[CentOS] Old HP Xeon server blade with only SCSI HDD ports & CentOS

[Fernando Cassia]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 6:25 AM, Christian Freund <freund at wrz.de> wrote:
> Hello Fernando,
>
> This drive-technology was replaced 7 years ago and the cpu's are that old as well.

Yes, I figured that because of the HDD technology. I wasn´t sure of
the 7 years or 5 years but I figured it was close to that timeframe.
But you know, I´m typing this on a dual-core AMD Opteron purchased in
2008 so... old ancient hardware is the name of the game for me. ;)

> Better buy some 1HE Servers with an actual i3 and 500GB SATA-HDD for less than the price of an old LVD-UW-SCSI drive. With these old blades you just have excessive power-consumption, heat, low performance.

Yep, I agree with you that buying a SCSI HDD is a big no-no. Since my
current budget is zero, and I´ve picked up these blades from a
dumpster, buying a new blade is not an alternative, because I never a
had a budget to begin with... I´m just trying to get this to work just
for the heck of it and see if I can turn this "gift" into a CentOS
server, plus if I can make it to work it will be nice to have a spare
system to run some stuff isolated from my main server.

I think I´ve found a solution: there´s a daughtercard that apparently
includes a Mini-PCIe slot. In this, I figure I could add a half-height
card with USB 3.0 and/or SATA controller. If the blade BIOS will
recognize it and allow it to boot, that remains to be seen. This
hardware is (or was) enterprise grade and is way out of my league.
I´ve only built AMD Opteron servers myself, but in the PC tower form
factor. It´s the first time I´m looking at a blade from the inside.

So, is there a mailing list other than CentOS where I could find
people knowledgeable about the internals of these blades? Right now my
top priority is finding if I can hack a 48V DC power supply to the odd
(proprietary? or de-facto blade standard?) connector at the back of
the blade. I don´t want to pollute this list more with
hardware-related messages.

Thanks a bunch for replying!
FC
-- 
During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act
- George Orwell