Speaking of raising money ...

[unixronin]

...anyone need any DEC hardware?  I have three Digital Alphaservers here that we can't spare the power to run and don't have any OS media for right now anyway (one fully-loaded 4100, one fairly-stripped 4100, and one semi-stripped 2100), plus more DEC StorageWorks arrays, controllers and rackmount kits than you can shake a stick at.  (There's, like, 10 disk arrays and 8 SCSI RAID controllers.)  Any or all of'em can be yours for a song, and the truth is, if we can't find anyone who wants the stuff, most of it (at least the two stripped Alpha Servers) will probably end up being scrapped.

(I might still try to load the "good" 4100 up as far as I possibly can with the available parts and see if I can get it running, but not until we're somewhere with better power than here.)

Comments

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

what are the specs/details on the storage arrays?
might be interested in one

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not too clear on the full specs myself. They're DEC Storageworks BA350-SB arrays, eight bays per unit, can take six narrow-SCSI disks (in proprietary DEC canisters) and two power supplies, or seven and one. Currently all the disk cans I have are RZ29-B units with 4.3G Seagate Barracudas in'em (well, actually, I just found one RZ40-VA with a 9.1GB Quantum Atlas II in it, but I'm cannibalizing that for use in our Franken-G3 Power Mac). I don't know for certain if the individual boxes are JBOD or appear on the bus as a single SCSI device with multiple LUNs. The BA350-MA controller boxes that go with them are the same physical size as the disk chasses, and hold two SCSI RAID controller cards and two cache/battery cards. One controller box appears to be able to drive up to six arrays, but keep in mind I don't have actual documentation for any of this, I'm just going by what I can infer directly from the hardware.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sounds better if I just stick with the IBM enclosure + IBM ServeRAID I picked up a while ago. Not chainable, but I don't have that much power anyway, my SGI's are drawing too much.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

What's in the loaded 4100? How much RAM? How many CPUs? Which CPUs? How fast are they clocked?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It's not as maxed-out as it could be by a long way, but it's not bad. It has 1.5GB RAM, two EV5 300MHz/2MB CPUs, one power supply, and the entire PCI card cage is full, containing the following cards, all 32-bit PCI:
1 Digital DE500 10/100 Ethernet adapter
1 Digital DEFPA FDDI adapter
1 Digital DEFPA dual FDDI adapter
1 Digital wide SCSI adapter, 50-24738-01, QLogic
2 Digital Wide SCSI RAID controller, 54-22494-01?, Symbios/i960
2 Digital memory channel adapter, 54-23663-01
I don't have the 100-pin memory channel cables, but I think I have everything else.

[iphy.livejournal.com]

The OS issue is not one. If you're interested in trying to get linux installed on one, ping me for rth's email address. Both he and the SubG have done it recently.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, AlphaLinux would be easy to get hold of. (Well, relatively.... I'm not actually sure which current distros support Alpha.) But if I'm going to bring up one of the Alphaservers, the obvious thing to do would be to put Tru64 on it under the hobbyist license and get another OS under my belt.