My initial hope was to commandeer a monitor, plug in a USB keyboard, and go
at it. One major proble, there is no video card installed on the box, although
if I had an extra PCI-E card, it would be interesting to see what happens with
one. Initial system boot-up and installation is done via the serial console.
Okay, find a null modem and a laptop with a serial port (my new T43p does not
have a serial port). Wrong. Even if I could have found a null modem, the
regular serial port is not the serial console, instead you need to use an
RJ45->DB9 dongle to get a serial terminal. Of course, these things were no
where to be found around Carnegie Mellon.

Luckily, an email went off, and a schmeatic of the circuit came back. Thinking
for a bit, I remembered that Make Magazine
vol 1 had an article on how to build a
5-in-1 network cable. Off to
Radio Shack for some parts. Unfortunately, Radio Shack has slowly turned
itself into “crappy overpriced cell-phone shack”. Not a single RJ45-DB9
connector was to be found. The only DB9 connectors I could find were just
a single snap in port. In fact, they didn’t even have a coupler for RJ45. So I picked up two of them. The next step was to
mangle an ethernet cable, and have some breadboard fun. After about 30 minutes,
I had my circuit.

The Ghetto RJ45->DB9 Converter

Luckily, after a little bit of tweaking the circuit, and reseating some wires
on my breadboard, the ALOM on the T2000 started up and spit out data to the
Hyper Terminal running on Kristina’s
laptop. It was pretty straight forward to get the network console running
after this point, and yes, it can DHCP an address, but be very careful about
putting the network admin port on a public network because the VxWorks OS that
runs ALOM does NOT support SSH. Suckage. Here’s another shot of getting
everything going. I’ve got the serial terminal up on the HP laptop and the
network terminal up on the T43p. After booting into Solaris, it’s much better
to use SSH to connect to the OS than go over the network terminal.

Getting the T2000 Up and Running

I do have a few critiques about the process. First of all, the sales people were, for lack of a better term, sales people. I started to get
random messages from people I had no knowledge of and seemed to have no relation to me. I was sent an invoice with a subject line of “INVOICE”,
which of course usually goes right to the spam filter. Finally, I got some helpful documents under a subject line of “[Fwd: [Fwd: cool tool FYI]]”,
with no explanation of why I was getting it. So let me provide a few suggestions to make the process nicer to people like me:

• Use informative subject lines that are not all capitalized. Remove all those “Fwd” headers too. Instead write “Helpful Sun T2000 Documents”.
• If you’re going to send me an email from an address that looks real, make sure you reply to it when I ask a question about it. This goes for
  you, Rebecca Lukens. I received an Invoice which said I needed to take some action regarding it, I replied to it with a few questions and never
  got a response. I tried again, and never got a response. There was also no contact information in the message, which I’ve reproduced in verbatim here:

  Try & Buy quote attached.  Thanks!

• Take some time to say why you’re emailing me. For example Instead of the above message, I would have appreciated something like this:

  Mr. Wagstrom,
  
  Attached you'll find a quote for your recent Sun Microsystems T2000 Try and Buy request.
  Should you choose to keep the machine beyond 60 days, you'll be required to pay the full
  amount of the invoice unless other arrangements have been made.  For right now, please
  enjoy the machine and we hope it sits your needs well.
  
  If you have questions, you can contact me at:
  [CONTACT INFORMATION HERE]

  You’ll notice it’s a form letter. They don’t even have to think more than pasting in the current text, but it would be very helpful to me. Also, the change would give it a chance of evading the Carnegie Mellon spam filters.

• When sending out unsolicited attachments via email, also include a web link to a site on sun.com where I can retrieve these documents.
  I trust documents coming from sun.com more than I do general email that is sent to me from unknown individuals.

But like I said, the process was actually relatively painless. A few frustrations, but I’m happy with the opportunity to test out this technology.
We’ll start benchmarking it soon.

As I thought, the machines are way backed up because of the massive response
to their admittedly very cool offer. I explained our situation to their
educational sales person for the Pittsburgh area (note to Sun web folks, I
could not easily find this information on your web site. Instead Phil had to
contact the sales person for the University of Minnesota who forwarded my
information to the nice person here in Pittsburgh) and she seemed quite
receptive and reassured me that Sun was processing the stuff and that our
purpose seemed pretty novel and interesting. So, we’re still in the queue,
but it should be all good from here.

She could have just left it at that, but she didn’t. She also was helpful
enough to provide us information about Sun matching grants for hardware. This
drops the price of a 4 core box down to a more reasonable $3800 or so. Pretty
nice. However, we still don’t have that much money, at least not yet. Anyway,
if this can run on $3800 hardware, I’d think that it makes things a whole lot
more attractive for doing some sustained testing on the system. We’ll just have
to see how well everything actually runs on it.

Once this thing shows up I’ll be sure to blog some more and provide some
photos of the system along with preliminary benchmarks.

As part of their promotion, they’re doing this cool Try before you Buy thing. Basically,
you given them your information, they send you a server free for 60 days — they
even cover postage. You evaluate it, if you like it, you pay for it. If it
doesn’t work well for your field, send it back — once again, on Sun’s dime. Pretty cool stuff. What’s cooler, is that according to Jonathan Schwartz, they’re looking for people to benchmark these guys. Specifically, if you
do a good enough job on the writeup, they may let you keep it.

So, being the graduate student I am, I immediately realized a couple of
different applications that I’d like to work on with this little guy. Firstly,
we’re going to see how well he works as a spyware monitoring box — run multiple
instances of snort on him and a database to log everything to. Should be
kinda interesting to see. Secondly, I’m going to try and use it for some of
my network analysis stuff. Specifically, seeing if it’s faster to run ORA on
it, or at the very least what’s the overall throughput.

I’m a little skeptical about it’s performance on some of the measures in ORA
because the cores share an FPU. However, the integer measures should run quite
nicely. I’ll also put it through the mixer by running Automap on a large amount
of text obtained from some of my open source reserach to evaluate how it’s able
to build a network based on all that data.

So if folks from Sun are reading this, please
let me get the machine. I’ve got real research to be doing here, and I’m even
willing put down that I got cool hardware from Sun in my papers. It’ll be even
cooler if you let me keep the box. Here’s hoping for some interesting results
once it ships!