T2000: Judgement Day
T2000: Judgement Day
About a month ago I signed up for the Sun Fire T2000 try and buy program that Jonathan Schwartz announced on his blog. I thought that would be a good opportunity for me to learn about Solaris 10 and Sun hardware as I’ve mostly been busy with FreeBSD and mostly Linux deployments the last years.
The whole procedure for participating in this program was a bit weird though. I signed up through Sun’s web site and then did not hear back from them for a couple of weeks. Not even a simple message to confirm that I signed up. Then suddenly I got an email saying that I was approved and that a machine was on it’s way! Hm. Well. Great!
About a week later I actually received the machine. Interesting, because I still have not signed any forms from Sun. Just the standard form that the delivery guy had. Ah well. I’m sure they know who I am 
Anyway, today we put the machine in the highly professional (and very secure) XS4ALL server room (in the KPN Telecom datacenter) in Amsterdam.
Installing this server was all pretty easy. I did not want to connect the whole rails system, so we simply put it on a shelf. I connected 2 ethernet ports to a 100mbit switch and just one power supply.
We were just a bit worried that the server would use too much power, as the cabinet was already pretty crowded. If the power strip maxes out then it shuts down the whole cabinet. Nasty.
Only one way to find out what these machines really use power-wise. With help from Peter, the friendly XS4ALL operator, we attached the T2000 to an empty test group in their ‘lab’ that has an amp meter attached to it.
The results were pretty good. In standby the machine uses 0.1A. Fully powered on it used 0.9A with one power supply connected and 1.0A with 2 power supplies connected. No more worries. Even it it doubles during heavy load that should be well within limits.
So, what’s next? Well, my last real experience with Solaris was in the 2.3 era, so I will have to dive into some standard system administration documentation. To start with I need to do simple things, like disable telnet and sendmail, upgrade Java 5.0 to the most recent version and then add some of my preferred tools to this setup like emacs and standard GNU stuff.
Real testing of Java and C++ with real numbers will come later. First we have to celebrate ‘Queensday’ here
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