I stopped working on these machines about the same time yours was made. I vaguely remember that the High Speed Link may have been used to connect two systems together in failover mode. We had two systems set up in failover mode so that when one system went down, the other one would (hopefully) automatically take over. I don't remember much about that since that was not my area, but that may be some explanation for the HSL cards. This video gives me memories, both good and bad, of working on these systems.
I worked in the systems group at ibm during this era by way of an acquisition. Many things at IBM were not leading edge, to be polite, but I’ve gotta give credit where due: their industrial design team was next level, second in the industry only to Apple I would say. I will never forget seeing the first prototype of our system with its new IBM industrial design aesthetic. It was truly a piece of industrial artwork. ps congrats on achieving justification for the 240V lab upgrade.
IEC C13 cables can actually be smaller at 240V than at 120V, as they carry less current for the same power. Cables with C14 PDU end - C13 device end are standard in 240V DCs
22:15 I'm fairly certain the reason for the adapter boards is that the normal SCSI connection isn't really designed to be repeatedly removed and inserted, while a card edge connector like that is much more robust. Basically, the reason is longevity when replacing drives.
SCA is specifically designed for Hot-Swapping. So no, that's not it. My guess would be backward-compatibility. They probably used that connector for ages.
Does this pre-date the SCA connectors though? Always seemed like those can take as many insertions as anyone would be willing to throw at them. Don't know if SCA was a thing back when IBM thought of these gold fingered edge connector adapters.
Well I think that's the point of SCA drives is for repeated insertions. I had an old dual pentium pro Dell server with SCA drives. And some old SUN hardware I had used them as well.
Also, Compaq did the same thing before they switched to the black caddies with Ultra2. They had a little adapter board to a similar connector like the IBM. I have seen that for 50pin, 68pin and SCA. They basically had to make those to achieve hot-plugging before SCA was a thing. (Put 304866-001 into google image search to see an example)
The protective film over the switch is actually something parts manufacturers put on there in order to make assembling easier. Pick-and-Place Machines often use vacuum nozzles to pick up parts. If you have something like a switch, this won't work as you don't have a flat enough surface. Having a bit of capton tape on there will fix that.
I have no idea why but your videos are beyond entertaining and interesting for me, never in my life did I think I would actually enjoy watching stuff about networking and home networking but here I am having almost watched your entire backlog at this point because your videos are truly very fascinating! Thank you for doing what you do.
I'm going to take a stab that many of those bigger caps are polymer based, which means they shouldn't need to be replaced ever. The bigger pins in those connectors are ground to isolate pairs of signals from each other. The connectors themselves are modular and are press fit into the PCB (no soldering required). The modules are made by various companies (so they might not be strictly proprietary, nor interchangeable) and you can often find them stacked up in varying configurations in all sorts of high end gear.
@@clabretro A good indicator they are polymer (or to figure out which ones are) is that polymer caps don't have the + or Y shaped vent on them, although I think the smaller caps are harder to figure out because they never seem to have those markings anyway.
Hey, there's a sticker speaking Finnish =) "Laite on liitettävä suojamaadoituskoskettimilla varustettuun pistorasiaan" It means that the server must be connected to outlet having protective earth grounding.
It says the same (or similar) in Swedish as well, my guess is that it's of scandinavian origin? Most such things tend to have the combo of swedish+finnish+danish/norwegian on them, how it ended up in the states is the bigger mystery!
JDE stands for JD Edward's an enterprise resource planning application. It's common to see it on AS/400 systems. And this P5 can run OS/400 in an LPAR. Hopefully the license is still there.
These were the machines back in the days where if you have to ask the price you cannot afford it 😍 we were happy like dog with our tails having some p166 mhz commodity desktop in a dc as server, this machine was just a dream 😃 Nicely engineered as well quality what I expect from IBM and bet ya it still fully functional.
Love your videos. BTW, that 'protective cover' on the dip switch is just a piece of kapton tape. It's put on there to protect the switch while the board goes through the soldering over and wave soldering machines. Usually they don't bother taking the tape off unless they need to flip that switch, and obviously they never had to.
This channel is beyond awesome, reminds me of simpler times when I tinkered away on old SGI, DEC and IBM gear. Always had a fond spot for those old Unix boxes ever since I started out in my IT job in 2001. Sadly, the business world already unified on boring x86/Wintel boxes back then. But you could score some sweet loot, since all the obsolete Unix stuff was being thrown out by the wagon load. Those were the days 😢 Thanks for fueling my nostalgia!
About server rack rails.... As a network engineer working in a datacenter racking/stacking and decomming equipment, I would like to issue a formal apology to Caleb and everyone else like us that tinkers with enterprise toys in the homelab environment for the rail situation. Like many places I'm sure, the company I work for unfortunately does not even pretend to entertain selling any surplus equipment to plebs like us for actual market value, instead they sell 'em for pennies on the dollar to places like Ingram Micro long after I rip & ship the equipment back to our main IT warehouse. The rack side of rails always gets discarded into a scrap pile and never included with the equipment for a multitude of reasons, primarily because the warehouse tells us to do so because they don't want to deal with them. No clue why, its stupid, but unfortunately the terrible world of IT we live in. Big sadge.
again a great video! I worked in many many gouv datacenters and those P5 where all over the place. Part of my job was checking air circulation in server rooms and remove faceplates in order to check air intake (some environments have tons of micro particules) and they were famous for breaking... and infra guys love them so much that sorted to things like tape to hold them in place just for the look... you can get a 240v adaptor that plugs in your dryer outlet and connect a 0U PDU .. I run all my servres and computers from that plug.. 30A available and PSU do run more efficient at that voltage..
I worked on ERAM for many years for Lockheed Martin (original contractor) and when we were moved over to Leidos. That division was formally IBM Federal Systems, which is why we were a big AIX house.
