CentOS - Apr 2014 - Old HP Xeon server blade with only SCSI HDD ports & CentOS

Hi there.

I got myself a pair of old Intel Xeon blades, which I plan to
repurpose with CentOS.
The model is : HP bl20p-g3 server blade

Manual
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12322_ca/12322_ca.pdf

Now, the main problem with this hardware is that LVD UW SCSI HDDs are
hard to find and hella expensive if you find em (and of reduced
capacity).
Any of you know:

1. If there's any third party maker of any daughtercard offering SATA
ports? The main board of the system has daughtercard sockets allowing
for instance SFP ports
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_transceiver
Seems to me that there'd be a small but interesting niche for this
kind of adapter.

2. If it's possible to use BootP for booting off a network drive?
I know there are some UWSCSI to SATA adapter daughtercards but those
sell for $250 which is way over my budget.

So, if you had one of these blades but not any UWSCSI HDDs what would you do?

Thanks in advance for any pointer. This hardware is too good to back
to the dumpster where I got mines from...
FC
-- 
During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act
Durante ?pocas de Enga?o Universal, decir la verdad se convierte en un
Acto Revolucionario
- George Orwell

Hello Fernando,

This drive-technology was replaced 7 years ago and the cpu's are that old as
well.

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.
We had hundreds of these old drives from storages and DMZ-servers with R1, but
because of security agreements they were all shreddered. I am afraid most people
that used a lot of such expensive disks have some "keep your disk"
agreement and destroy them.

You can always boot your system from a stick and mount your root-fs from
storage. That is a standard procedure for many virtualization-setups and
DMZ-proxy/fastcgi.

mit freundlichen Gr??en
Christian Freund
-------------------------------------------
Christian Freund - freund at wrz.de

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] Im
Auftrag von Fernando Cassia
Gesendet: Freitag, 11. April 2014 04:10
An: CentOS mailing list
Betreff: [CentOS] Old HP Xeon server blade with only SCSI HDD ports & CentOS

Hi there.

I got myself a pair of old Intel Xeon blades, which I plan to repurpose with
CentOS.
The model is : HP bl20p-g3 server blade

Manual
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12322_ca/12322_ca.pdf

Now, the main problem with this hardware is that LVD UW SCSI HDDs are hard to
find and hella expensive if you find em (and of reduced capacity).
Any of you know:

1. If there's any third party maker of any daughtercard offering SATA ports?
The main board of the system has daughtercard sockets allowing for instance SFP
ports http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_transceiver
Seems to me that there'd be a small but interesting niche for this kind of
adapter.

2. If it's possible to use BootP for booting off a network drive?
I know there are some UWSCSI to SATA adapter daughtercards but those sell for
$250 which is way over my budget.

So, if you had one of these blades but not any UWSCSI HDDs what would you do?

Thanks in advance for any pointer. This hardware is too good to back to the
dumpster where I got mines from...
FC
--
During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act
Durante ?pocas de Enga?o Universal, decir la verdad se convierte en un Acto
Revolucionario
- George Orwell
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS at centos.org
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Hello Fernando,

This drive-technology was replaced 7 years ago and the cpu's are that old as
well.

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.
We had hundreds of these old drives from storages and DMZ-servers with R1, but
because of security agreements they were all shreddered. I am afraid most people
that used a lot of such expensive disks have some "keep your disk"
agreement and destroy them.

You can always boot your system from a stick and mount your root-fs from
storage. That is a standard procedure for many virtualization-setups and
DMZ-proxy/fastcgi.

mit freundlichen Gr??en
Christian Freund
-------------------------------------------
Christian Freund - freund at wrz.de

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] Im
Auftrag von Fernando Cassia
Gesendet: Freitag, 11. April 2014 04:10
An: CentOS mailing list
Betreff: [CentOS] Old HP Xeon server blade with only SCSI HDD ports & CentOS

Hi there.

I got myself a pair of old Intel Xeon blades, which I plan to repurpose with
CentOS.
The model is : HP bl20p-g3 server blade

Manual
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12322_ca/12322_ca.pdf

Now, the main problem with this hardware is that LVD UW SCSI HDDs are hard to
find and hella expensive if you find em (and of reduced capacity).
Any of you know:

1. If there's any third party maker of any daughtercard offering SATA ports?
The main board of the system has daughtercard sockets allowing for instance SFP
ports http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_transceiver
Seems to me that there'd be a small but interesting niche for this kind of
adapter.

2. If it's possible to use BootP for booting off a network drive?
I know there are some UWSCSI to SATA adapter daughtercards but those sell for
$250 which is way over my budget.

So, if you had one of these blades but not any UWSCSI HDDs what would you do?

Thanks in advance for any pointer. This hardware is too good to back to the
dumpster where I got mines from...
FC
--
During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act
Durante ?pocas de Enga?o Universal, decir la verdad se convierte en un Acto
Revolucionario
- George Orwell
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS at centos.org
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On 04/10/2014 10:10 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> Hi there.
>
> I got myself a pair of old Intel Xeon blades, which I plan to
> repurpose with CentOS.
> The model is : HP bl20p-g3 server blade
>
> Manual
> http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12322_ca/12322_ca.pdf
>
> Now, the main problem with this hardware is that LVD UW SCSI HDDs are
> hard to find and hella expensive if you find em (and of reduced
> capacity).
> ...
Fernando,

That sounds like a cool project.  As has been mentioned by several in 
the thread it's going to be a bit of a challenge to get it running.  If 
the beast has 8 slots, and could draw  a total max of 64A  (yes, I 
rounded up, for a reason!) or so at -48V nominal, then each blade is 
going to draw roughly 8A at -48V (let's round that to -50 for easy 
calculations) or a max of about 400W per blade.  So a 400W telco power 
supply is going to at most run one blade at max draw, and it could 
possibly run two blades with small drives.

Having said that, Ultra320 drives aren't too hard to find, but since 
you're in .AR you might be looking at international shipping.  Now, it 
depends on the exact model of Xeon as to whether 64 bit will work or 
not, and even if it does you're more likely to find that 32-bit runs 
better, and CentOS 5 runs better than 6.  One of my main dev/test server 
boxes is running RHEL 6 32-bit on dual 2.8GHz Xeons of the previous 
generation, and it makes a fine testbed/try-this-out server.  And, yes, 
I do know virtualization of things is the 'Way to Go These Days (TM)'.  
Well, unless you need a parallel port for an offbeat device controller 
for an astronomical instrument (IEEE-1284 CAMAC Crate, anyone?  What 
about a SCSI CAMAC Crate (we have three)).  Or you're doing other things 
where virtualization is simply not the right thing to do.

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.

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!).  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).

Now, if I may rant just a bit.

Not everyone on this list is here for professional reasons.  I am; but 
many are not.  Many people run CentOS because it's just plain fun to run 
it on various and sundry 'cast-off' hardware.  Fernando has been around 
for a while; he's not a newbie.  He has a new (to him) toy, and wants to 
make it work.  Telling him 'that's too old to be useful' is useless.

In my position with this not-for-profit astronomical observatory, I get 
this type of answer way too many times:  'You have a VAXstation 4000/90 
and you need $off_the_wall_software?  Why do you want that old thing?  
You need $insert_computer_flavor_of_the_day and our new 
$super_duper_alley_ooper_ka-ching_product!  Forget that old stuff!' Yes, 
we really do have a runnable VS4000/90 (two of them, in fact), and yes 
it did something important (which is why the software was needed), and 
no it can't be replaced by something newer without 
multiple-tens-of-kilobucks worth of new controls hardware and more than 
that in software development, so can I just get my question answered, 
please?  (Thankfully, we are building something newer thanks to 
crowdfunding, but it's not yet operational).  (And just in case you 
think you might have that part, no, you don't, unless you had access to 
internal development information at a particular CAMAC Crate vendor who 
never supported SCSI CAMAC on VMS later than 5.2, and we needed to at 
least try to upgrade to OpenVMS 7.3 on VAX or maybe even OpenVMS 8 on 
Alpha (too much critical (and time-tested, certified) Fortran code to go 
to anything other than VMS)).

Sorry for the rant.

On 04/12/2014 10:46 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> Now, if I may rant just a bit.
>
> ...
> Sorry for the rant.
>
And even more sorry that I didn't make it clear that the rant was 
directed at no-one in particular, but just out there on the list, and 
definitely not directed at Fernando.

On 04/14/2014 08:02 AM, mark wrote:
> We've got servers that are 5+ years old, including a 
> once-supercomputer from SGI that's from, I think, '03. And if
*anyone*
> thinks we need to get rid of it, they can contact me offlist, to 
> arrange, from their pocket, a donation to the civilian sector of the 
> US federal gov't..... 
Heh, SGI Altix..... Got two, formerly used for weather modelling.  I 
have successfully rebuilt up to CentOS 5.9 (I haven't been able to 
justify the work yet to get to 5.10, but over the summer perhaps) on our 
30-CPU SGI Altix 350 system, and it's running on a small 4 CPU Altix 
3700 (we have another 3700 with 20 CPU's, but it has a hardware issue 
somewhere).  RH support IA-64 in RHEL 5, so if you have an RH contract 
you can run straight RHEL5 on it.

My newest servers are by most standards fairly old these days; a pair of 
Dell PE 6950's and a scattering of PE 1950's.  But they're solid,
and
they do the job.