On Tuesday 11 September 2007, R P Herrold wrote:
On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Lamar Owen wrote:
What is the minimum for actual hardware? I have a small s390 here that I've been looking for a reason to power up. What sort of access is needed?
Goodness ... the Stuff you have in your closet at PARI.
:-)/ ~
I didn't mention the SUN E5500 and E6500 or the Dec AlphaServer 2100 with quad 275MHz 21164's....or some of the other arcane hardware lying around that's been donated to us (like 1992-vintage Proteon 68020-base Multibus routers; Cisco's only competition to the AGS line back then).
Best as I had roughed out plans for a builder some months ago, would be access to a console with root access, and a rebooter, and a side unit (a generic PC box with plenty of HD space, with a 'crossover cable' network to the s390, and a seperate interface pointing 'upstream' to reach the outside build master endpoint), with sufficient space to push images onto and to pull from
Whew. As typical, you have thoroughly thought through things. Let me see if the beast will power up and whether the OS/2 console processor comes up before we make too many plans, though. And, as I mentioned, it is a SMALL s390; but it is the genuine article, Model 3006. As I said, a little box. Its usability will depend entirely upon whether the disks are wiped or not, I would think; but it does still have the disks, at least. A few 18.2GB units, IIRC.
If someone would like to donate a midsized 208VAC-capable (single-phase OK, but has to be 208 and not 240, or at least jumperable) UPS to the effort, about a 3000VA unit or so, that would help matters considerably! All my good UPS's are 120VAC at this point (my one good 208VAC unit threw a battery a few weeks ago; 8 12-270 UPS batteries will blow my equipment budget right now, so it is off line and the Cisco 12012 router it served is degraded to standby status on the OC3); while we have a 500KW generator out back, the start delay would be enough to down the box. Or a 48VDC input 3000VA inverter (a pair of 1500's probably would work) with either a 208 or a 240 output; I have plenty of -48VDC power.