[geeks] Cool rescue

[Chris Byrne]

Well I finally managed to get my big multiway SMP box. And when I say big I
mean BIG. It's only a 4 proc machine, but its about four feet high and just
as deep, and it weighs well over 100 lbs. It's got to be the poorest
processing power to machine weight ratio of any relatively recent machine
I've seen.

About three weeks into the job I rescued from the skip at work a Dell
PowerEdge XL 5133. It's a 4x133 Pentium box with 256 megs of ram, a Seagate
4 tape DDS-2 autoloader, a Mylex DAC960 raid controller with 16mb battery
backed cache, and a six slot hot swap backplane filled with 9.3 gig
cheetahs. Along with it I got a Dell Scalable Disk System 100 with three
more 9.3gig cheetahs, (its an 8 slot array) and dual powersupplys.

The PE is an interesting design with the PROCS and RAM mounted on 4 Mezz
boards (two for procs two for ram with 16 72 pin slots each). Apparently the
system was available with 2 or 4 procs, and the second RAM mezz board was
optional. I've only got 1 of the RAM mezz boards but it's completely full of
16 meggers. The max per slot is 64 megs, and the bios supports up to 2 gigs
ram.

So at the moment I'm hoping to find a RAM Mezz board and 32x64 meg 72 pin
parity modules very very cheaply. I'm thinking the board will be a lot
harder to get than the RAM.

The biggest problem I'm having with the system right now is that for some
reason I cant get any Linux distro to install on it because the DAC960
drivers fail to load. I've tried redhat, mandrake, gentoo, and caldera with
no luck. They all fail whenever they try to init the DAC 960 drivers with a
failure to load module message. I've updated the firmware on the board
itself, the cache battery is good, and I've gone through the configs and
container creation and all is well. NT installs on the thing just fine so I
know its functioning. Next I'm going to try Suse and Debian. If those don't
work then I'm going to try a BSD distro. After that, who knows. I'm
definitely not going to use NT on it if I don't have to.

If anyone knows of any init parameters or whatnot that I may need to use let
me know.

Also I know absolutely  nothing about the SDS100 array. If anyone has info
or docs I'd love a hint.

And of course the final issue is, what to do with it. At the moment I'm
thinking load up the HDD slots (and the external array) with some cheap 18
or 36 giggers, max out the RAM and I've got a real nice NAS box. The procs
themselves are a bit slow for real work, but with four of them some of the
well threaded things might be a good fit as well.

Chris Byrne
==================================
The eyes may be the windows on the soul
But the word is the doorway to the mind
==================================