30:16 „DIE Shot” just some additional facts: Those are 2 dual core P5s and their respective L3 caches. L1 and L2 are integrated in the chips, where each L2 is accessible by both cores. This quad core “CPU” (called QCM as in quad core module) is actually 2 DCMs combined, and the L3 not shared between all cores on the module but only its respective DCM (dual core module) ones. QCM allowed IBM a very effective method of nearly doubling the theoretical performance and also retain the small footprint of the modules. Each of these CPUs is SMT2 ready, allowing for a theoretical 8 “cores”. SMT is enabled dynamically when needed and disabled, when more processing power is required. That’s a key factor in allowing micro partitioning as seen before you wiped all LPARs. Disclaimer: That’s very theoretical knowledge (never had the chance to have a P5 in hands, only P3 and P4) so please correct me if something was wrong
You could hear the dopamine in your voice when the IBM hub came out. Glad your hobby brings you joy. Everyone needs simple pleasures in life. One of mine is watching your videos.
Hmc's were a pain, luckily you could escape the sandbox and get root by changing the man pager and execute a root shell. No need to call support for a key. Always loved the vio servers though, such a nice set of mgmt commands
I used that same Dell KVM in a server rack I set up decades ago. I also used an RS/6000 (desktop) as a workstation a long time ago. The only AIX knowledge you needed for RS/6000 was "smit".
That RS/6000 is a beast! Fascinating stuff, looking foward to see what else you'll show us! Also, kind of glad I am not the one having to deal with all that Java and just watch you do it xD
I think TH-cam may have eaten my comment. I mentioned that one of my first gigs in IT was sysadmin of a bunch of RS/6000 boxen that ran a warehouse management system. We had a bunch of H70's, a few B50's and a pair of S80's and they were all really solid, wonderful machines to work with. One of the big marketing pushes that IBM put on was running Linux on pSeries; it was all penguins, all the time. You should be able to get a RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 LPAR going if you wanted to mess with it. Great vids, really enjoy seeing all the stuff I worked on "back in the day" on the screen!
It's always a good day when I see you've posted again. I love the focus on esoteric enterprise gear! I've learned a ton from watching your videos. Keep it up!
Way back then, RS/6000 was just something else. I worked for a company which had one, they used for a client server system build with a 4GL system - and it was not sweating.
Great vid! I did a fair amount of work with p-series back in that time frame. Good systems- the HMC was a bit of a pain, but when set up, it was a great system.
It's a good week when clab uploads. I was curious and went to your channel page and realized I have watched every single one of your videos. They're too good!
ASMI runs on an embedded PPC processor on the FSP (flexible service processor) card that connects to the HMC. That's how the HMC can connect to the system before any LPAR are defined or stared. Some of the SRC (system reference codes) on the LCP operator's panel reference boot codes for the FSP.
In the few times I‘ve had an issue like yours it was either an issue with contacts or crapacitors. Very interesting hardware, this is what I was around in my younger years 😏
I too am amazed at the amount of cool computer stuff you can do.....if you just wait a couple decades for the hardware to become legacy. Really enjoy your videos!
Thought you were quiet - turns out TH-cam removed your subscription from my account! Just a heads up if your metrics are a bit skewed, wonder if anyone else has had this? Great video as always, good to finally see this box come to life.
5 months in the making! (since last p5 video) the LPAR monster has been slayed finally lol glad to see it going! it really looks like you need a HMC to fully experience these. OK, now run Linux on a LPAR; lol I would be trying it. There is linux distros that support IBM POWER...got to try it lol.
It is great watching these. I can’t remember if I commented before, but I’m a network engineer and I definitely networked some of these together with our Linux team. I never got to see these parts so it’s cool to see! Networking these HMCs needing to be on the same layer 2 was interesting on how usually segment our areas today
Great video, I can feel your pain trying to get this hardware working. I remember ages ago nearly adding brown to my pants the first time I plugged in an enterprise server, it ramped it's fans so quickly and so loudly I was sure something had self destructed!
Seeing those LPARs inspired me to go learn QEMU-KVM better and I ended up discovering Cockpit, which is a web GUI just like this HMC. It's so easy now! But that LPAR hardware level isolation seems pretty neat. Like having a mainframe on your desk.
