Replacing a failed CD-ROM in a Sun Ultra 60

The CD-ROM drive in the Sun Ultra 60 that I recently picked up from ebay lasted long enough to get an initial install of Solaris 10 installed, and then the tray refused to stay closed. I picked up a replacement used DVD drive from www.anysystem.com

It came with free plastic ducks. Yay!

One thing I’ve noticed is that used retro computer gear is often shipped with far more care and with better packing than new gear – good job on the packing anysystem.com:


Here’s a side view of what the Sun Service Manual for the Sun Ultra 60 calls the ‘Removable Media Assembly’, or RMA:

Here’s the front view before removing the face plate:

The front plate is removed by squeezing the left and right sides then it pops off. Remove the screws seen here on the front left and right:

… and then the whole RMA section slides out:

Undo the 2 screws on the left and right of the CD-ROM drive, remove the cables at the back and then slide it out of the assembly. Here’s the CD drive out, and the new DVD drive inserted:

RMA pushed back into place and front plate re-attached. Done!

Resetting HP Proliant server ILO network settings from power on System Settings

As part of reorganizing of my home network and homelab setup, I’m moving everything running on my DL380 G7 server from 19.168.1.0/24 addresses to it’s own network under 10.0.0.0/24

I thought I knew what new ip and gateway settings I needed in ILO on my server, so I changed them through the web interface, only to find out the gateway was incorrect and now I could no longer access ILO remotely on my network.

Luckily from the power on System settings, you can access the ILO config if you connect a monitor and keyboard and press F8 when prompted (see detailed step by step and timings of each option here). The F8 to access ILO settings is only on the screen for about 2 seconds, so if you miss it you’ll get the System Settings menu like this:

If you get into this Setup Utility menu then you need to exit and try again.

The F8 prompt you’re looking for appears only for about 2 seconds before the HP RAID array info appear – if you see this then you’ve already missed it and you’ll need to reboot and try again:

This is the ILO menu you should see after pressing F8 when prompted:

I had previously changed the gateway so a router on my 192.168.1.0 network that was unreachable from there. Changed, now we’re ready to reboot:

Success, ILO is now accessible on 10.0.0.2!

awk basics

I’ve tinkered with awk and sed for quick one off tasks before in the past but I always have to go back and check the syntax for awk as it’s one of those things I use only once in a while.

Some quick notes for reference for later:

  • awk splits records in an input file by default by white space chars
  • uses $0 to refer to a whole line, and $1 … $n to refer to each matching token on a line
  • to split using column delimiters other than whitespace use -F

Examples:

Example file – example1.txt:

aaa bbb ccc
ddd eee fff

$ awk {'print $1'} example1.txt

Will print the first matching column:

aaa
ddd

If file has other column delimiters use -F to specify the delimiter, for example, example2.txt:

aaa,bbb,ccc
ddd,eee,fff

$ awk -F , {'print $2'} example2.txt

Will match column 2:

bbb
eee

More info on awk here.

Raspbian error: “The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available”

I couldn’t do a ‘sudo apt-get update’ on my Pi 3 running Raspbian as I got this error:

Fetched 74.9 kB in 31s (2,381 B/s)                            Reading package lists... Done
W: GPG error: http://security.debian.org jessie/updates InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 9D6D8F6BC857C906 NO_PUBKEY AA8E81B4331F7F50

To import the missing keys:

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-key AA8E81B4331F7F50

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-key 9D6D8F6BC857C906

Tips from here.