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UPDATE November 15, 2005:

Successful install of Solaris 10 x86 on a Dell 1850, with the RAID ENABLED

Steps:

1. download yourself the "solsimega.zip" file from sun:
[since Sun changes URL's in their site more often than my wife changes underwear, I will post this link below
with extreme caution.]
So, if this link does not work, you can find the patch, in the additional drivers section, under STORAGE.

[link is at bottom under: Solaris Device Driver for the LSI MegaRAID Adapter]

now: 

2. unzip the file, and you will find tn .img file there, which you just dd into a diskette:
dd if=lsimega.img of=/dev/rdiskette0
- if you can't find a diskette, then call sun and tell them Feudalism is also passee. haha

3. check below, and follow these new instructions:

a. step 1 below: change:  ENABLE RAID in the F2 setup menu, under the scsi options

b.  steps 2-5 are fine

c. now add the ADDITIONAL DRIVER, which is the lsimega diskette we just build

d.  continue as specified below, except, in step 8, you will see that the diskette not "recognized" as a postinstall patch is the lsimega, so you may have to press ENTER twice on that one, when you insert the diskette.  (the SD is fine).

e. steps 9 through 13 are not necessary.

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Complete success: Solaris 10 x86 on Dell 1850 dual Xeon 3.0 HT
Author: BobX 		Jun 6, 2005 11:00 AM (reply 4 of 4) 	
OK guys,

I've got it rocking. thanks to the new itmpt driver released by LSIlogic a couple of days ago for download on their site.

these are the exact steps, how to install Solaris 10 x86 (03/05 release) on a Dell 1850 Dual Xeon 3Ghz, with 2x73GB SCSI disks, using an LSI 1030 controller.

1. go into the bios in the Dell, and disable the Raid mode, this is done in the Integrated Peripherals, just set the raid card to SCSI enabled. Also, make sure the boot device has the diskette above the hard drive or CD.

2. download yourself the 119376-01 SD.ITU from sun.

3. make yourself a DCA diskette (you can get the file called d1_image from the DVD, which you can mount on another pc)

4. mount that DCA diskette on some linux box, or wincrap box, it is a DOS formatted diskette, and edit the file [solaris/bootenv.rc] file and add a line at the bottom with the following:
setprop acpi-user-options 0x4

5. boot the machine with the DCA diskette, and the DVD in the drive (make sure the diskette is booting), and then F4 to add a driver, and add the SD.ITU diskette. Then continue as always (F2....)

6. When asked what boot option, choose Interactive installation text in CONSOLE MODE (option 4) (believe me, you will need this due to a bug in the graphical install)

7. continue with the full install, you will notice that even though the e1000g0 is "skipped" on the test, it actually recognizes that you are networked, weird.

8. at the end of the full install it will ask you to add the SD_11... diskette again, so do that, and press enter. If at this point it complains that it cannot find the sd driver in the diskette, then press enter again, and it will find it (this may or may not occur randomly).

9. the box will reboot, and the bootup will take a long while doing some SMF stuff (i.e. how to hide inetd so that noone can telnet in any longer hahhaa). During this process, go to the lsilogic.com site, and download yourself the following file: itmpt-x86-5.06.00.zip

10. unzip that file, and you will notice that it contains itmpt-x86-50600-itu.dd and also itmpt-x86-50600.tar.Z
the itmpt-x86-50600-itu.dd is an ITU, but it only contains a solaris 9 version of the thing, so it wont be useful at boot time. Ergo, we will use the package file itmpt-x86-50600.tar.Z

11. Now that you are networked, copy that itmpt-x86-50600.tar.Z file into your dell, and uncompress untar it. Then change into the install folder it creates, and just type pkgadd -d . Go ahead and install the thing.

12. not it is important that you make sure you do exactly as the installpkg tells you. You need to vi /etc/driver_aliases and comment out the mpt "pci1000,30" and mpt "pci1000,50" lines (i.e. add a # as the first char of the line).
and UNCOMMENT the ones you will see at the bottom, called itmpt "pci1000,30" and itmpt "pci1000,50"
in my case the itmpt "pci1000,54" is already uncommented, leave as is.

13. touch /reconfigure

14. reboot

15. PTG.

The key end effect that was desired:
- I now get 50-100 megabytes / sec sending data from disk to disk, which is paaaarfect !.
- Hyperthreading is recognized properly, I can now see 4 cpus,
- The 8GB of swap I have is recognized.


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In response to Solaris being junk, and moving to Linux or BSD, well, this is not an OS-War thread, but I can guarantee the following premises are true:

a. the easier to install an OS, the more latent incompatibilities are added to a running system, which invariably manifest themselves at 4 AM, or when you least expect them.

b. wincrap is *not* and OS, it's just a bad, sad joke on humanity.

c. BSD will invariably freeze your whole operation as soon as you have 10 heavy applications accessing the disks heavily for more than a minute.

d. Linux will invariably need a reboot once in a while, specially when you run more than 5 different heavy apps with lots of ram manipulation, and disk action. (note, if using heavy NFS, then the reboot will be needed once a week or less)

e. Solaris (sparc or X86) is the only one that allows me to sleep and smile (once it's installed of course), and will not freeze no matter what you throw at it, I have a dual cpu x86 at constant load 3 or 4, doing webserver, database, php runner, and batch image processing, with an uptime of 1200 days.

cheers to all, wish you luck.