On Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 11:24:14PM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: > I've warned you about a lot of them, you ignored that, but for some reason > I feel obligated to try one more time. I just hate to see people do things > like this to themselves (and I want to be able to say, "No, not interested > in helping on this" in clear conscience).
Thanks Nick, I didn't ignore it, but you weren't this specific. > > For that kinda money, they better be delivering it...and helping you get > it on the rack. > Yeah. I know. > Old Compaqs are an art. Old Compaq servers are a black art. They are > some of the quirkiest, strangest, and most obnoxious systems I've worked > with. Kinda like a Cisco switch, in that once you get the dang thing > running the way you want, you feel so great because the pain stopped, so > you tend to forget it just shouldn't have been that way. > > I've yet to see a multi-Pentium and only one Multi-PPro machine run > OpenBSD/SMP. (score is at least two Pentiums and two PPros that didn't > work with SMP), > I know that there's no SMP. > I suspect our EISA support has suffered severe bit rot. Between the > system and the bus, I'd be rather surprised if you got the thing running > OpenBSD (pleasantly surprised, yes, but surprised). If you do, please > post dmesg. :) I just looked through the dmesg log, I saw no Pentium > class EISA machines that people sent dmesgs from. I saw a few PPro > systems, one PPro running GENERIC.MP, several Alphas and HPPA systems. > I haven't investigated EISA. These boxes are supposed to be a combination of PCI and EISA. I would be using the PCI slots. However, I suppose that some things internally would be on the EISA bus (e.g. keyboard, floppy drive). > The CMOS battery is dead (or will be soon). It isn't going to be easy > to replace. See the SPARC Battery FAQ and the part about cutting into > the old CMOS chip to solder in your own battery (it works, done it on a > SS2 and a mvme88k, worked. I also seem to have toasted another mvme88k > doing the same thing, but I didn't pay $300 for that machine. BTW: > I'm way out of practice, but I'm still much better than your average > $5 soldering iron novice, I used to do component-level repair on > computers and other such things. I got good equipment and I sorta know > what I'm doing...and I still managed to break the CPU board on the > mvme88k. > The service manual for these boxes has a section on adding an external battery and there's supposed to be a socket/pin-pair on the motherboard to accept the batttery. Presumably (hopefully??) a lithium button battery of the same number of cells as the orgional should fit. But that is a lot of "shoulds" and "hopefullys" for a non-free box. > EISA isn't fun when it works properly. I've probably config'd more EISA > machines than most people on this list, trust me, it's not fun. If you > have never done it before, the time to learn was back in the 1980s, not > now. WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS, Compaqs were some of the easiest to configure, > but finding the right tools was exciting last time I tried. When it > DOESN'T work properly...ew. > Is it worse than ISA? Have that on my 486 with no PCI on which to fall-back. > No disks...you better hope they include the Compaq config utilities on a > CD so you can install 'em and configure the thing. I've done it from > floppies, Not Fun. I screwed up the disk config, reinstalled. More Not > Fun. I think I did this three or four times. I did learn disk OpenBSD > disk configuration Really Well, so I guess it was a good, not fun thing. > > Hope they include disk trays. There are a lot of old servers laying > around, there are a lot of old disk trays. The servers and disk trays > are rarely in the same place. No idea how that happens. There are > several variations of Compaq disk trays, not sure how cross compatible > they are. (68 pin drives, 80 pin (SCA) drives, 1" drives, 1.6" drives). > That is an open question which would have to be solved prior to purchase. > Did I mention that Compaqs config the disk array using the utility > partition or the utility CD? I have a stack of cac(4) cards. Spent a > day or so building an array on a Windows machine, moved it to the > target machine, and then discovered that cac(4)s are really, really slow. > BTW: don't think that because you use SCSI, you don't have to worry about > disk size. Expecting to build a 1TB disk array on a 15 year old > controller may expose some "issues." > I found the config utilities on the website. I don't yet know re "issues". I wasn't planning a 1 TB array, more like 300 GB or so. > <speculation> > Old cac's have some kind of battery on them, they look like large lithium > cells. They don't really look like rechargeable. Even if they are, > they are so old, they are probably dead on yours (and mine). That may > be why my cac(4) experience was so uninspiring, or it may just mean the > things will toast your file systems when the power goes out unexpectedly. > </speculation> > Anoter battery to replace. > Read, memorize, live by: > http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#cpq16m > "some" most likely includes you. > I just re-read it. I've had that on some old boxes on Debian where you have to specify ram size on the kernel command line. > Three words: "Power Hungry Pig". > Yeah. > > Bringing up an old workstation is usually just a matter of taking your > PC skills and remembering a little history. Bringing up an old server > is a test of patience. Bringing up an old Compaq is a little like > restoring a rusty old car, 'cept none of the neighbors walk by and say, > "wow, that's cool". > I hear you. > One of my favorite dis-features of the Compaq servers of around that > era was a case interlock: remove the cover and the thing would save > itself from...what, eventually overheating and maybe crashing?...by > immediately turning itself off. (I discovered this disfeature at a > client's site -- I was sent in to do a server upgrade. Never seen > the system before, had zero trust that they had sent me with the > right parts. So, about 15 minutes before scheduled "get out of the > system" time, I started gently sliding the cover off the machine, so > that if something was clearly not right, we could cancel with minimal > impact on the users. I missed the big, bright blue(?) warning sticker. > "Click" and silence, followed by me saying, "oh shit", thinking of > all those people working frantically to get their work done before > the shutdown time...) HOWEVER, in your case, you might actually > prefer that it does shut itself off if you break the RF shielding. :) > > > If you really want to go that route, look at what the machines are > SELLING for on e-bay, not what people are asking for them. BIG > difference. Offer $50 to the person asking $300 for the machine, > you will probably get a "no way in hell", and the machine a couple > weeks later. :) > > Nick. > Thanks Nick. Doug.