In the HMC software, the little icon on System Management would likely be representing either an IBM Power 595 (big Power box in the form-factor of a mainframe) or an IBM Z890/Z990 which are mainframes. And that isn't an orange stripe but representing the copper style stripe on the front of both of those machines. Later ones used a metallic blue, then even later a metallic green, and now its Blue/Orange for the mainframe line and you were correct about the Orange representing a LinuxOne box in modern era hardware. That practice only started a few generations ago though. Also remember that HMC software is also used for Z boxes. Although I don't know if the HMC software is the exact same, or a variant. I'd hope that you could use the same HMC software to manage Zs and Power systems together but frankly I've not tried or seen it while working at IBM 🙂 Edit: Those enablements on the Power5 box are not too standard. PowerVM is a licensed and expensive enablement at-least on the new machines so that's a super awesome config you got there! Great find on the F40, we have an F50 on exhibit at the Classical Computing Laboratory at IBM Poughkeepsie, NY The F50 is pretty kitted out, it has 4 PowerPC 604e processors running at 332Mhz each, and it has 1GB of ram, and if I get a second memory board and load it up I can get it up to 4GB! I also upgraded from the basic framebuffer it had to a not officially supported but you can make it work GXT3000P which makes quake fly! There is a seller with a pile of the GXT3000P for 50 bucks a piece... Not too bad IMO. Also the quake demos, still hosted on IBM dot com. You can find it with a bit of looking. I don't think youtube comments like links so I won't link it. But if you want help just give me a poke somewhere online. I'm not too hard to find 😅 I'll have to say hi to you at VCF MW, I'm there every year from setup to teardown. Best show on the planet IMO! -Connor K
As you suggest the interposer PCBs probably are for hot swap, specifically, if you look at the PCBs there’s are some longer contact fingers at each end that are probably connected to ground and so these ensure a common ground potential is established BEFORE the other pins are connected.
I decomissoned so many of those products before I switch my profession to software engineering and have not once was able to take at least one home to tinker with. We were told to destroy the hard drives and pull out all of the memory. I did this several times at a data center that I worked for 7 years and by the time I was done and heading out, the data center looked bare with only a few switches and routers attached. I wish I could get my hands on one cisco routers.........
I love your IBM hardware videos! As a current user/'admin' of a Power 914 server running IBMi with a vHMC, I'm always keen to try to learn more about the IBM ecosystem as there's not much learning material out there, especially here in the UK. This is my third IBM server, the previous being a P720 and before that, a P515.
You should be able to setup SSH login to the HMC, where you can open the vterm to the lpars, it's much more comfortable to connect and do stuff to the lpars there than via the web-ui and java stuff. IF you do a VIO setup you can mount virtual disks from a local volume group - so you can partition up your drives a bit more and run even more LPARS. The virtual setup of these boxes is extremely nice.
When I worked at a grocery store in the mid 90s we had an RS/6000 very similar if not the same to that F40 that was the server for the whole store. All of the cash registers net booted IBM 4960 OS which I think used a DOS kernel to bootstrap the rest of the OS for the cash register. They were NCR cash registers but they were similar to the IBM equivalent cash registers.
If you're going full on AIX, there is an additional way to install these - via the network! You just need one of your LPARs to act as a NIM server, quite fun to set up - you should try it if you can. Installation of a new LPAR this way is done in minutes from booting the profile to logging in.
Very cool! You have inspired me to be more exprloratory with my system. I was just using Ubuntu and running docker programs on my dell t430 then remoting in only using CasaOS. Now i have ProxMox running only a couple LXC containers with my different apps. I have eveything reverse proxied so i can access my machine anywhere, And the machine is using like 30 watts less power. Super fun!
Thank you for the clear explanations - I have a collection of P4 to P8 machines, the most interesting one being two P7 770/780 that have some beefy interconnect between them. It would be good to come up with some sort of benchmark - to assess the absolute computational power of these machines and let them compare not only between each other by generations, but also to some other contemporary or historical servers. We always were told that these mainframes are high-performance ones, but newer got an actual comparison to classic x86 stuff (of that era). For modern computers I have a "linux kernel compilations per kWh" metric (to assess computational efficiency...as energy costs went up lately), but I still have the compile duration, to compare the raw performance.
@@clabretro not a HSL, the 770/780 technical overview (REDP-4639-00) on pages 46-47, section 2.5 Drawer interconnection cables mentions SMP cables, i have the leftmost dual setup. Now seeing the docs, there is also a FSP cable on the other side, which I do not recall having afaik.
The pSeries is the “new” IBM approach to run PowerPC, where they converged the RS/6000 (with AIX) and the AS/400 (with OS/400, now called IBM i). Historically AS/400 comes from custom RISC silicon from System/36 and System/38, but they transitioned OS/400 to PowerPC in the late 90s. All of these (S/36, S/38, AS/400, RS/6000) where called “mini” computers, as opposed to “regular” computers (mainframes, so System 360, System 370, …) and “micro” computers (PCs). AS/400s were and are used a lot in mid-sized institutions (retail chains, warehouses, smaller banks, smaller governments, etc).. Anyway, now that you have two machines pSeries working, you should be able to do some Disaster Recovery tricks, where you lpars automatically run on the other box if the primary is online. Not sure if you can do it without shared storage tho.. which traces back to AS/400 and System/36 and System/38. All of these (S/36, S/38, AS/400, and were “mini”computers, as opposed to big “mainframes” and single-user “micro-computers”.
we better not see you with a gofundme for back surgery from lifting these boat anchors. be careful, nerd-ing out can be dangerous! Hopefully some IBM'ers from Rochester can come down to VCF and share some tips and tricks!
Good job on the 240VAC service. Look at an L14-30R or L6-20R and some 240V PDUs. You can run all your wide input range gear on 240V for a few more percent of PSU efficiency.
My first job at a fertilizer manufacturing plant 2005-2013, had a F40 as our DR server and the p5 as our live. I don’t think we had any LPAR it if we did only 1 and no HMC We were running QAD MFGpro as our ERP. Good memories.
