FINAL System shutdown after 16 years
root@gamanjiru:/usr # shutdown -p now Shutdown NOW! shutdown: [pid 14442] root@gamanjiru:/usr # *** FINAL System shutdown message from gessel@gamanjiru.blackrosetech.com *** System going down IMMEDIATELY System shutdown time has arrived Connection to gamanjiru.blackrosetech.com closed by remote host. Connection to gamanjiru.blackrosetech.com closed. DISCONNECTED (PRESS <ENTER> TO RECONNECT) (Tue Feb 11 21:39:45 2025)
Almost 16 years ago, in July of 2009, I bought a used IBM x3655 7985-1AU off Ebay for $202.50 to replace my IBM Netfinity 5500 (4U!, dual dual 500MHz Xeo 1GB RAM (later upgraded to 4GB) and 5x 9.1GB HDs for $217.50 ) that had been running since 2004. That had, itself, replaced a dual socket generic deskside machine, a box Mark Godwin gave me back in the Nebucon days, that first went live on the interwebs running FreeBSD 2 in April of 1998 under black-rose.org. As of this post: 26 years, 10 months of FreeBSD hosted internets.
Those were the magic days of ebay: in 2008, just a year earlier, I’d quoted a similar x3650 (Intel E5410-based), 32GB but only a pair of crappy consumer SATA 500GB drives for $7,297.00.
The new x3655 came with 32GB of RAM and dual-core AMD processor and an RSA-II. The original motherboard firmware only supported dual core AMD processors, not the then brand new AMD Opteron quad core, so I bought a somewhat hard to find 43W7343 motherboard for $190 (and an additional 5 fans to max out cooling for $18 each) and then a pair of AMD Opteron 2352 2.1GHz CPUs and swapped the mobo and the CPUs and the heat sinks and the fans. Note that it is really hard to find data on the dual quad core option, it was a bit of a hot rod.
I added the 2x drive expansion module, another ebay find, and loaded the drive bays with 8x 26K5657 10k 72G 2.5″ SAS drives (at about $65 each, used) on the ServeRAID 8k and expanded the RAM to 64GB, 57856 MB available with RAM sparing set for reliability. The modified machine reports itself as an x3655 7943-AC1.
I ended up creating an 8×1 RAID array to pass to ZFS, ZRAID2, which mean I had a battery backed write cache I could count on. The system has dual power supplies, each connected to a 2200 VA (hacked XR) UPS.
Over the years, almost plural decades, of continuous operation I’ve lost maybe 4 drives. Once, while I wasn’t paying much attention, somewhere over about 6 months two drives failed and I got close to catastrophic failure, but ZFS pulled through. It started life on FreeBSD 7 and I took a chance on the then brand-new experimental release of ZFS. Over the years it ran most of the releases up to 12, stalling there as the decision was made to shift to new hardware and I’m pretty sure I’ve run every release of FreeBSD except 1.0 and 13.
It was a fast machine, 8⨉ 2100.12-MHz K8-class physical cores, more than enough to run mail and various web services, everything compiled for the AMD Barcelona architecture. The pre-Lenovoization of the IBM x86 hardware was really first rate, top of the line data center gear and it shutdown without a flaw, same performance and configuration as when I fired it up, used and already off-list, 16 years earlier.
It was never too slow, even now, even as OS’s have expanded and the total number of ports needed for basic services has grown by about 10x given ever spiraling dependencies. It wasn’t that it was slow, but that it used far too much power and electricity got more and more expensive in CA.
So I migrated to a new box, took the better part of a year to spare time migrate all of the jail services from the old machine and, increasingly unsupported FreeBSD 12 OS to new HPE DL360 G9 (ebay, inflation: $497) running FreeBSD 14, added a poudriere build environment on a DL60 and carefully tuned the kernels for power efficiency not bad for 10 disks, 20 cores, 192GB: 114W. Now there are 20 physical cores and 40 virtual and yet, clearly showing the limits of Moore’s law, the new box’s E5-2630 v4s are only 2.20GHz: 5x the execution cores, but only 5% faster clock. 16 years of progress.
Good night, sweet prince.