Neat Older Hardware

Ever since I saw the massive 8U Netfinity 7600 I knew I wanted my own. Now that they are getting much older one can pick one up for next to nothing on the used market.


I located a local Netfinity 7600 and and decided to buy one. Here is a photo of "darthfinity" mounted in my Sun rack. My Netfinity 7600 is a dual PIII xenon's with 2.5gb ram and 8 drives in a raid 5 on a ServRaid 4L controller running Debian 4.0.

I tend to gravitate more towards Redhat for my machines but was really impressed with how easily Debian installed and configured. It's certainly an improvement over my last Debian experience and quite honestly a reason to reevaluate my affinity for Redhat.

What is also very interesting is this machine is not really as slow as I was expecting. Debian is quite quick on this machine. If one did not look at the hardware and did not have really CPU intensive applications it would be possible to not even realize you were on an older system.

IBM Management Module CLI Reference Guide

The IBM Blade Center hardware has a rather under documented SSH and Telnet based CLI that offers the same level of control that the web based interface allows.

While I was working at IBM I ran into many scenarios where a remote administrator did not have access to a system on port 80 for the web interface or the web server within the management module failed to respond. I wrote a document providing some examples of the commands one might use to administer the blade center via the CLI. The existing guide written by IBM provides the same information in a less hands on way. You can download the guide I wrote here.

Here is a simple example where we would give blade 1 control of the media tray and set the boot sequence of blade 1 to the cdrom and then power on the blade.

mt -b 1
bootseq cd -T system:blade[1]
power -on -T system:blade[1]

Solaris 10 Zones Survival Guide

Since I was dealing with so many more machines at work with Solaris Zones I decided to setup a zone lab on my home Enterprise 450 so that I could be a bit more invasive in working with them and do things that I would never do on a production system (destructive testing is a lot more fun too!). In setting up this lab I wrote this white paper for some of the other Administrators at work.

Not only are the command line tools really simple and work really well the Zone's themselves take very little in the area of CPU and memory resources when they are not in use. In addition the disk resources are shared with that of the host system so you can move through the zone's file system from within the global zone without having to mount a disk image like one has to do with Vmware ESX.