Not so long ago I said something or other about there being “a lot to love about the ILOM”… Nearly 4 weeks later, the ILOM's about a reboot and half away from being homeless. The darn thing is just so buggy its nearly unusable. In all fairness it's 2:30 in the morning, and a rash-infested badger in a bear trap probably has tad more patience than me at the moment. With that being said, let's recap the latest frustrations.

  • Virtual CD-ROM continues to stop functioning at some point…usually 15 mins or so into your 3 gig Sol10 install…

  • The virtual keyboard just plain loses its mind. Case in point, every so often it decides my 2 key doesn't work. Try typing in a partition size without a functioning 2 key. Use the number pad you say? Don't think so McFly.

  • Other times, I think the v-kboard just goes on permanent vacation. Bang on it. Hammer on it.  Swear at it. Coax it. Unh Unh. It's not going to actually translate your keystrokes to the server.

What fixes this? Well, restart the ILOM Java client and it clears up like a charm. Thankfully, they seem to have fixed the behavior where restarting the ILOM was the only solution. So is it really a problem with the ILOM? I don't think so. It seems to me that Java's being Java again…not handling data intensive streams worth a darn.

Is Sun alone in this? No. The best Java KVM client I've seen is the Raritan Multi-Platform Client for their KX & KSX series KVMoIP boxes. However, even the Raritan Java client gives up the ghost after about an hour. Raritan's Windows client works like a trooper however…even when dealing with inflamed badgers like me. ;-)

The ILOM has so much potential. Come on guys…I'm still rootin' for a solid ILOM! More to come on this later.

P.S. I'll post something soon about getting Sun Cluster to do sub-second failover for MySQL.

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