I worked for Sequent Computer Systems as a level 3 support engineer (doing mostly kernel crash analysis of Sequent's DYNIX/3 and DYNIX/ptx Unix like OS's and Linux) when IBM bought that company in the early 2000's. Which meant we ended up with a bunch of gear like the p5 servers you discuss in this video (albeit x86_64 and similar rather than Power5). I was impressed by the quality of those servers, but even at the time didn't really understand how customers justified the price. When I went to work at Google in their data center automation team in 2007 and started visiting Google's data centers it was immediately obvious that using cheap hardware that has no redundancy and dealing with server failures in software makes a lot more economic sense.
Ahh so cool! I work on the modern day P series CPUs at IBM. Very awesome to see this being used. I actually have one of those P5 MCMs on my desk, as well as its Z series cousin.
Beautiful machines, love the PowerPC architecture, shame it couldn't get ground in consumer systems besides the old PowerMacs. Annoying how IBM just has that pointless proprietary connector for your hot swappable drives, you *totally* love to see that when replacing them. Interesting how that server actually needs 240v, when we got modern systems with way more than 4 cores nowadays running perfectly off 120v. Great video, Clab.
We have a Power 8 system at work and internally there's quite a lot of similarities. IBMs lineage is always intriguing to me. Love the video as always!
I have used the HSL cables before. You are correct, they are for connecting multiple servers together in a NUMA (non-uniform memory access) configuration. It allows you to grow your computer by adding hardware directly to your main system, rather than as a farm. I used them both on IBM Power 6 systems and their x445 system from the mid-2000's.
actively used one for kernel driver automatic testing, LPAR was great thing from mainframe era, had one half for SUSE ppc and another for RHEL, so nice
I want to say that those RIO/HSL slots in the 550Q are only for external expansion slots. For the users that needed them, IBM offered chassis with more PCI-X or PCIe slots. The higher end 570 model is what generally supported a GX bus extender card in those slots which would permit a coherent processor link between multiple chassis. This how IBM builds larger socket count systems using midrange hardware: cable multiple chassis together. This is also how IBM was able to transition from PCI-X to PCIe without having to offer different motherboards: just cable a different external enclosure for the slot type. For the HMC network, I'd be curious if there is any Bonjour/ZeroConf traffic on it. Watching that is another means I've found handy for grabbing IP addresses across different subnets as it is a layer 2 protocol. With regarding the serial console, have you tried adding a null modem adapter to see if that makes the serial port functional? Alternatively have you tried those USB adapters with the serial port on the front with a RJ45 adapter? JDE is likely referring to an ERP application from JD Edwards which after a series of acquisitions is now owned by Oracle. While the LPAR configuration indicates that it was for AIX, JDE was also available for IBM i (aka AS/400) LPARs as well.
The adapter plates are basically just for making it easy and safe to hot swap them. Most physical connectors aren't really designed for it... That then it's just easier to buy your drives from IBM directly. Funny how that works. 😂
SCA connectors _are_ designed for hot-swap. They may not have existed when IBM designed this thing. Or they wanted the ability to plug other things in. (I have an SGI branded FC array that can take just about any drive ever made if you can find the correct interposer board. The problem is no one know who actually made it.)
Old Compaq Proliants had similar card edge connectors to faciliate hotswapping of HDDs. They actually date back to time before SCA. I had server with mixture of narrow, wide and sca scsi disks all with same card edge connectors going to backplane. After SCA became a thing on new proliant generations they dropped those custom interposers with card edges.
I think the hsl links are so you can cluster multiple systems together a bit like what infiniband does. Ho did something similar with the dl980 which was essentially two dl580's clustered together with a proprietary link.
yeah basically I think, after some further research there are various Expansion Units you can buy, such as a PCI unit for more cards in large LPAR setups
i was given a 'desktop' version of something very much like this, about 10 years back, i worked out it needed AIX OS.. but i couldnt find it anywhere..i ended up gutting it and scrapping it...still have the cpus and few other bits n pieces in my collection!..i was also given a Netfinity 5500 at the same time, dual P3 500Mhz.. thing was absolutly huge..full redundancy...all contained in one 60KG box! IBM really made their systems so well...no wonder the machines were so expensive.. theres a half ton of metal in there! :P
If I had to guess, the drive backing connector was to be extra protective of the connector when plugging drives. Avoid a bad connection damaging a port or drive which in turn damages the next drive or port and so on. That would also explain the nice latching mechanism. The Oxide computer guys talked about those types of issues on their podcast about back when they were at Sun.
Always love seeing your videos, theyve actuslly inspired me to pick up some servers of my own! I got a poweredge R620, proliant DL360 and DL380 for 200 bucks total! (Australian) im really excited to start learning to use them and get them online!
That is so pretty!!! LOL you just commented on "it's stunning good looks" as I wrote that! Man, I would love to find some of the empty cases. Stick a Zimaboard behind it via some LED and I/O expansions. Could rig up hot swaps to SATA. VERY COOL! I have a 23" server rack with metal sides that pop off and a tinted plexi door. I had 19" rigged up in it with gratuitous rack equipment and servers, but it was too much power. I use a Zimaboard now mostly with a crossfire build on standby for any hardcore computin. Im actually using it as a 3d printer enclosure currently. I insulated it with rockwool acoustic tiles that fit right in the sides without any fasteners! It's perfect! Still... I miss my massive rack sometimes 😊
And yeah, these machines expect you to have 220v/30A data center power to run. I ran the JS22V blades in a blade center S chassis and the power requirements were even nuttier.
Beautiful inner and external design. 64GB DDR2 RAM in 2007! Incredible capacity in that time.My High end laptop had 1GB RAM and super workstation had 2GB RAM in 2007 but the general consumer PC had 128MB RAM only.
Oh, JDE? I'd put money on that being JD Edwards, or as (I think) it's called now IBM OneWorld. I worked in a place with a relatively modern iSeries system a few years ago, and the pSeries hardware is interchangeable with the iSeries if I remember correctly. Its massively complex but amazingly powerful.
RIO or remote IO connects to what is known as an IO drawer, essentially a similar shaped/sized/coloured box with just a bunch of PCIe slots in them. Your P5 can handle much more peripherals than the 4 slots you have available in the chassis. The other use for the HSL is proprietary switching technology, so you can run HPC jobs on P5 clusters. You can also run GPFS on said cluster, so you can share storage volumes over the cluster nodes. If memory serves me right, the 590 was the biggest you could get, the size of a full rack and pretty loud. Also, IBM gear is very picky about serial connections. You will probably need a proper serial cable, and set it to 9600 baud.
The Type number is on all IBM equipment. All the way down to workstations and laptops. The Type number can be looked up and it tells you all about the device you have
This is super cool! As popular as the cloud is these days, there's something that it can't take away from these servers. I hope to own Sun and IBM machines some day running in my basement. Thanks for making content on these machines.
The places I worked ran AS400 on the P5’s they had not AIX. I’ve never touched one of these at all as I worked help desk or network/ firewall Great video
I'm running my server rack on 240V. It's worth doing for for the slight improvement in PSU efficiency.. Any wide range input voltage devices work just fine.
Back in the day when I was an admin for a Sun e10k I always found it funny that a multi million spec'd our machine was controlled and required Sun's lowest cost desktop to boot from, the Ultra 5. Two of them for that redundant goodness. This was a carryover from Cray when they built sparc and ultrasparc systems. The Cray CS6400 used SparcStation 20 systems (could have been others but I only know of the ss20 being used) and the successor e10k (Starfire.).
very cool. those e10ks look like absolute monsters. I have a lead on some ultra machines so hopefully get to cover those soon... no e10k unfortunately haha
For VMware boxes at least, we used additional add-in NICs and built our virtual switches to use one port on each physical NIC. That way, if we had a whole card die, we'd only lose one path to each vSwitch. Same with redundant RAID cards: dual-port drive backplanes connect to both controllers so the array survives loss of one controller.
Serial to USB converters are notorious for 'not working' - what it actually comes down to is that some of the converters use a chip that Windows has drivers built in for, and some require a cumbersome manual driver assignment process (if you can even find the right driver). If you get a cable with the right chip it'll just work.
yeah, these p5s are just so particular. I have trouble with a direct serial connection to a Linux box too (though it mostly works). if I remember correctly the MRV serial console in my rack plays nice with them though
For anyone else reading, the magical letters, usually, are FTDI. They make the actual USB-to-RS232 UART chip, and WIndows knows how to handle them. I'm a ham radio operator, you would not *believe* how many arguments get started because the factory programming cables for cheap radios use cheap UARTs, but buying one with the correct pinout and an FTDI chip in it just solves all the problems.
You can trust those handles. If you remove heavy components like the power supplies and drives you can do a diagonal grip and install it by yourself on a good day.
13:00 meanwhile as a Swede I am drawn to the note saying: "This machine shall be plugged into an earthed outlet." But in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finish. Danes are apparently left to decode the Swedish and Norwegian for their own use, it is close enough. And yes, having 230 Vac 10/16 amp as one's standard voltage has some real advantages. Main one isn't that 230 X 10 = 2300 watts and one rarely uses anywhere near that much power for even a couple of computers. But rather that with some voltage drop one still gets ample power. Lose 5-10 volts along the way isn't as major as on 110-120 volts where that accounts for a lot larger drop in available power. And the fact that most PSUs already semi struggles to use 110-120 Vac to start with.
Again, this machine has the european/nordic sticker which states that it needs to be connected to a grounded electrical outlet so it might have been sourced from Europe. The JDE server identification might stand for Jacobs Douwe Egberts, an American-European coffee company. Anyways, looking forward to the next episode!
I suspected as much, and had to ask my wife who is the P Series expert here at home: The NICs can be divided between LPARs just like in the virtualisation platforms that, eh, learnt a lot from IBM. They're connected to VIO servers, which are special LPARs that only perform resource sharing for other LPARs. So, you don't need a NIC per LPAR. What you typically would do is to build a LACP pair (or quad, as it were) into your switching environment, and running that aggregate interface in 802.1q trunk mode, so as to be able to assign different networks to different LPARs. RIO lets you add more I/O drawers for even more PCI slots. Not link separate machines. Has been around a long time; I installed my first multi-drawer machine, a M80, back in 2000. One CEC, (CPU and RAM drawer) and one PIO (Primary I/O, looks like a 520 in its own right.)
The front LCD isn't readable probably because its contrast is off, sometimes there is adjustment for that in software. If not then its probably a bad pot/resistor inside next to the LCD, those 2byX displays usually had a pin dedicated to controlling contrast on them.
That HSL link is to stack multiple power machines and share resources. Not really familiar that much with p5 but proto over those wires should be infiniband and should allow sharing of memory&compute or at least allows moving a live LPAR from one chassy to another.
And it has 2 connectors because you could daisy chain p5s in a rack so the connector needs to be robust and probably lock secured to the chassy. O yeah, there is nothing but scsi/FC for storage on systemp5
Alternate serial console access: If you have that V240 up and running (and is running Solaris 6/8, maybe 10 IIRC), then you can connect the 9-pin serial on the back of the V240 to your target host (via 'null modem' or 'laplink' serial cable). Then (if Solaris defaults weren't changed) run 'tip hardwire.'' I used to buy and hand out those dual-headed Belkin serial cables for co-workers, at a time that felt like an age ago (pre-Y2K). I still have mine stowed away in my cables kit (previously lived in the car), alongside an *original* blue Laplink cable. LOL at that FC connector btw, some Sun models used those drives, they sucked IMO due to the rarity.
dude i love that you are just like me literally, the fans "i wonder how these will sound" and the second server on top itd definitely be more fun xD i can actually understand how everything works you are very visual with it and thats awesome. i dont see that much. we should definitely do something haha it would be a great video.
