More Sun T2000 "minor changes"

As the Sun hardware manual for the T2000 series states that "minor changes" would need to be made to installations of Solaris 10 on that hardware, I thought I'd enlighten everyone what these changes actually are.

1. As stated previously, this is the only hardware from Sun on which hardware drive mirroring for boot drives must be configured before installing the OS. This is bad enough. Read on.
   
   
2. When you add this to a pre-installation script to create the mirror before the disk is set up in JumpStart (tm) (r), the whole install bombs out with a "unable to write VTOC label" error. This is because while the drives are being synced for the (hopefully only) first time, some weird lock gets set.
   
   
3. When the sync operation on the drives completes, both mirrored disks are wiped. At least it warns you. The problem is, they're binary-wiped, and don't have the Sun format disklabel magic at the beginning. Not fixing this causes the next attempt to JumpStart the machine to bomb out too.
   
   
4. On the T2000's, one obscure reference in this document alludes to the need to add the line "set pcie:pcie_aer_ce_mask=0x1" to /etc/system. Mmmmkay, I understand this is an issue, but for gripes' sake why put it into that document? Nobody looks there, which brings me to point 5:
   
   
5. Your search engine and user interface for docs.sun.com is probably one of the worst web sites ever created my man. It's slow as molasses, and the searches return little of value. Most people prefix "docs.sun.com:" to their Google searches because that sucks a whole lot less.
   
   
6. And why do the issue numbers listed in the above-mentioned documents not link to the bug database? Not a bug, but a feature, huh?
   

I think as long as people depend on consultants to stand these systems up, nobody will ever really know the cost of ownership of this garbage.

Ah... it's a paycheck, and it pays by the hour...