On Tuesday 11 September 2007, Karanbir Singh wrote:

Les Bell wrote:

...

Any word on s390 and s390x? I don't need it myself, but I've been talking to a number of mainframe users recently and they expressed interest.

Provide access to the hardware, and if someone is interested we can look at it.

If hardware access is not a possibility, then machines fast enough to run the emulators might be an option too.

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?

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?

now, I haven't dealt personally with s390 since it was s370 and punchcards and mag tape were still de rigeur, so the following is purely conjecture.....

a reasonable MINIMUM for a test-n-dev machine is likely around 512MB ram and 18GB or so of disk.

it needs to be accessible via ssh from the internet, and it itself should be able to access internet. I assume those have some sort of console processor? that also should be accessible via ssh or whatever from the internet. It would probably be a good idea to have a x86 centos host on the LAN with it that also can be accessed from the net so you can cross-compile and net-install locally.

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.

[Veering off-topic; mods, I'll not continue this branch of the thread much longer....]

On Friday 14 September 2007, John R Pierce wrote:

I've gotten away with running some 208V equipment on a 120V UPS using a step-up transformer which had a 208V tap (and 220V, 240V). Of course, 3000VA is going to require a 120V 30A outlet to power said transformer (and a UPS with 30A output probably needs a 50A circuit to feed it).

Input power not a problem; we have a 125KVA Leibert PDU for the server room (about 4,000 square feet raised floor with 30 tons of A/C (Leibert System 3 15 ton x2)). There are a few L21-30R's, L5-30R's, and L6-30R's under the floor.

(googles, oh. 12V 75AH monsters, online looks like $125 each).

I'd put said batteries in a series of battery boxes, and install the whole mess some place like the basement, with ventilation to prevent accumulation of hydrogen fumes.

You've just described the way our 48VDC system is connected, with the exception of the type of battery...we have a bank of 24 C&D KCT-450's for 48VDC, with two Lorain RHM200D50's floating them (cells and rectifiers were donated to us). The cells are in an old munitions building that was on-site (please don't ask; look up our history on www.pari.edu....:-)) that we moved from the pistol range to the back of the main building, and ran four 2/0 'jumpers' to.

But if someone wanted to support an educational institution and wanted to lease floor space and/or bandwidth (we currently have 100Mb/s to the Internet, and an OC3 to our co-lo in Asheville (also our ISP's PoP; see www.ercbroadband.org) (which is part of the reason my equipment budget is so lean!)), we would love to talk. Perhaps even for CentOS mirroring and/or building.

Peter Arremann visited us a while back (by the way, Peter: good article in LJ, and thanks again for the UltraSPARC goodies!); he could fill you in on how it was when he visited.

On Friday 14 September 2007, R P Herrold wrote:

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Lamar Owen wrote:

...

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!

As it turns out, I _may_ actually have two idle units, which I think can be so configured, with SNMP card, about which Liebert kindly donated to the local LUG ( http://www.colug.net/ ), before Liebert were bought by Emerson Electric (I think -- I fergit; /me looks at Google -- yup) ... probably need new batteries, but ...

Yeah, I'd just need to know what kind of batteries. If the things ran on 48VDC I know how to make that work with my telecom 48VDC setup, assuming they don't mind the positive ground. If 60VDC I can take the necessary 5 12V 12-270's out of the Controlled Power beast easily enough.

hmmmm --- Google Maps says PARI is south and east of the Smokey Mt Natl Park, on the NC side by what looks like 50 miles of winding mountain road off I-40 -- probably to cut down on ambient nearby radio noise, it is kinda out in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, it is. See www.pari.edu for better shots than what you'll find on Google Earth; the GoogleEarth detail is cut back badly. Terraserver has good visuals, though.

Wonder what the freight will be on the chassis' -- I'll go to the locker, get model numbers, pull the batteries for a part number, and look into the price of a delivered replacement set.

Freight on the 120V APC SmartUPS 3000RM5U's that I have was a little over $100 each, Old Dominion, batteries included. I got them on eBay for $225 each; got a grant that covered new battery packs, and have five good working units (out of six purchased). Wish I had the twin 225KVA units the site's previous occupants took with them...or the 600V 1320Ah battery bank to bring the 500KVA Piller back up....at least they left the three 125KVA Leibert PDU's.

I'm going to make the attempt to power the 3006 up tomorrow (I have maintenance windows on Saturdays); we'll see what comes of things then.

[Administrivia: should this be on CentOS-devel instead of the regular CentOS list? If so, please redirect.]

On Friday 14 September 2007, Lamar Owen wrote:

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.

Ok, my curiosity got the best of me, and so I ran a couple of 208 power cords over to the 3006, hooked up a PS/2 keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and booted the rig. OS/2 comes up just fine, and the P390 tools are all there. Hmm, I get an SSA event; ah, one of the three 18.2GB drives is bad, apparently, and the SSA RAID5 is running in degraded mode. Anybody got an IBM 21L3335 18.2GB SSA hard disk assembly, or know anything about such a beast? If my Torx drivers were here I'd pop the top on the drive shell and see what kind of drive it really is, and see if I have something compatible lying around.

The P390 IPL's OK, but my ignorance of the Integrated Server environment is showing, as I'm pretty clueless about getting a console. Oh, and the config is password-protected; have to figure out how to get around that. The PSW windows runs, increments, and I see pretty color bars; for whatever that's worth.

In any case, I shut down the P390 with the provided tool, and shut down OS/2.

The beast boots; but it will need a drive (it has several empty bays that could take SSA drives, too, if someone had some that wanted to part with them).

There are what appears to be two ESCON cards; one has a large DB connector; 50 pins or more, and the other has a duplex fiber connector; looks like FDDI.

Sorry to be a bit of a stickler, but can we please change the topic for each architecture. I am monitoring all posts containing IA64 or Itanium to see when CentOS 5 support will be available and this thread has been throwing *a lot* of false positives.

Thanks, and again, sorry to be so sticky.

Karanbir Singh wrote:

What sort of machines do you have that you could test on ? there is an ia64 distro spin running right now, so depending on how that works out there will be an installable tree ( but no isos ) available for testing shortly.

SGI Altix 3700 64P x 64GB, SGI Prism 32P x 32GB SGI Altix 450 4P x 4GB