Chinese scum... (Why i would want to buy PVC-coated cables?)
WE NEED MORE MODS! Mod elections now!!! ;D
==============back to topic....
Once in a life, you have the opportunity to do something that you never thinked to do. This time: taking apart an AS/400!
Our university was doing spring cleanup (actually, decomissioning assets and sending them to a
dumpster warehouse for the next 50 years), and this thing just surfaced:
Closer...
Yep, it's an old IBM Application Server 400, an AS/400e (now known as p-Series). This "refrigerator"-shaped box was from early 1999, and was gathering dust in one of the computer labs. The original plan was to put it back on service, but someone from the labs told us that this server was fried ("burnt IC boards"), and it was going direct to a warehouse for... ever (or until the warehouse gets destroyed by a fire/quake/nuke).
"What!? No AS/400 to play? A warehouse for the next five centuries? You must be kidding!" No luck... so we decided to apply plan Z: scavenge the thing for good parts.
No screwdrivers near us means that we needed to be creative. Behold us,
the "Lil' Jacker Poorman' Flathead Screwdriver(tm)(pat.pend)"! (banana shown for size reference)
(also works as a gun, a swiss knife AND, maybe, as a expansion slot cover plate)
- First, the RAM: a drawer with 16 slots, 8 of them with placeholders, and LOTS of dust:
I don't know what format of DIMM was that (longer than a normal DIMM). Also i got a ECC module from another board, that one looks like a standard 168-pin DIMM.
- Now, the RAID: 5 IBM DGHS-9LP-series SCSI SE drives (68-pin connectors, 9.1GB, 7200RPM, 1MB of cache, made in late 98/early 99), all of them in custom mounting brackets for hotswapping (with custom SCA sockets mounted in flex cables)
We will rewiew those drives later...
Now, onto the expansion cards!
- PPC processor card (?) in a custom slot (looks like NuBus cards, but with lots and lots of extra pins)
- PCI SCSI RAID card: also PPC-powered!
I don't know why the backup battery, but it also has a battery-back'd SIMM! This is is without a doubt the weirdest SIMM that i have ever seen:
- Extracted cards so far (there were also two PCI NICs, a serial port card with high-density conenctors, a single-port PCI SCSI HBA, and a video/chipset (?) board)...
Oh, that cable is a round SCSI cable with a sexy black sleeve...
This server also contained a PC-like board with a Socket-8 Pentium Pro (and yes, this is the first time that i see one, and i also confused it as the main CPU, but AS/400 are PPC, not x86)
Back to home, i've
jacked rescued from their doom, the two NICs (two AMD PCnet FAST+), the single-port SCSI adapter (a LSI Logic something, made in Hong Kong), and one of the HDs from the RAID. Now, let's have some fun with that hardware on Saki.... (insert evil laugh here)
- Relax, Saki, this will hurt only a bit
Unfortunately, the SCSI card caused the boot HD (a 8GB Samsung SV0842A) to make weird noises (!?!?!?) and to throw a lot of DMA errors. Plus, Linux was veeeeeeeeeeery sluggish to boot (and it even froze!). Either the card was fried (although it appeared on the BIOS), or this PCCRAP board don't like it...
- One of the two PCnet cards (Linux driver: pcnet32):
- The two current NICs on Saki: a Netgear FA-310TX (DECchip Tulip-based chipset built by LiteOn, Linux driver: tulip), and an el-cheapo no-name Realtek 8029A 10mbit card (NE2000 PCI clone, Linux driver: ne2k-pci):
Since both PCnet NICs were OK, i decided to keep'em mounted inside Saki, and after a kernel rebuild and some udev rules tweaking, the cards were in service: the performance is 5% better, but at the cost of high CPU loads on heavy network loads (because of the Linux pcnet32 driver wasting time on service interrupts and such crap). Anyway, they're working fine.
- HQ SCSI drives + PCCRAP boards = DOOM?
And here is our AS/400, totally naked and dead...
(unfortunately, we were unable to remove that SCSI CDROM drive... Too bad, because it looked so sexy with that black front and blue button
)
Well, here ends the guided visit to the inner depth of an AS/400 server box. Remember, the next time that you see a dead server of this kind, don't be afraid, and take it apart! You may never have another opportunity in your life!
BONUS SHOTS!- Want a old monitor? 1GB hard drives? AT skeleton cases? Foam inserts? Too bad that you were not here
- Having fun with PLCs on the lab:
