My Sun T2000 is here, and with Cliff’s help it’s now patched, configured, and online. (Aside: what’s a Sun Happy Meal?)

I’ll second Jon’s assessment that Sun really should put some reasonable cable adapters in the box, as the the bundle of adapters necessary to make a null modem connection to the box is ridiculously out of scale (I’ll get a picture soon).

I’m getting the application environment put together, which has turned out easier than expected thanks to the convenient packages from Blastwave.org. The box came with Solaris 10 installed, and after a quick installation and configuration of pkg-get I was happily installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP as simply as typing pkg-get -i apache.

AMP, AMPS, Apache, Blastwave.org, LAMP, MySQL, PHP, Solaris, Solaris 10, Sun, Sun Microsystems, T2000

A Solaris sysadmin I’m not. But now that I’ve finally got the Sun T2000 server I begged for a while back, I’ve got to ramp it up right quick.

The first task is to get a, um, LAMP environment up and running (SAMP?…oh, Sun wants us to call it AMPS). A bit of Googling turned up this forum thread that suggested Blastwave.org’s ports of PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

edit: I corrected the model number.

amp, amps, apache, lamp, mysql, open source, oss, php, solaris, sun, t2000

My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards:

Sun vs Dell

All you need to know about Dell & Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool:

http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/

How come the big brokerage house analysts can’t figure this stuff out?

Cliff doesn’t really blog from his parent’s basement, but well, he was happy for the link love.

basement, blog, blogger, blogging, cliff pearson, dell, industry analysis, link love, parent’s basement, sun, sun vs. dell

Jonathan Schwartz made the kind of news that makes Slash Dotters happy: he announced Sun is (sort of) giving away free servers. It’s a promotion, a media play, of course, but one that might make a few lucky people very happy.

Here’s the deal: Sun is really proud of their new T2000 eight core server. Each core runs at 1.2GHz, but they’re apparently applying some distributive power of multiplication and calling it an 9.6GHz machine and touting some impressive performance benchmarks. But rather than play the game of “our experts are better than your experts” against other vendors, they’ve extended a pretty generous try and buy program to users themselves. And, as Jonathan made noise in his blog post, a few people might get lucky enough to keep their machines.

So what’s my angle? WPopac rocks, and performance is excellent with my test corpus (160,000 bib records) on even a lowly single-CPU server with only 1GB of RAM, despite the fact that each bib record is represented in both its composed form in the wp_posts table and as about 20 more rows per record in a separate table (yup, I’ve got almost 3 million rows representing every atomic detail of every bib record), and all of this is full-text indexed.

And I’m fully confident that when I put our entire catalog into WPopac, all 330,000 bib records (resulting in about 6.2 million atomic records), performance will still be up to the task. My math suggests everything should be ducky on a relatively budget server up beyond about 1 million bib records, but what happens for libraries that have more than that, say, perhaps 6 to 8 million bib records (again, 110 to 150 million atomic records; again, all full-text indexed in MySQL)?

It would seem that WPopac’s combination of, um, large MySQL databases with high-volume Apache/PHP should be an ideal fit for the T2000’s big RAM space and support for high numbers of parallel threads. Jonathan claims the T2000 costs a modest $5,000 (but the online store shows a higher price?) and outperforms everything else, but is it up to WPopac? Do they want to try?

C’mon Sun, toss a T2000 this way, let’s see what happens? (Heck, I’ll even try a T1000.)

sun, solaris, t2000, coolthreads, server, 9.6ghz, challenge, sparc, ultrasparc, 8core, free, wpopac, performance, big db, Jonathan Schwartz , try-n-buy, try and buy, free server

From the NASA website:

EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) images the solar atmosphere at several wavelengths, and therefore, shows solar material at different temperatures. In the images taken at 304 Angstroms the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 degrees Kelvin. In those taken at 171, at 1 million degrees. 195 Angstrom images correspond to about 1.5 million Kelvin. 284 Angstrom, to 2 million degrees. The hotter the temperature, the higher you look in the solar atmosphere.

More images of the sun, and movies too, are at NASA. The movies show coronal mass ejections coming from those bright spots.

tags: 1 million degrees kelvin, blue, bright material, corona, degrees kelvin, extreme ultraviolet imaging, hot, hot air, hot gas, nasa, solar, solar material, solar satellite, sun, the sun, ultraviolet

Cliff worries that his website, Spiralbound.net, doesn’t get indexed by Google often enough. He’s a good guy, so I figure I’ll prime the pump for him. Here, Google Google.

Solaris Docs: Migrating Veritas Volume Manager disk groups between servers
Solaris Docs: Solaris Disk Partition Layout
Solaris Docs: Copying A Boot Drive Between Disks With Different Partion Layouts

If you’re looking for those, you should also take note of these here at MaisonBisson: Configuring Sun T3 Storage Arrays and Things To Remember While Doing Upgrades on Mission Critical Sun Equipment.

Fireworks Factory Explosion Video

Related at MaisonBisson: Camera Goes All To Hell, Bits Recovered From Memory Card

Cellophane Tee Shirts

Related at MaisonBisson: Beef T-Shirts.

Clean Graffiti

tags: blog, cafepress, cellophane, disk partition, explosion video, factory explosion, fireworks, fireworks factory, google, servers, solaris docs, sun, tee shirts, things to remember, veritas, veritas volume manager