Mmm, I have a pair of P6 520 (Express)s, a p505, and a 710. The queue of old computers needing my attention is just too deep. I don't think they've been on in 5 years :-(. I should dig out the vios software and get AIX 7 going one of these days. I really wish I could move LPARs from one host to another, but that's another enablement my 520s don't have. HMCs before the virtual appliances were the x86(-64) servers, but the product number of the x3550 M3, M4, M5 was replaced with the product number for the HMC option in the BIOS/UEFI firmware. You can change it with some utility that's used to set the serial number when you replace motherboards I think. I did that to one x3550 M3 or M4 then stumbled on a M5 mis-advertised as just a x3550 M5...for far less than the factory HMCs were going for on ebay at the time. I think there might be a version of the HMC that supports POWER5 and POWER6. I don't know if there's one that will do POWER5, POWER6, and POWER7 so I probably can't run a single HMC if I want to see my p505. The 710 is a cute entry to POWER7, but of course I wish it was a 730. POWER7 is interesting in having 4-way (4 threads per core) SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading, or HyperThreading in Intel speak). I had fun operating a P6 550 Express, two P6 520 Expresses later replaced by a 710, 720, and 750 running some ERP type software. I think I pieced together my two P6 520s from at least three ebay buys-the sellers were terrible at shipping. I should have left the P6 520 we decommissioned from the data center in the my car a little longer, I ended up leaving that job what seems like days after I unloaded the gear from the DC, would have saved me finding powervm enablement p6 520 on my own and dealing with bad shippers.
I love just how in-depth these enterprise-grade menus are. Some of the stuff definitely goes way over my head (probably because I have no training or experience working with servers and networking aside from a VPS or two), but other things made sense, especially with the explanations you gave. I was wondering why the design language of the HMC's web-based UI looked so familiar, and then it hit me after it started throwing the NPEs: this thing is using some goofy Java web applet to function. AWT/Swing has a very distinct default look and feel that you don't really see on anything else. I'm not sure if I'd have anything to offer aside from a DVD drive with LightScribe support that supports IDE and maybe a Pentium 4 CPU that's lying around, though none of this would admittedly help since that stuff is consumer grade and you seemed to be more geared towards enterprise grade stuff. Didn't know you were also from CO, but very cool. Great video, I can't wait to see what happens next with that gigantic piece of work. You can tell just from looking at it that it means serious business.
I thought I remembered that RS/6000 towers were huge. But the picture including the Mac confirmed it. (That PowerMac/MacPro tower style was not exactly "tiny" in its own right.)
I do not miss having to have the exact right Java runtime environment installed to make ancient hardware work. Or even not so ancient hardware. Cisco ASA firewalls used a Java application for the management GUI, and I hated the CLI since the configuration was just a little too different from plain old IOS, so I could never remember the commands or the right syntax for some things. Mercifully, I haven't had to use a Cisco firewall in years. As for your setup, I probably would've taken a peek at the original LPAR setup and taken notes. I saw there was a tab for "virtual adapters", I'm guessing that might be what you need to use if you want to have like an array of drives in RAID with different volumes for each LPAR. Anyway, I have no idea why I find this stuff so relaxing. I literally just got home after spending 12 hours (on a Saturday, no less) cutting over our head office to a new wi-fi system. I'm exhausted, my brain is lightly toasted (as in tired, not the other thing), but I thoroughly enjoyed watching you get those LPARs working.
Glad you enjoyed it! I'll definitely be exploring that virtual IO stuff in future videos, I have an era-appropriate IBM fibre channel disk shelf I'd like to get into the mix.
@@clabretro Spoiler alert! 😆 Seriously though, I hate FC with a passion, after spending half a day figuring out how it worked so I could configure a Cisco fibre channel switch to replace on that died when our UPS blew up. But I'm sure I'll enjoy watching you get that disk shelf up and running.
Most, if not all of Dell's KVMs are from Avocent, so the modules should be intetcompatible. That KVM looks like a rebadged DSR1020, of which i have two. Glad to know about the fan mod for them.
If the interface adapters are new enough, they should allow mouse scaling in the web intetface, though Java WebStart is a particular brand of hell I don't care to work with again.
The only thing cooler than a GUI that can easily translate reference codes to their meanings, is a status that isn't unnecessarily obtuse to begin with. ;-) Good ol' IBM. Why say something meaningful when you can just assign it an arbitrary value instead? hehe
@41:25 bottom right. i used to work with these compaq servers, we called them the undead, because apart for the rare disk fails, they would work for many years, without a single fault. that was of course before compaq was acquired by hp. the mac case looks to be in very good condition. how about an og xbox? yes, of course.
I've had power supply issues with an Oracle/SUN Sparc T4-1 just like you in the vid at 17:30. In my case I had just one PSU plugged in but the system was configured to balance the load between both PSUs by the previous owner. The missing power on the second PSU meant the system refused to start.
at @31:28 you should be able to see the disks there, by selecting the appropriate controller device (5), the 7 option never seemed to show everything in my experience. This is also how one can boot off of remote SAN storage LUNs (via virtual or physical fiber cards).
