[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hipster 2020.10 text installer ISO Wow!!!!

[Reginald Beardsley]

The HP BIOS is the screwiest one I've ever come across. My first Z400 cost $1100, but several years ago I got 3x Z400's for a total of $300 delivered. They are all the older 4 DIMM machines w/ 2.67 GHz quad core W3520 processors, but you sure can't beat the price. Lately I've been eyeing a Z820. I can get one with 24 3 GHz cores, 512 GB of RAM and 20-30 TB of RAIDZ3 for less than I paid for my Ultra 20 in 2006. The hardest part is finding a justification with the current state of the oil industry. So I'll need a new use case.

I'm happy to report that by running FreeBSD sade(8) and putting a GPT label on the disk I can access the disk on OI 2020.10 again and all the vendor information has been restored. prtvtoc again provides the same output as before I nuked the label. Once I've studied the ZFS implementations in Linux, BSD, OS X, Solaris and Illumos/OI I plan to write a more sensible way to clean cruft off of disks than a blind "dd if=/dev/zero...". Whenever I do disk upgrades I put the old disks in caddies so I can test stuff such as I've been doing. Or try out the latest version of Plan 9 ;-)

So I think it worth studying how they are getting the disk info and doing some work on format(1m) after all. I don't think the proliferation of redundant tools is useful. I'm much more inclined to fix old stuff than write new stuff. Though "fix" may well require writing a lot of new code. It's the person who has to use it that matters. My chief objection to Gnu/Linux is the perpetually changing syntax and semantics of things one rarely does. That is very dangerous if you have some ancient utility that attends to a complex but infrequent task which you got working long ago, but never quite got around to documenting properly.

Have Fun!
Reg
     On Tuesday, March 2, 2021, 12:46:11 PM CST, John D Groenveld <groenveld at acm.org> wrote:  
 
 In message <0679fa41-d544-7007-44fd-b00b3a5c9fd4 at kit.edu>, "Udo Grabowski (IMK)
" writes:
>since that mode is just slow. Get yourself into AHCI mode first,
>along the guidelines Gary just posted (and that should've worked
>out of the box, these HPE guys manage to break everything...).

Does HP's BIOS prohibit booting from LSI HBAs?
ISTR some HPQ evil in that regard.
In my little corner of the world, Dell Precision workstations
are available at salvage prices for home lab use, but in other
corners I have seen well-speced HP Z workstations on thrift shop
shelves.

John
groenveld at acm.org

_______________________________________________
openindiana-discuss mailing list
openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss