David Gessel
Updating an IBM 366
Today I’m updating an IBM 366-8863 to be a new home server because not having a quad 64 bit Xeon box with 24G of RAM and 6 x 72G SAS RAID 10 in your house would be like watching TV on a black and white CRT or something… and it was $350 on eBay so who could resist? It will replace the old 5500 M20 and save 3U in the rack and probably a lot of power for a decent NAS box.
Unlike the 335, the 366 does not have a floppy drive. There’s actually room in the cas right behind the IBM logo, next to the lightpath diagnostics and above the optical drive… maybe I should get out my dremel and start looking for a 266Mhz 64bit PCI-X floppy controller.
The 366 is supported by the IBM Bootable Media Creator, which is a new thing for me. This tool gathers all of the most recent firmware updates for the servers you specify (or all supported ones) and creates a single bootable disk (the 335 is not supported). The tool found 23 updates for the 8863, though the versions are not all the same as you get doing the one-by-one download (there’s an option to select manually, but the integrated one-click approach is much easier).
All you do is download the creator tool for the OS of your choice, execute it, specify the systems you want to support, let it gather the updates and build the disk and it will even burn the disk for you. Once the update disk is burned, you simply boot with it into a GUI (which supports normal mouse keyboard) and a few restarts later you have a fully patched machine.
The only thing left is to use the latest ServeRAID disk to update your ServeRAID configuration.
Nice job IBM! This sort of thing is why I like IBM machines. Plus they’re black. And they have the built in KVM/console controller over IP (remote supervisor II).
LAX Edition
Another sighting of the Eat Vulva meme, this time at the LAX RCC.
New Espresso Machine @ LAX RCC!
Yay! Tastes like coffee even. Finally, real coffee-based espresso drinks rather than RealCaughfee industrial powder based reconstituted hot beverages. This is a huge improvement. One side has a Concordia IBS, the other side has a 2500i. Both are good. Both have a double shot option. I am now wired for the day.
Updating an IBM 335
I’m bringing up an old IBM 335 for use as a pfSense Firewall. It is a fine computer, with almost everything you’d want except dual power supplies (the 336 has those plus 64 bit hardware).
The first step is updating the machine:
- BIOS to 1.16: download the flash image, it writes itself to a floppy, boot with that floppy and flash the BIOS. I had to go through a bunch of 1990’s era software disks until I found a few floppies that would format without errors. This also updates the LSI 1030 disk controller.
- Internal Diagnostics to 1.07: these are disk images (.img) diskcopy didn’t seem to do the right thing on my XP box, so I used diskwriter 0.9 to create the disks. You boot off the BIOS update disk then select update diagnostics.
- Configure the disks with ServeRAID. I didn’t flash the BIOS on the controller, but I did reformat the disks and set them up as RAID 1.
- Update the System Management Processor to 1.06. This is a self-booting floppy.
- Update the Broadcom NetXtreme NICs to 209h. This is a self-booting floppy that creates a RAM disk then runs the update. The command for the 335 is
UPDATE 8830
This gets the core hardware up to date. You might also want to flash the firmware in the disks, though I did not as my box is loaded with unsupported disks. Plus 36GB SCSI disks aren’t exactly going through a lot of teething pains these days.
Then I installed pfSense from the LiveCD (verify the hash). This is pretty effortless. The only important bit of data is to set up the NICs: in the 335 under FreeBSD bge0 is the lower port and bge1 is the upper port.
At a later date I will install a 73P9265 Remote Supervisor II adapater, but the cable I have (73P9312) is for newer boxes. The 335 needs the 02R1661: oddly it is cheaper to buy the cable with a card than just the cable. This will probably need flashing of the firmware, but is a nice tool with remote KVM and a lot of other slick features.
A week of tweets: 2009-05-10
- My favorite seats at ORD. Coffee not comparable to new B RCC, alas. http://twitpic.com/4oyyu #
- Canadian customs starts asking about swine flu and one nostril begins to psychosomatically leak. Do not wipe nose! #
- Having Indian food with @iamwallace at Bollywood in Guelph. #
- Lovely day in canada today. Hopefully the good weather means timely flights. #
- Long week. Finally back in california. #
- Going to It’s Tops. Yay! California Pig. Yum. #
- Star Trek at the Grand Lake. Music from the original series on the Might Wurlitzer before the show. http://twitpic.com/4wgt5 #
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Yay! News Quiz is Back
With Sandy Toksvig. Week is funny again.
I’m very worried about this flu thing.
I tried to phone NHS… but all I got was this cracklin’
Apple wins
The battle of the hipster bay area cafe laptop has been decisively won by Apple.
WordPress Twitter Integration
I discovered TwitterFeed and I was happy. It does a nice job of formatting blog entries to tweets. I set it up then went back to it later after I changed my login for twitter and whoops. You can only log in with OpenID.
Uh oh. OpenID. Why? Why do this? It is a solution in search of a problem. It is very clever and worse than useless. It must be a support nightmare. So instead of having my browser automagically insert my passwords (and instead of having my browser’s convenient password store “show passwords” option to help me figure out what they are all in one convenient place) I have to remember some random URL from a totally random company I’ve never heard of, do not have any reason to trust, and would never use for anything else.
Great.
Security! Plus they use some idiotic picture picker thing instead of a password. Why? Why?
These things are great in theory, but worse than useless in practice.
Time to find another blog->twitter tool. Hello hellotxt.com
Simple username/password login. Browser remembers it for me. Sign up once, done.
Of course this makes me enter my username and password for my twitter account, but I’m signing up with hellotxt so I’m already trusting them with a user/pass combination and at least I know something about them and I’m trading some security for some function, unlike the OpenID provider that’s just creepily asking to be my Big Id Brother to vouch for me when I go to the bar (and what happens when vidoop’s lights get turned out or the servers fail? No more logins?)
Anyway, hellotxt has a service called hellotxtfeed which uses a feed as input and then ping.fm like syndicates it out to all your hungry fans on every service who are just waiting with baited breath to hear how your most recent poop came out.
In the end though, I prefer having things run on my own servers because even if hellotxt isn’t a single point of failure like vidoop yearns to be, most “pre-revenue” companies don’t make it. So I use a nice clean open source solution: Alex King’s excellent TwitterTools plug in. It has a lot of great features for bidirection integration between blogs and twitter including the digest posts it is creating on this site. The only bug I’ve found is that sometimes twitter.com seems to reject login. For me it has just cleared up randomly, so I’m happy enough to assume it is twitter.com, at least as long as it continues working.
A week of tweets: 2009-05-03
- This week: commuting to LA. Wheee! some parents of screaming infants still don’t know about aviation hypoxia. #
- Aren’t these people all really late for work? #
- Lately my only exercise is sprinting around tourists in surgeon costumes at airports twice a day. #
- Somebody should make swine flu panic special edition sugical masks with little pig noses printed on them. #
- Off to see romaimian film Hooked at #SFIFF #
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