FYI you can use the same storage controller and SCSI controller, just during installation of os you select the hdd to install and the virtual io allows to give inputs to guests host from physical host
Good sir the FIN Damage you point out, could actually be Operational Damage. I've racked up over a million servers easy at this point in my life, and its not uncommon for servers to come out of racks for retirement with what's called FinSeperation. The contestant vibrations do it to the fins, in combination with the occasional bang like sliding a server in and out on rails, if they have been actually dropped the damage would be way more serious and there be a lot of bends in the fins, and likely the tray as well, i dont actually see any damage on it but what do i know lol. Just something for you to consider!
You might consider using your new 220V outlet for running more of your rack gear. Most of the universal voltage power supplies run more efficiently off 220V than 110V.
another option would be to ssh into the HMC, from which you should be able to connect to any configured LPAR. unsurprising that there is a command-line interface within the HMC for everything you can do from the web gui.
Excellent stuff 👍🏻 Takes me back when I administered these systems. Ideally you need a CSM (Clustered Server Manager) setup in the HMC. Then you can deploy software /OS and do Backups to and from 😉 Shame you didn’t setup the VIOS as this will allow for Virtual Hardware sharing too…
@@clabretro You'll definitely want VIOS. You can then RAID your disks and create smaller virtual disks to share with your LPARs instead of having to assign entire disk controllers.
I would imagine the hardware management unit inside the p5 has its own PowerPC processor on it. I believe IBM calls the processor cards Processor Complex Cards, similar to what such cards were called on PS/2 systems. On a mainframe they would call that a "book" or a "drawer".
It's a Storage System UE and yes you're right -- the SCSI module on the back has an excellent silk screen image of a cowboy riding a horse with some ducks trailing along behind lol
When Clabretro uploads, thats a great day
When some Enterprise stuff is on the table, thats a even better day
Yes!
I can't figure out why these videos are so fascinating but clabretro hacked my brain. I click immediately
@@Baulder13 There's just nothing as cool as vintage IBM enterprise gear, that's all there is to it.
30:16 „DIE Shot” just some additional facts: Those are 2 dual core P5s and their respective L3 caches. L1 and L2 are integrated in the chips, where each L2 is accessible by both cores. This quad core “CPU” (called QCM as in quad core module) is actually 2 DCMs combined, and the L3 not shared between all cores on the module but only its respective DCM (dual core module) ones. QCM allowed IBM a very effective method of nearly doubling the theoretical performance and also retain the small footprint of the modules. Each of these CPUs is SMT2 ready, allowing for a theoretical 8 “cores”. SMT is enabled dynamically when needed and disabled, when more processing power is required. That’s a key factor in allowing micro partitioning as seen before you wiped all LPARs.
Disclaimer: That’s very theoretical knowledge (never had the chance to have a P5 in hands, only P3 and P4) so please correct me if something was wrong
At this point, you can run the internet from your bunker in the apocalypse. Don’t forget to bring the sewer pipe.
Pretty kewl. IBM engineering was good back in the the day.
It still is I hope. I don’t mind power bill.. All I need is POWER. Good luck finding somethig with POWER9 on sale (not mentioning the price of those).
You could hear the dopamine in your voice when the IBM hub came out. Glad your hobby brings you joy. Everyone needs simple pleasures in life. One of mine is watching your videos.
Yes! Thank you!
You're easily my favorite new TH-cam channel find, I've had notifications on since the homelab cable videos. Keep up the good work man!
thank you!
I worked at ibm in the hardware division back then. This brings back so many memories . I spent many hours fighting with hmc and vios
very cool! yes I imagine huge production setups would have all sorts of mysteries to explore
Hmc's were a pain, luckily you could escape the sandbox and get root by changing the man pager and execute a root shell. No need to call support for a key. Always loved the vio servers though, such a nice set of mgmt commands
For an IBM video.. this had a surprising lack of CISCO. Nice! :)
😆
I was already happy when i see the notification of a new video....but the end with a sight of an RS/6000 was thrilling!
Really nice video!!!!
“What would you do if you had $1M? Run two LPARs at the same time” was beautifully placed. 😂
I'm a basic Mac user and don't understand anything you're saying and yet I keep watching idk why.
Cuz tech is cool. Especially stuff like this
Well, a PowerPC server is inching closer to your "basic Mac" proclivities
Yeah but thats because of ,,, you are a basic mac user, ;)
@@Mysticsam86us Mac users are enjoying our MIDI working out of the box 😊
As an Linux bro I do the same with Mac and Apple vids 😂
Two LPARs at the same time. That's the dream man.
I used that same Dell KVM in a server rack I set up decades ago. I also used an RS/6000 (desktop) as a workstation a long time ago. The only AIX knowledge you needed for RS/6000 was "smit".
That RS/6000 is a beast! Fascinating stuff, looking foward to see what else you'll show us! Also, kind of glad I am not the one having to deal with all that Java and just watch you do it xD
I think TH-cam may have eaten my comment. I mentioned that one of my first gigs in IT was sysadmin of a bunch of RS/6000 boxen that ran a warehouse management system. We had a bunch of H70's, a few B50's and a pair of S80's and they were all really solid, wonderful machines to work with. One of the big marketing pushes that IBM put on was running Linux on pSeries; it was all penguins, all the time. You should be able to get a RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 LPAR going if you wanted to mess with it. Great vids, really enjoy seeing all the stuff I worked on "back in the day" on the screen!
Always awesome to hear stories about this gear! Will definitely be exploring Linux on some LPARs in future videos!
It's always a good day when I see you've posted again. I love the focus on esoteric enterprise gear! I've learned a ton from watching your videos. Keep it up!
thank you!
Way back then, RS/6000 was just something else. I worked for a company which had one, they used for a client server system build with a 4GL system - and it was not sweating.
Great vid! I did a fair amount of work with p-series back in that time frame. Good systems- the HMC was a bit of a pain, but when set up, it was a great system.
It's a good week when clab uploads. I was curious and went to your channel page and realized I have watched every single one of your videos. They're too good!
ha I'm glad to hear that!
ASMI runs on an embedded PPC processor on the FSP (flexible service processor) card that connects to the HMC. That's how the HMC can connect to the system before any LPAR are defined or stared. Some of the SRC (system reference codes) on the LCP operator's panel reference boot codes for the FSP.
In the few times I‘ve had an issue like yours it was either an issue with contacts or crapacitors.
Very interesting hardware, this is what I was around in my younger years 😏
Have been sick the whole week but you posting made it a lot better.
hope you're better soon!
@@clabretro Thanks
I too am amazed at the amount of cool computer stuff you can do.....if you just wait a couple decades for the hardware to become legacy. Really enjoy your videos!
32:02 Me, with a _possible_ preview of what's coming: Lol. Nice.
I had enough hardware I’ve decommissioned and sent off to ewaste to feed your channel for many many years 😂
I'm building up quite the pile anyway 😂
I remember some of those big HP machines actually needed both power supplies plugged in for a cold boot, then they will run on one if they need to
I was afraid of that (don't have another cord) but luckily swapping to the other worked
one cool stuff of AIX, you can backup directly to tape as well as restore the entire AIX system from tape, simply by booting the CD
The ActionRetro of IT.
Thought you were quiet - turns out TH-cam removed your subscription from my account! Just a heads up if your metrics are a bit skewed, wonder if anyone else has had this?
Great video as always, good to finally see this box come to life.
Thanks! Yeah I've heard about that before... I think it's been an on-going issue for a long time
Glad to see you got these beasts up and running. Im with everyone eles in looking forward to the 6000!
5 months in the making! (since last p5 video) the LPAR monster has been slayed finally lol glad to see it going! it really looks like you need a HMC to fully experience these. OK, now run Linux on a LPAR; lol I would be trying it. There is linux distros that support IBM POWER...got to try it lol.
yup eventually!
It is great watching these. I can’t remember if I commented before, but I’m a network engineer and I definitely networked some of these together with our Linux team. I never got to see these parts so it’s cool to see! Networking these HMCs needing to be on the same layer 2 was interesting on how usually segment our areas today
awesome!
Great video, I can feel your pain trying to get this hardware working. I remember ages ago nearly adding brown to my pants the first time I plugged in an enterprise server, it ramped it's fans so quickly and so loudly I was sure something had self destructed!
Seeing those LPARs inspired me to go learn QEMU-KVM better and I ended up discovering Cockpit, which is a web GUI just like this HMC. It's so easy now! But that LPAR hardware level isolation seems pretty neat. Like having a mainframe on your desk.
cool!
I'm not even knowledgeable about these machines but it's always interesting to watch and learn with your videos.
Heck yeah! Looking forward to seeing you at VCFMW!
In the HMC software, the little icon on System Management would likely be representing either an IBM Power 595 (big Power box in the form-factor of a mainframe) or an IBM Z890/Z990 which are mainframes. And that isn't an orange stripe but representing the copper style stripe on the front of both of those machines. Later ones used a metallic blue, then even later a metallic green, and now its Blue/Orange for the mainframe line and you were correct about the Orange representing a LinuxOne box in modern era hardware. That practice only started a few generations ago though.
Also remember that HMC software is also used for Z boxes. Although I don't know if the HMC software is the exact same, or a variant. I'd hope that you could use the same HMC software to manage Zs and Power systems together but frankly I've not tried or seen it while working at IBM 🙂
Edit:
Those enablements on the Power5 box are not too standard. PowerVM is a licensed and expensive enablement at-least on the new machines so that's a super awesome config you got there!
Great find on the F40, we have an F50 on exhibit at the Classical Computing Laboratory at IBM Poughkeepsie, NY
The F50 is pretty kitted out, it has 4 PowerPC 604e processors running at 332Mhz each, and it has 1GB of ram, and if I get a second memory board and load it up I can get it up to 4GB!
I also upgraded from the basic framebuffer it had to a not officially supported but you can make it work GXT3000P which makes quake fly!
There is a seller with a pile of the GXT3000P for 50 bucks a piece... Not too bad IMO.