Awesome video, as always! Weird connectors for the drives will always make me angry... it makes the systems way less future-proof... Can't wait for part 2! By the way, do you have a Mastodon account or somewhere on the fediverse where we could follow you?
We use those C13 plugs (just the regular IEC plugs, not the bigger C19 plugs) for a lot of our 240V/16A appliances here in Europe, so the C13 should've never been an indicator for just 120V :)
Clabreto, on the $25 drive adapters, my thought is the allow "Hot Swap", looking at the connector the contacts are different lengths allowing grounds to contact first in the swap process
consider installing a nema L6-30 twist lock outlet and get yourself a 1U horizontal pdu that has c13 outlets. So you can use the very common / cheap c13-c14 power cords.
Interesting. You seem to cover a lot of things I've worked on 😂😂.. i briefly worked on an IBM power 5 back in 2010 while working for the social security department here in Seychelles. I believe they might still be using it today. It was in an AS/400 which I believe by then had been rebranded to i5 🤔 it was a tower version. IBM servers are always impressive in design and looks. Specially the AS/400 or Power series
I've seen one of these going locally for cheap, which is rare. All this interesting stuff unfortunately stopped being cheap quite a few years ago in this part of the world. Only thing stopping me is I can't justify another server of that size. As for powering it thankfully I get 230V at the wall, so just run an extension cord from here as I'm sure the several thousand km won't cause too much transmission loss :D
Cool! We have P9, P8, P7 in production and P5, P4+ and PIII in storage. Btw, i have never seen Remote IO drawers in real life, who ever needs 144 PCI network cards ?
I think the issue with your serial to USB adapter is the TX/RX pins are swapped, or you got a bad adapter. I recommend the Gearmo serial adapters and also pick up a USB "null modem" adapter for that TX/RX issue.
Yeah I've never been able to get the pseries machines to work properly with a serial to USB adapter (it works fine on tons of other stuff). Always have to use a real serial connection.
Man, I don't know how I haven't seen your channel before. This is great stuff, I just love weird old hardware. Kinda dumb detail here but fwiw: that tape you had to peel off of the DIP switch is just to aid the pick and place machine that puts the component on the PCB during manufacturing. It's not a security thing.
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How is the Linksys stack THAT tall? Amazing!
You love to see it grow
You could fit so much openWRT in that thing!
Now THAT is a tower of power! No game genie or sega cartridge adapters hold a candle to that!
@@lcrazy8li would consider a lot of IBM Power systems a power tower xD
They are used as packing material or in the "lot" listings on ebay you usually have some Linksys hardware
I'm eagerly awaiting the inevitable "I just bought a mainframe!" series.
Technically, he has one now. That's kind of what those stacking cables are for.
one day
you have the determination of an archaeologist, trying to take us back to the life and times of these machines. This is great, thanks!
thank you!
I stopped working on these machines about the same time yours was made. I vaguely remember that the High Speed Link may have been used to connect two systems together in failover mode. We had two systems set up in failover mode so that when one system went down, the other one would (hopefully) automatically take over. I don't remember much about that since that was not my area, but that may be some explanation for the HSL cards. This video gives me memories, both good and bad, of working on these systems.
I love the aesthetic of those era/style of machines. Big, blocky and industrial looking.
agreed!
Was just thinking the same. Love it or hate it, useful or useless, nobody can deny they are damn charming. Let's call it "Industrial chic" :D
Golden era.
Me too, IBM just has a way with design. Even these days the new IBM equipment still industrial pretty.
Agree, especially internal construction is beautiful, like Accuphase C-2810
I worked in the systems group at ibm during this era by way of an acquisition. Many things at IBM were not leading edge, to be polite, but I’ve gotta give credit where due: their industrial design team was next level, second in the industry only to Apple I would say. I will never forget seeing the first prototype of our system with its new IBM industrial design aesthetic. It was truly a piece of industrial artwork.
ps congrats on achieving justification for the 240V lab upgrade.
IEC C13 cables can actually be smaller at 240V than at 120V, as they carry less current for the same power.
Cables with C14 PDU end - C13 device end are standard in 240V DCs
Correct. I am always impressed bu the ...girth of american power cables lol
Almost 45 minutes of old archaic IBM server systems? Count me IN!!!
hell yeah
22:15 I'm fairly certain the reason for the adapter boards is that the normal SCSI connection isn't really designed to be repeatedly removed and inserted, while a card edge connector like that is much more robust. Basically, the reason is longevity when replacing drives.
fair point!
SCA is specifically designed for Hot-Swapping. So no, that's not it. My guess would be backward-compatibility. They probably used that connector for ages.
Does this pre-date the SCA connectors though? Always seemed like those can take as many insertions as anyone would be willing to throw at them. Don't know if SCA was a thing back when IBM thought of these gold fingered edge connector adapters.
Well I think that's the point of SCA drives is for repeated insertions. I had an old dual pentium pro Dell server with SCA drives. And some old SUN hardware I had used them as well.
Also, Compaq did the same thing before they switched to the black caddies with Ultra2. They had a little adapter board to a similar connector like the IBM. I have seen that for 50pin, 68pin and SCA. They basically had to make those to achieve hot-plugging before SCA was a thing. (Put 304866-001 into google image search to see an example)
The protective film over the switch is actually something parts manufacturers put on there in order to make assembling easier. Pick-and-Place Machines often use vacuum nozzles to pick up parts. If you have something like a switch, this won't work as you don't have a flat enough surface. Having a bit of capton tape on there will fix that.
I have no idea why but your videos are beyond entertaining and interesting for me, never in my life did I think I would actually enjoy watching stuff about networking and home networking but here I am having almost watched your entire backlog at this point because your videos are truly very fascinating! Thank you for doing what you do.
thank you, glad to hear it!
I'm going to take a stab that many of those bigger caps are polymer based, which means they shouldn't need to be replaced ever.
The bigger pins in those connectors are ground to isolate pairs of signals from each other. The connectors themselves are modular and are press fit into the PCB (no soldering required). The modules are made by various companies (so they might not be strictly proprietary, nor interchangeable) and you can often find them stacked up in varying configurations in all sorts of high end gear.
yeah you're probably right about the caps... still nervous though haha
@@clabretro A good indicator they are polymer (or to figure out which ones are) is that polymer caps don't have the + or Y shaped vent on them, although I think the smaller caps are harder to figure out because they never seem to have those markings anyway.
@@clabretro😮let’s hope it avoided the capacitor plague problem and can survive a long time like the Sega Mega Drive 👍🌱
@@SproutyPottedPlant Yeah... IBM used the same bargain bin components as... sega...
IBM, and their 4-digit identifiers. And 3-letter acronyms. It is a tradition going for decades.
Hey, there's a sticker speaking Finnish =) "Laite on liitettävä suojamaadoituskoskettimilla varustettuun pistorasiaan" It means that the server must be connected to outlet having protective earth grounding.
It says the same (or similar) in Swedish as well, my guess is that it's of scandinavian origin? Most such things tend to have the combo of swedish+finnish+danish/norwegian on them, how it ended up in the states is the bigger mystery!
I spotted that too! Wonder if this machine came from somewhere in scandinavia because the sticker seems to have Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish.
Yeah i saw that to.. that server prob was running in the nordic region at some point! Interesting..
JDE stands for JD Edward's an enterprise resource planning application. It's common to see it on AS/400 systems. And this P5 can run OS/400 in an LPAR. Hopefully the license is still there.
These were the machines back in the days where if you have to ask the price you cannot afford it 😍 we were happy like dog with our tails having some p166 mhz commodity desktop in a dc as server, this machine was just a dream 😃 Nicely engineered as well quality what I expect from IBM and bet ya it still fully functional.
Love your videos. BTW, that 'protective cover' on the dip switch is just a piece of kapton tape. It's put on there to protect the switch while the board goes through the soldering over and wave soldering machines. Usually they don't bother taking the tape off unless they need to flip that switch, and obviously they never had to.
Thanks! Yeah some other folks mentioned it's likely there for the automatic soldering, makes sense.
I have a clabretro addiction
I will rewatch this video
These machines are so fascinating to me, even if I'll never have any use for one. Your content is top notch! Greetings from Portugal
thanks for watching!
This channel is beyond awesome, reminds me of simpler times when I tinkered away on old SGI, DEC and IBM gear. Always had a fond spot for those old Unix boxes ever since I started out in my IT job in 2001. Sadly, the business world already unified on boring x86/Wintel boxes back then. But you could score some sweet loot, since all the obsolete Unix stuff was being thrown out by the wagon load. Those were the days 😢 Thanks for fueling my nostalgia!
Thanks! Yeah would be awesome to hunt down some old SGI or DEC stuff someday.
About server rack rails.... As a network engineer working in a datacenter racking/stacking and decomming equipment, I would like to issue a formal apology to Caleb and everyone else like us that tinkers with enterprise toys in the homelab environment for the rail situation. Like many places I'm sure, the company I work for unfortunately does not even pretend to entertain selling any surplus equipment to plebs like us for actual market value, instead they sell 'em for pennies on the dollar to places like Ingram Micro long after I rip & ship the equipment back to our main IT warehouse. The rack side of rails always gets discarded into a scrap pile and never included with the equipment for a multitude of reasons, primarily because the warehouse tells us to do so because they don't want to deal with them. No clue why, its stupid, but unfortunately the terrible world of IT we live in. Big sadge.
Some other folks mentioned that as well!
Babe, wake up! Clabretro has dropped a new video 🎉
again a great video! I worked in many many gouv datacenters and those P5 where all over the place. Part of my job was checking air circulation in server rooms and remove faceplates in order to check air intake (some environments have tons of micro particules) and they were famous for breaking... and infra guys love them so much that sorted to things like tape to hold them in place just for the look... you can get a 240v adaptor that plugs in your dryer outlet and connect a 0U PDU .. I run all my servres and computers from that plug.. 30A available and PSU do run more efficient at that voltage..
thanks! yeah I was tempted to temporarily plug it into my dryer outlet haha. But I'll just run a new dedicated circuit.
I worked on ERAM for many years for Lockheed Martin (original contractor) and when we were moved over to Leidos. That division was formally IBM Federal Systems, which is why we were a big AIX house.
cool!
I worked for Sequent Computer Systems as a level 3 support engineer (doing mostly kernel crash analysis of Sequent's DYNIX/3 and DYNIX/ptx Unix like OS's and Linux) when IBM bought that company in the early 2000's. Which meant we ended up with a bunch of gear like the p5 servers you discuss in this video (albeit x86_64 and similar rather than Power5). I was impressed by the quality of those servers, but even at the time didn't really understand how customers justified the price. When I went to work at Google in their data center automation team in 2007 and started visiting Google's data centers it was immediately obvious that using cheap hardware that has no redundancy and dealing with server failures in software makes a lot more economic sense.
Very cool! and yeah, the absolute plummet in x86 prices and an increase in capabilities back then definitely made it the way to go.
Seeing this older equipment back in action is just awesome! Keep up the great work.
thanks!
A PowerEdge 2XXX would look tiny compared to this thing!
Btw older IBM hardware is always interesting to look at, great video!
Ahh so cool! I work on the modern day P series CPUs at IBM. Very awesome to see this being used. I actually have one of those P5 MCMs on my desk, as well as its Z series cousin.
If you have POWER ISA or system machine. Questions let me know.
that's awesome! yes I'll definitely ask if I need any help!
I operate an HP Proliant DL 380e, built in 2009 till now, the best hardware i ever bought :)
Beautiful machines, love the PowerPC architecture, shame it couldn't get ground in consumer systems besides the old PowerMacs. Annoying how IBM just has that pointless proprietary connector for your hot swappable drives, you *totally* love to see that when replacing them. Interesting how that server actually needs 240v, when we got modern systems with way more than 4 cores nowadays running perfectly off 120v. Great video, Clab.
I'll admit I was surprised at the 220v requirement, didn't even think to check.
@@clabretro yeah it's something that you just totally don't expect
We have a Power 8 system at work and internally there's quite a lot of similarities. IBMs lineage is always intriguing to me. Love the video as always!
very cool! yeah the lineage is fascinating, one of the reasons I really like these p series machines
The tape is so pick-n-place machines can pick up odd shaped things when the board was being manufactured.
I have used the HSL cables before. You are correct, they are for connecting multiple servers together in a NUMA (non-uniform memory access) configuration. It allows you to grow your computer by adding hardware directly to your main system, rather than as a farm. I used them both on IBM Power 6 systems and their x445 system from the mid-2000's.
At 31:50 time stamp you were trying to assign a static IP address but you never changed it from dynamic to static in the settings.
lollll good catch. that explains it
actively used one for kernel driver automatic testing, LPAR was great thing from mainframe era, had one half for SUSE ppc and another for RHEL, so nice
I thank the world for another clabretro video on this wonderful day!
I want to say that those RIO/HSL slots in the 550Q are only for external expansion slots. For the users that needed them, IBM offered chassis with more PCI-X or PCIe slots. The higher end 570 model is what generally supported a GX bus extender card in those slots which would permit a coherent processor link between multiple chassis. This how IBM builds larger socket count systems using midrange hardware: cable multiple chassis together. This is also how IBM was able to transition from PCI-X to PCIe without having to offer different motherboards: just cable a different external enclosure for the slot type.
For the HMC network, I'd be curious if there is any Bonjour/ZeroConf traffic on it. Watching that is another means I've found handy for grabbing IP addresses across different subnets as it is a layer 2 protocol. With regarding the serial console, have you tried adding a null modem adapter to see if that makes the serial port functional? Alternatively have you tried those USB adapters with the serial port on the front with a RJ45 adapter?
JDE is likely referring to an ERP application from JD Edwards which after a series of acquisitions is now owned by Oracle. While the LPAR configuration indicates that it was for AIX, JDE was also available for IBM i (aka AS/400) LPARs as well.
The adapter plates are basically just for making it easy and safe to hot swap them. Most physical connectors aren't really designed for it... That then it's just easier to buy your drives from IBM directly. Funny how that works. 😂
😂
SCA connectors _are_ designed for hot-swap. They may not have existed when IBM designed this thing. Or they wanted the ability to plug other things in. (I have an SGI branded FC array that can take just about any drive ever made if you can find the correct interposer board. The problem is no one know who actually made it.)
Old Compaq Proliants had similar card edge connectors to faciliate hotswapping of HDDs. They actually date back to time before SCA. I had server with mixture of narrow, wide and sca scsi disks all with same card edge connectors going to backplane. After SCA became a thing on new proliant generations they dropped those custom interposers with card edges.
Those are SCA drives they are hot-swappable an earlier comments said that’s just a legacy connector IBM used for years
Love the GUI, takes me back to the late 90s
your a genius at this...I love seeing how you get these machines up and running...be careful doing the 220volt project! can't wait for the next one.
thanks!
I think the hsl links are so you can cluster multiple systems together a bit like what infiniband does. Ho did something similar with the dl980 which was essentially two dl580's clustered together with a proprietary link.
yeah basically I think, after some further research there are various Expansion Units you can buy, such as a PCI unit for more cards in large LPAR setups
This is awesome. Gives me some insight into an IBM server that is at one of our clients on how mainframes work. Thanks!
i was given a 'desktop' version of something very much like this, about 10 years back, i worked out it needed AIX OS.. but i couldnt find it anywhere..i ended up gutting it and scrapping it...still have the cpus and few other bits n pieces in my collection!..i was also given a Netfinity 5500 at the same time, dual P3 500Mhz.. thing was absolutly huge..full redundancy...all contained in one 60KG box!
IBM really made their systems so well...no wonder the machines were so expensive.. theres a half ton of metal in there! :P
Built like a tank. A modular one. Very clean unit too.
One of the best channels on TH-cam! Thank you for all the content
thank you!
That server is awesome. Thanks for sharing the info.
If I had to guess, the drive backing connector was to be extra protective of the connector when plugging drives. Avoid a bad connection damaging a port or drive which in turn damages the next drive or port and so on. That would also explain the nice latching mechanism.
The Oxide computer guys talked about those types of issues on their podcast about back when they were at Sun.
It's certainly more robust than the regular LVD connector, I'll give it that.
Always love seeing your videos, theyve actuslly inspired me to pick up some servers of my own! I got a poweredge R620, proliant DL360 and DL380 for 200 bucks total! (Australian) im really excited to start learning to use them and get them online!
very cool, that's a pretty good deal!
I noticed when you were configuring addresses that there was a dropdown toggled to Dynamic. That may be why the address you set didn't stick?
good catch, I bet that was it haha
That is so pretty!!! LOL you just commented on "it's stunning good looks" as I wrote that! Man, I would love to find some of the empty cases. Stick a Zimaboard behind it via some LED and I/O expansions. Could rig up hot swaps to SATA. VERY COOL! I have a 23" server rack with metal sides that pop off and a tinted plexi door. I had 19" rigged up in it with gratuitous rack equipment and servers, but it was too much power. I use a Zimaboard now mostly with a crossfire build on standby for any hardcore computin. Im actually using it as a 3d printer enclosure currently. I insulated it with rockwool acoustic tiles that fit right in the sides without any fasteners! It's perfect! Still... I miss my massive rack sometimes 😊
a face plate all hooked up like that would be cool! kinda like a PiDP-11
The sticker at 13:37 says "The device must be connected to a grounded outlet" in Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish. Happy to help.
Love these systems! First financial institution I worked for ran our core platform on P5 series machines.
And yeah, these machines expect you to have 220v/30A data center power to run. I ran the JS22V blades in a blade center S chassis and the power requirements were even nuttier.
Looking forward to see your lab upgrades to power beats like this!
Love these videos taking me back in time.
Beautiful inner and external design. 64GB DDR2 RAM in 2007! Incredible capacity in that time.My High end laptop had 1GB RAM and super workstation had 2GB RAM in 2007 but the general consumer PC had 128MB RAM only.
Oh, JDE? I'd put money on that being JD Edwards, or as (I think) it's called now IBM OneWorld. I worked in a place with a relatively modern iSeries system a few years ago, and the pSeries hardware is interchangeable with the iSeries if I remember correctly. Its massively complex but amazingly powerful.
someone else mentioned JD Edwards as well, I bet you're right!
Came to comment the same, JD Edwards. Looks like a Development, Prod, Prod Learning (Training)? and an an after/fore thought named TEST partition.
The RIO ports were used to add additional chassis that has more drive bays and more PCI slots for more IO capacity.
yeah found out about the various Expansion Units, makes sense for large LPAR setups
RIO or remote IO connects to what is known as an IO drawer, essentially a similar shaped/sized/coloured box with just a bunch of PCIe slots in them. Your P5 can handle much more peripherals than the 4 slots you have available in the chassis.
The other use for the HSL is proprietary switching technology, so you can run HPC jobs on P5 clusters. You can also run GPFS on said cluster, so you can share storage volumes over the cluster nodes.
If memory serves me right, the 590 was the biggest you could get, the size of a full rack and pretty loud.
Also, IBM gear is very picky about serial connections. You will probably need a proper serial cable, and set it to 9600 baud.
The Type number is on all IBM equipment. All the way down to workstations and laptops. The Type number can be looked up and it tells you all about the device you have
JDE partitions were probably running a JD Edward's Oracle database. I used to work for a company that ran JD Edward's on an IBM iSeries.
I think that's correct!
This is super cool! As popular as the cloud is these days, there's something that it can't take away from these servers. I hope to own Sun and IBM machines some day running in my basement. Thanks for making content on these machines.
agreed, and thank you!
The places I worked ran AS400 on the P5’s they had not AIX. I’ve never touched one of these at all as I worked help desk or network/ firewall Great video
thanks! hoping to play around with AS400 someday
I'm running my server rack on 240V. It's worth doing for for the slight improvement in PSU efficiency.. Any wide range input voltage devices work just fine.
Back in the day when I was an admin for a Sun e10k I always found it funny that a multi million spec'd our machine was controlled and required Sun's lowest cost desktop to boot from, the Ultra 5. Two of them for that redundant goodness. This was a carryover from Cray when they built sparc and ultrasparc systems. The Cray CS6400 used SparcStation 20 systems (could have been others but I only know of the ss20 being used) and the successor e10k (Starfire.).
very cool. those e10ks look like absolute monsters. I have a lead on some ultra machines so hopefully get to cover those soon... no e10k unfortunately haha
For VMware boxes at least, we used additional add-in NICs and built our virtual switches to use one port on each physical NIC. That way, if we had a whole card die, we'd only lose one path to each vSwitch. Same with redundant RAID cards: dual-port drive backplanes connect to both controllers so the array survives loss of one controller.
interesting!
Back when these were new I worked at a place where we had hundreds of them and the come from IBM in a rack already racked, cabled, and ready to plugin
Serial to USB converters are notorious for 'not working' - what it actually comes down to is that some of the converters use a chip that Windows has drivers built in for, and some require a cumbersome manual driver assignment process (if you can even find the right driver).
If you get a cable with the right chip it'll just work.
yeah, these p5s are just so particular. I have trouble with a direct serial connection to a Linux box too (though it mostly works). if I remember correctly the MRV serial console in my rack plays nice with them though
For anyone else reading, the magical letters, usually, are FTDI. They make the actual USB-to-RS232 UART chip, and WIndows knows how to handle them.
I'm a ham radio operator, you would not *believe* how many arguments get started because the factory programming cables for cheap radios use cheap UARTs, but buying one with the correct pinout and an FTDI chip in it just solves all the problems.
Totally recommend running the whole rack off of the 240 volts if you can. Efficiency gains are not nothing.
Genuinely didn't realize how huge this machine was until you compared it to its little brother. hahaha
yeah I was surprised too haha
😅 (the moment he knew) 😅 when you're computer force's you too run 240V (got a love this kid a things) ... Thank you for sharing 🎉
You can trust those handles. If you remove heavy components like the power supplies and drives you can do a diagonal grip and install it by yourself on a good day.
yeah removing a PSU to give yourself a handle can be a pro move
13:00 meanwhile as a Swede I am drawn to the note saying: "This machine shall be plugged into an earthed outlet." But in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finish. Danes are apparently left to decode the Swedish and Norwegian for their own use, it is close enough.
And yes, having 230 Vac 10/16 amp as one's standard voltage has some real advantages.
Main one isn't that 230 X 10 = 2300 watts and one rarely uses anywhere near that much power for even a couple of computers.
But rather that with some voltage drop one still gets ample power.
Lose 5-10 volts along the way isn't as major as on 110-120 volts where that accounts for a lot larger drop in available power. And the fact that most PSUs already semi struggles to use 110-120 Vac to start with.
Going off all the JDE nomenclature in the hostname and LPARs, that 550 probably used to be used to host some businesses JD Edwards World ERP platform.
I think you're right!
Again, this machine has the european/nordic sticker which states that it needs to be connected to a grounded electrical outlet so it might have been sourced from Europe. The JDE server identification might stand for Jacobs Douwe Egberts, an American-European coffee company. Anyways, looking forward to the next episode!
