lice!

Since I stumbled over this motherboard a month ago I had the idea that it would do good in a cluster, so some days ago I got myself some ‘toys’:

• 2x D945GCLF2 Intel Mainboard.
• 2×2GB DDR2 667 RAM.
• 2×160GB SATA Samsung HDD.
• 2xRealtek Gigabit NIC.
• 2×1m cat. 6 RJ45 cable.
• 1×0,5m cat. 6 RJ45 Chorssover cable.
• 2×20Pin to 24 Pin Mainboard power adapter.
• 1 Old 350W PSU

That is the setup, the goal was to wire the two systems up to the PSU, set up a network and install Solaris 10.

The first step is building a Y adapter for the PSU, to do so I cut the two 20Pin-24Pin adapters in half, tossed one of the 20Pin-female ends away. Then connected the wires of the two 24Pin-Male ends and hooked them up to the remaining 20Pin-Female connector. That worked like a charm, no problems at all. So the 4 Pin 12V CPU connector on the mainboard still was missing, for that I used a 2×12V 4Pin (the connectors used for PATA disks and drives) to a 6 Pin connector for a graphics card, cut away the two extra pins, fix the wiering according to the 4Pin specs (where goes ground and where goes the power) and this works too.

Okay so the two motherboards are powered, for the on button two old power connectors for Floppy drives (flat 4 pin) were abused as they fit the legs on the mainbord quite well, and short circuting the two pins will cause the motherboard to boot. The only thing that is not entirely nice is that once one mainboard boots the other starts to get at least some power (disks power up and the fan starts to spin). Non the less everything wores well.

The two extra NIC’s get plugged in and connected via the 0,5m chrossover cable, they will give the two nodes a fast way to communicate without putting load on the switch. The two onboard NIC’s go to the switch to allow access to the network from the nodes.

I used a old PATA cdrom drive to install Solaris 10, during the installation the NIC’s are not recognized since the model isn’t known to Solaris and it refuses to recognize the Atom 330 as 64 bit CPU, non the less the system installs smoothly without any kind of trouble, SATA disks are recognized and everything else is shiny.

Once the basic installation is done the next step is to get the NIC’s recognized luckiely I was not the first one to run in the problem so the solution was easy. Thanks to James for the gret work. In essence it was required to adjust the /etc/driver_alias and the /etc/system. This fix also worked for the second NIC since it had yet another chipset … narf …

So the base system is running, I will get to do some performace tests later on too. If anyone has questions, or suggestions what to testrun – please go ahead and let me know.