Also the quake demos, still hosted on IBM dot com. You can find it with a bit of looking. I don't think youtube comments like links so I won't link it. But if you want help just give me a poke somewhere online. I'm not too hard to find 😅
I'll have to say hi to you at VCF MW, I'm there every year from setup to teardown. Best show on the planet IMO!
-Connor K
Definitely come say hi! I'll be roaming around all day Saturday. Yeah I've found those quake builds still being hosted by IBM still!
great to see ya!
As you suggest the interposer PCBs probably are for hot swap, specifically, if you look at the PCBs there’s are some longer contact fingers at each end that are probably connected to ground and so these ensure a common ground potential is established BEFORE the other pins are connected.
Love this weird Power stuff! Good to see it running and even better to see how well spec'd and licensed that thing seems to be!
I decomissoned so many of those products before I switch my profession to software engineering and have not once was able to take at least one home to tinker with. We were told to destroy the hard drives and pull out all of the memory. I did this several times at a data center that I worked for 7 years and by the time I was done and heading out, the data center looked bare with only a few switches and routers attached. I wish I could get my hands on one cisco routers.........
DUDE! I LOVE my old Abit IC7-G!!!
excellent video as always man! the LPAR is so confusing, but seem like it was a powerful thing for back in the day
I love your IBM hardware videos! As a current user/'admin' of a Power 914 server running IBMi with a vHMC, I'm always keen to try to learn more about the IBM ecosystem as there's not much learning material out there, especially here in the UK. This is my third IBM server, the previous being a P720 and before that, a P515.
awesome! and I'm glad you like these videos, I really enjoy making them
i have one of those compaq jbods for my 1850r, ive also got a tower jbod for it too. i love the absurdly large psus they come with 😊
You should be able to setup SSH login to the HMC, where you can open the vterm to the lpars, it's much more comfortable to connect and do stuff to the lpars there than via the web-ui and java stuff. IF you do a VIO setup you can mount virtual disks from a local volume group - so you can partition up your drives a bit more and run even more LPARS. The virtual setup of these boxes is extremely nice.
For early 2000s to mid 2000s hardware, Firefox portable 2-3 are quite good
Great video! Excited for the RS6000
When I worked at a grocery store in the mid 90s we had an RS/6000 very similar if not the same to that F40 that was the server for the whole store. All of the cash registers net booted IBM 4960 OS which I think used a DOS kernel to bootstrap the rest of the OS for the cash register. They were NCR cash registers but they were similar to the IBM equivalent cash registers.
very interesting! I want to hunt down some old IBM point of sale gear someday
If you're going full on AIX, there is an additional way to install these - via the network! You just need one of your LPARs to act as a NIM server, quite fun to set up - you should try it if you can. Installation of a new LPAR this way is done in minutes from booting the profile to logging in.
I love seeing these silly machines that are entirely incomprehensible to me on my feed. definitely watching to the end.
Another clab drop!! What an awesome Friday!
I start salivating when I see non x86 stuff on this channel. Great vid!
Always a good day when a new clabretro video drops! 🤗🤘
Very cool! You have inspired me to be more exprloratory with my system. I was just using Ubuntu and running docker programs on my dell t430 then remoting in only using CasaOS. Now i have ProxMox running only a couple LXC containers with my different apps. I have eveything reverse proxied so i can access my machine anywhere, And the machine is using like 30 watts less power. Super fun!
nice!
Thank you for the clear explanations - I have a collection of P4 to P8 machines, the most interesting one being two P7 770/780 that have some beefy interconnect between them. It would be good to come up with some sort of benchmark - to assess the absolute computational power of these machines and let them compare not only between each other by generations, but also to some other contemporary or historical servers. We always were told that these mainframes are high-performance ones, but newer got an actual comparison to classic x86 stuff (of that era). For modern computers I have a "linux kernel compilations per kWh" metric (to assess computational efficiency...as energy costs went up lately), but I still have the compile duration, to compare the raw performance.
Yeah I really never do enough benchmarking of any gear, definitely going to explore that. I suppose it's an HSL connection between the two P7s?
@@clabretro not a HSL, the 770/780 technical overview (REDP-4639-00) on pages 46-47, section 2.5 Drawer interconnection cables mentions SMP cables, i have the leftmost dual setup. Now seeing the docs, there is also a FSP cable on the other side, which I do not recall having afaik.
Very nice and pretty IBM gear, I'm envious
The pSeries is the “new” IBM approach to run PowerPC, where they converged the RS/6000 (with AIX) and the AS/400 (with OS/400, now called IBM i). Historically AS/400 comes from custom RISC silicon from System/36 and System/38, but they transitioned OS/400 to PowerPC in the late 90s.
All of these (S/36, S/38, AS/400, RS/6000) where called “mini” computers, as opposed to “regular” computers (mainframes, so System 360, System 370, …) and “micro” computers (PCs). AS/400s were and are used a lot in mid-sized institutions (retail chains, warehouses, smaller banks, smaller governments, etc)..
Anyway, now that you have two machines pSeries working, you should be able to do some Disaster Recovery tricks, where you lpars automatically run on the other box if the primary is online. Not sure if you can do it without shared storage tho..
which traces back to AS/400 and System/36 and System/38. All of these (S/36, S/38, AS/400, and were “mini”computers, as opposed to big “mainframes” and single-user “micro-computers”.