I suspected as much, and had to ask my wife who is the P Series expert here at home: The NICs can be divided between LPARs just like in the virtualisation platforms that, eh, learnt a lot from IBM. They're connected to VIO servers, which are special LPARs that only perform resource sharing for other LPARs. So, you don't need a NIC per LPAR. What you typically would do is to build a LACP pair (or quad, as it were) into your switching environment, and running that aggregate interface in 802.1q trunk mode, so as to be able to assign different networks to different LPARs.
RIO lets you add more I/O drawers for even more PCI slots. Not link separate machines. Has been around a long time; I installed my first multi-drawer machine, a M80, back in 2000. One CEC, (CPU and RAM drawer) and one PIO (Primary I/O, looks like a 520 in its own right.)
interesting!
The front LCD isn't readable probably because its contrast is off, sometimes there is adjustment for that in software. If not then its probably a bad pot/resistor inside next to the LCD, those 2byX displays usually had a pin dedicated to controlling contrast on them.
That HSL link is to stack multiple power machines and share resources. Not really familiar that much with p5 but proto over those wires should be infiniband and should allow sharing of memory&compute or at least allows moving a live LPAR from one chassy to another.
And it has 2 connectors because you could daisy chain p5s in a rack so the connector needs to be robust and probably lock secured to the chassy.
O yeah, there is nothing but scsi/FC for storage on systemp5
new video!!! so happy! best Friday!
Alternate serial console access:
If you have that V240 up and running (and is running Solaris 6/8, maybe 10 IIRC), then you can connect the 9-pin serial on the back of the V240 to your target host (via 'null modem' or 'laplink' serial cable). Then (if Solaris defaults weren't changed) run 'tip hardwire.'' I used to buy and hand out those dual-headed Belkin serial cables for co-workers, at a time that felt like an age ago (pre-Y2K). I still have mine stowed away in my cables kit (previously lived in the car), alongside an *original* blue Laplink cable.
LOL at that FC connector btw, some Sun models used those drives, they sucked IMO due to the rarity.
Yeah I had it hooked up to a little Lenovo Linux box, but once it's over in the rack I actually have an MRV secure console I'll be able to use.
Those little clips on the drive bays are uniquely suitable for 3D printing replacements!
agreed!
another cool video again, btw I guess when setting the IP on the ASMI would not change because need to change static instead of dynamic.
yeah I think you're right haha. oops
dude i love that you are just like me literally, the fans "i wonder how these will sound" and the second server on top itd definitely be more fun xD i can actually understand how everything works you are very visual with it and thats awesome. i dont see that much. we should definitely do something haha it would be a great video.
“If that’s not remote management, I don’t know what is.”
-clabretro, 2024
Australia 230~240v 10a is standard. 15a & 20a is also available in the standard outlet plug type.
Awesome video, as always! Weird connectors for the drives will always make me angry... it makes the systems way less future-proof... Can't wait for part 2!
By the way, do you have a Mastodon account or somewhere on the fediverse where we could follow you?
thanks! unfortunately just a @clabretro Instagram account (which admittedly I don't post on that often)
Love those videos! With all these servers are you looking to get a 2nd hand SAN?
thanks! yeah I'd say a SAN setup of some sort is on the list
We use those C13 plugs (just the regular IEC plugs, not the bigger C19 plugs) for a lot of our 240V/16A appliances here in Europe, so the C13 should've never been an indicator for just 120V :)
omg clabbert! what a beautiful server! this machine fills my tummy with sparkles! wouldnt it be wonderful to put a cute little gentoo install on it?
IBM aint build computers, they build BEAST
Clabreto, on the $25 drive adapters, my thought is the allow "Hot Swap", looking at the connector the contacts are different lengths allowing grounds to contact first in the swap process
good call, for easier hot swap detection maybe!
consider installing a nema L6-30 twist lock outlet and get yourself a 1U horizontal pdu that has c13 outlets. So you can use the very common / cheap c13-c14 power cords.
Interesting. You seem to cover a lot of things I've worked on 😂😂.. i briefly worked on an IBM power 5 back in 2010 while working for the social security department here in Seychelles. I believe they might still be using it today. It was in an AS/400 which I believe by then had been rebranded to i5 🤔 it was a tower version. IBM servers are always impressive in design and looks. Specially the AS/400 or Power series
Very cool! Yeah these pseries trace their lineage back to AS/400.
New clabretro let's goooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I've seen one of these going locally for cheap, which is rare. All this interesting stuff unfortunately stopped being cheap quite a few years ago in this part of the world. Only thing stopping me is I can't justify another server of that size.
As for powering it thankfully I get 230V at the wall, so just run an extension cord from here as I'm sure the several thousand km won't cause too much transmission loss :D
😆
Wow! What an epic monster! 55KG that is super heavy for a computer 😀👍
More IBM goodness! Yay!
Cool! We have P9, P8, P7 in production and P5, P4+ and PIII in storage. Btw, i have never seen Remote IO drawers in real life, who ever needs 144 PCI network cards ?
could get a lot of Serious Business done with 144 PCI cards
I think the issue with your serial to USB adapter is the TX/RX pins are swapped, or you got a bad adapter. I recommend the Gearmo serial adapters and also pick up a USB "null modem" adapter for that TX/RX issue.
Yeah I've never been able to get the pseries machines to work properly with a serial to USB adapter (it works fine on tons of other stuff). Always have to use a real serial connection.
RIO's can be used for more PCI expansion - when it gets fun is if someone nudges the RIO cable when the system is running and boom - dead system :)
Man, I don't know how I haven't seen your channel before. This is great stuff, I just love weird old hardware.
Kinda dumb detail here but fwiw: that tape you had to peel off of the DIP switch is just to aid the pick and place machine that puts the component on the PCB during manufacturing. It's not a security thing.
thanks! yeah I didn't actually know that about the pick and place machine until you and some other folks pointed it out.
@@clabretro oh that's funny, I should have expected somebody else would have mentioned that. I think I have found my people! :)
4:41 MINDBLOW…interchangeable covers!?!? 🤯🤯🤯
wild stuff 😂