[zahal]

Hello all,
Been a long time since Nekochan days.
Pureblood here, still kicking butt.
My computer collection keeps growing, but the space and time to mantain/code/test/play with them shortens.
Anyway, just got me a T5120.  Lowend quad 1.2GHz.  Has 8 2GB sticks but for some reason only 8GB are recognized.  MB button to identify faulty sticks won't light any LED.
It's got 11.2 on it, but I need to do a clean install.  FW is 7.4.8 and I need at least 7.4.9 to install 11.3 (althought it did boot from 10.3 DVD in order to reset password on installed 11.2).
No way to download from Oracle without costly support contract.  Does anyone around here have a newer FW for this model?  I believe the latest is 7.4.11 but 7.4.9 will do.
Some other questions about this server.

1)  Is the processor upgradeable or is it soldered (I believe it is since there are no T2 procs on eBay, but plenty of T1 procs).
2)  Are other framebuffers besides XVR300 supported?  If I install Linux, will any PC graphics card (which fits the low profile bracket) allow me to use a desktop once booted like PowerPC Macs running Linux (no ILOM or OpenBoot prompt access though)??  Does anyone have the SUN firmware to flash a PC FireMV 2200?
3)  Which faster SAS cards can this guy boot from (onboard seems to be 3Gbps)?

Any other mods/tips/recommendations for this guy will be appreciated too!

Thanks and nice reading you again

[zahal]

UPDATE:

Well that escalated quickly.
Turns out the T5120 is an octacore, but there seems to be a fault which causes it to only see 4 cores and half the RAM.
I've searched and tried to clear the fault from ILOM / ALOM but still get the "ERROR: Operating with a degraded memory configuration." output from show faulty.
Been a long time since I use Solaris and it was version 10.
I don't recall having to deal with roles back then.   I have a LSI SAS 9240-8i flashed to 9211 from a few years back.  Everyone using ZFS was doing that to these cards to make their disks JBODs for much faster I/O, but they were all doing it on x64 if I recall correctly.
I'll try that card once I manage to get all CPUs and RAM going....I've read nasty posts about this series not recognizing all RAM unless sticks are same part number and even down to same lot.

PS.  I had forgotten how long Slowlaris takes to boot!

UPDATE 2: Rebooted and all 64 threads and the full 16GB of RAM are now seen in Solaris.