Yeah definitely planning to cover more of the history of the p and i lines in depth for future videos!
we better not see you with a gofundme for back surgery from lifting these boat anchors. be careful, nerd-ing out can be dangerous! Hopefully some IBM'ers from Rochester can come down to VCF and share some tips and tricks!
😂
Good job on the 240VAC service. Look at an L14-30R or L6-20R and some 240V PDUs. You can run all your wide input range gear on 240V for a few more percent of PSU efficiency.
My first job at a fertilizer manufacturing plant 2005-2013, had a F40 as our DR server and the p5 as our live. I don’t think we had any LPAR it if we did only 1 and no HMC
We were running QAD MFGpro as our ERP.
Good memories.
really interesting. I think this F40 came from some sort of farming co-op! I'll cover that when I do a full video on it.
Mmm, I have a pair of P6 520 (Express)s, a p505, and a 710. The queue of old computers needing my attention is just too deep. I don't think they've been on in 5 years :-(. I should dig out the vios software and get AIX 7 going one of these days. I really wish I could move LPARs from one host to another, but that's another enablement my 520s don't have.
HMCs before the virtual appliances were the x86(-64) servers, but the product number of the x3550 M3, M4, M5 was replaced with the product number for the HMC option in the BIOS/UEFI firmware. You can change it with some utility that's used to set the serial number when you replace motherboards I think. I did that to one x3550 M3 or M4 then stumbled on a M5 mis-advertised as just a x3550 M5...for far less than the factory HMCs were going for on ebay at the time. I think there might be a version of the HMC that supports POWER5 and POWER6. I don't know if there's one that will do POWER5, POWER6, and POWER7 so I probably can't run a single HMC if I want to see my p505.
The 710 is a cute entry to POWER7, but of course I wish it was a 730. POWER7 is interesting in having 4-way (4 threads per core) SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading, or HyperThreading in Intel speak).
I had fun operating a P6 550 Express, two P6 520 Expresses later replaced by a 710, 720, and 750 running some ERP type software.
I think I pieced together my two P6 520s from at least three ebay buys-the sellers were terrible at shipping. I should have left the P6 520 we decommissioned from the data center in the my car a little longer, I ended up leaving that job what seems like days after I unloaded the gear from the DC, would have saved me finding powervm enablement p6 520 on my own and dealing with bad shippers.
Great way to start the weekend!
Today’s a good day! Been missing your posts!
I love just how in-depth these enterprise-grade menus are. Some of the stuff definitely goes way over my head (probably because I have no training or experience working with servers and networking aside from a VPS or two), but other things made sense, especially with the explanations you gave.
I was wondering why the design language of the HMC's web-based UI looked so familiar, and then it hit me after it started throwing the NPEs: this thing is using some goofy Java web applet to function. AWT/Swing has a very distinct default look and feel that you don't really see on anything else.
I'm not sure if I'd have anything to offer aside from a DVD drive with LightScribe support that supports IDE and maybe a Pentium 4 CPU that's lying around, though none of this would admittedly help since that stuff is consumer grade and you seemed to be more geared towards enterprise grade stuff.
Didn't know you were also from CO, but very cool. Great video, I can't wait to see what happens next with that gigantic piece of work. You can tell just from looking at it that it means serious business.
I thought I remembered that RS/6000 towers were huge. But the picture including the Mac confirmed it. (That PowerMac/MacPro tower style was not exactly "tiny" in its own right.)
Awesome progress! Gonna check out AS/400 eventually?
thanks! and yes someday! Just need to find the right gear
Oh another thing, the LPARs should support dynamic hardware allocation (cpu, memory) - which also works with virtual devices (disks, network).
A long journey from the Mid-2000’s.
I do not miss having to have the exact right Java runtime environment installed to make ancient hardware work. Or even not so ancient hardware. Cisco ASA firewalls used a Java application for the management GUI, and I hated the CLI since the configuration was just a little too different from plain old IOS, so I could never remember the commands or the right syntax for some things. Mercifully, I haven't had to use a Cisco firewall in years.
As for your setup, I probably would've taken a peek at the original LPAR setup and taken notes. I saw there was a tab for "virtual adapters", I'm guessing that might be what you need to use if you want to have like an array of drives in RAID with different volumes for each LPAR.
Anyway, I have no idea why I find this stuff so relaxing. I literally just got home after spending 12 hours (on a Saturday, no less) cutting over our head office to a new wi-fi system. I'm exhausted, my brain is lightly toasted (as in tired, not the other thing), but I thoroughly enjoyed watching you get those LPARs working.
Glad you enjoyed it! I'll definitely be exploring that virtual IO stuff in future videos, I have an era-appropriate IBM fibre channel disk shelf I'd like to get into the mix.
@@clabretro Spoiler alert! 😆 Seriously though, I hate FC with a passion, after spending half a day figuring out how it worked so I could configure a Cisco fibre channel switch to replace on that died when our UPS blew up. But I'm sure I'll enjoy watching you get that disk shelf up and running.
