[geeks] IBM rant

[Dan Duncan]

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, Bryan Fullerton wrote:
> IBM x86 servers are ass. I'm supporting ~60 low-end IBM x86 servers at
> $WORK, mostly running RHEL.

We have 200-300 of them running RHEL 3-4.  x235, x345, x366.

> We seem to be using IBM because one of our
> execs has a good relationship with them from previous experience which
> was all AIX/POWER - sigh.

Our older systems are mostly Tru64 with a few AIX boxes thrown in.

> Don't get me started about HostRAID.

Luckily we aren't using hostraid.  We disable it immediately and use
the drives separately.  The machines basically load-balance
jobs so they're massively redundant and it's not worth the
extra resources to use RAID on them.

> Or IBM's lights out management card that uses a PCI slot, even in 1U boxes.

We're using the RSA cards so we only have a card in every 24th machine.
The other systems have two connectors where we just daisy-chain them
together from the first RSA card.  We have the BIOS configured to use
the serial port and we're using a decserver (700 or 900 depending on
the site) for the consoles.

-DanD

-- 
#  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
# "Remote neural rape is an act of war.  NSA, Air Farce are the enemies.
# Place the blame where it belongs."  A sign I saw on the way to work 6/19/2000