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

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Sat Apr 12 15:46:19 UTC 2014


On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 11:46 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:

> Now, if you're in the 'experimenting' mood you might look at what it
> would take to adapt something like
>
> http://shop.codesrc.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=59&product_id=50
> (a 50-pin narrow SCSI to SD flash card board) to LVD UW.
>

Thanks for the pointer Lamar.


> While this box doesn't qualify as 'vintage' yet, if you want to see the
> lengths to which some people will go you need to go lurk a while on the
> vintage-computer.com forums; there are people trying to do things as
> 'interesting' as rebuilding an original PDP/8 (a 'straight 8') from
> scratch with just a collection of flip-chips, a blank wirewrap
> backplane, a vintage enclosure, and a set of schematics (and more time
> on their hands that I have!).
>

That is waaaaay too much for me. Yet, if I run across a Commodore 64 in a
dumpster, I'll surely open its guts and take its SI6581 sound chip for what
I wanted all my childhood and couldn't have: a "Stereo SID" cartridge. ;)

Of the 8bit years I've got a working C128D, and of the 16-bit age an Amiga
1200 (it works, but it's not hooked up, lost the scandoubler and hence it's
impossible to display its low-refresh modes in today's VGA monitors).
I've also got a working 4-way SMP monster, the ALR Quad6 (4x Intel Pentium
Pro 200Mhz) w 256MB RAM. But that thing is really a toaster.

 So what you're wanting to do, if you have
> the time and it's more for hobby purposes (or development purposes,
> even), is nowhere near as far-fetched as some of the things I've been
> reading lately.  (Long story, and way OT).
>

Basically I never had anything to do with blades, and since I have never
worked for big corporations (nor I plan to, unless one of my favorite tech
firms decide to hire me, and there's only 2 in that category ;), this
was/is the only opportunity of being up close with Blade technology.

It was fun already learning how it all works, and the hardware design. For
instance I thought before that the blades could operate by themselves even
with ethernet ports but that's not entirely true, without the interconnect
backplane and the comms blade (which I also found I have) that provides the
Ethernet ports, it's crippled.

Back to topic.

 It seems the only stumbling block for me so far is
1. Finding a 48V power supply
2. Learning the right polarity on the connectors in the back of the chassis
so I don't burn things down
3. Dealing with the UWSCSI issue, either by finding a cheap used UWSCSI
drive or buying an adapter (last night while searching about this, I
stumbled upon one Florida,USA store selling one UWSCSI to SATA adapter for
like $75, instead of the usual $150-$170 that is the minimum price you can
find on eBay or amazon).

In the end, if this exercise ends up getting nowhere. I'm gonna put the
blades for sale at a local auctions site, but first taking out the 8GB of
DDR2 ECC RAM which I can use in my Sun AMD Opteron box...

Thanks for the help -you and everyone who replied-, have a nice weekend!.

FC
-- 
During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary
act
Durante épocas de Engaño Universal, decir la verdad se convierte en un Acto
Revolucionario
- George Orwell



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