Most, if not all of Dell's KVMs are from Avocent, so the modules should be intetcompatible. That KVM looks like a rebadged DSR1020, of which i have two. Glad to know about the fan mod for them.
If the interface adapters are new enough, they should allow mouse scaling in the web intetface, though Java WebStart is a particular brand of hell I don't care to work with again.
More AIX stuff would definitely be interesting. Not all of us were in the IBM world. I was more in the Sun/Solaris world. CDE rocks anyhow 😂
We heckin love Clabretro
Awesome, I have a 2Node configuration of IBM X3950x5 with XEON E7-8870, You've some lovely exotic compute mind :D
I have never come across MAX5 though, if anyone has a 1TB RAM expansion unit or two.. :)
Cant wait for for the RS/6000 And the Power 6
The only thing cooler than a GUI that can easily translate reference codes to their meanings, is a status that isn't unnecessarily obtuse to begin with. ;-)
Good ol' IBM. Why say something meaningful when you can just assign it an arbitrary value instead? hehe
Almost thought my Friday night was ruined! He is back.
I had a B50 with AIX 5.1 in 2002. CDE rocks.
Finally. 🎉 I can stop naging about it.
haha yes finally got it working!
@41:25 bottom right. i used to work with these compaq servers, we called them the undead, because apart for the rare disk fails, they would work for many years, without a single fault. that was of course before compaq was acquired by hp. the mac case looks to be in very good condition. how about an og xbox? yes, of course.
I've had power supply issues with an Oracle/SUN Sparc T4-1 just like you in the vid at 17:30. In my case I had just one PSU plugged in but the system was configured to balance the load between both PSUs by the previous owner. The missing power on the second PSU meant the system refused to start.
oof that's a bummer. I got lucky it started with one
The ASMI on the POWER7 looks exactly like that.
Excellent video (99% of it went over my head 😂). Any video plans on some ancient Mac stuff such as OS X Server or some Xserves?
someday! I used some of those xservers at work back in the day.
at @31:28 you should be able to see the disks there, by selecting the appropriate controller device (5), the 7 option never seemed to show everything in my experience. This is also how one can boot off of remote SAN storage LUNs (via virtual or physical fiber cards).
29:34 That's what she said 😂
FYI you can use the same storage controller and SCSI controller, just during installation of os you select the hdd to install and the virtual io allows to give inputs to guests host from physical host
interesting, I figured I was missing something like that. Definitely will be exploring the storage setup more in the future
Those sip modules are neat but cursed. had some with swapped VGA RGB
Wow, that's AIX x 2!
finally
The F40 will only support up to AIX 4.3.3
Good sir the FIN Damage you point out, could actually be Operational Damage. I've racked up over a million servers easy at this point in my life, and its not uncommon for servers to come out of racks for retirement with what's called FinSeperation. The contestant vibrations do it to the fins, in combination with the occasional bang like sliding a server in and out on rails, if they have been actually dropped the damage would be way more serious and there be a lot of bends in the fins, and likely the tray as well, i dont actually see any damage on it but what do i know lol. Just something for you to consider!
You might consider using your new 220V outlet for running more of your rack gear. Most of the universal voltage power supplies run more efficiently off 220V than 110V.
definitely!
another option would be to ssh into the HMC, from which you should be able to connect to any configured LPAR. unsurprising that there is a command-line interface within the HMC for everything you can do from the web gui.
oooh interesting. Definitely trying that
You need to enable ssh through the web Ui first, and once you're ssh'd in, run "vtmenu" as hscroot
Hi.
@NCommander was running Doom on RS/6000 -- pretty interesting.
Nice.
Excellent stuff 👍🏻 Takes me back when I administered these systems. Ideally you need a CSM (Clustered Server Manager) setup in the HMC. Then you can deploy software /OS and do Backups to and from 😉 Shame you didn’t setup the VIOS as this will allow for Virtual Hardware sharing too…
I'll definitely try all that in the future. also have a fibre channel IBM disk shelf from the same era I'd like to throw into the mix as well
@@clabretro You'll definitely want VIOS. You can then RAID your disks and create smaller virtual disks to share with your LPARs instead of having to assign entire disk controllers.
I would imagine the hardware management unit inside the p5 has its own PowerPC processor on it.
I believe IBM calls the processor cards Processor Complex Cards, similar to what such cards were called on PS/2 systems. On a mainframe they would call that a "book" or a "drawer".
those management cards (or Flexible Service Processors as IBM calls them) are pretty impressive. wouldn't be surprised if they had PowerPCs
Just placed my like
It uses the same design language aesthetics as an ATM mmachine. Imagine being married to that! 😂 ❤ 🤖
Ooooh I see a graphite airport in the background…are we getting an 802.11b tutorial next? 🤔
eventually!
That is some sexy, sexy IBM hardware. Want.
41:20 Is that an RA1000 in the corner under the DL380? I remember there being a stellar easter egg on the midplane silk screen.
It's a Storage System UE and yes you're right -- the SCSI module on the back has an excellent silk screen image of a cowboy riding a horse with some ducks trailing along behind lol
26:46 - looks like that JRE you use in that XP VM is too early version for it to support