using the Solaris updatemanager (it still has a few bugs that need to be ironed out). I will be applying these patches via the cluster install method, so I think I should be ok.

Final note to self...run 'add_solaris_location' in the morning to finalize the load.