IBM
unscrew the IBM U320 disks screw, and connect it to simple u320 controller
I have two unused U320 SCSI drives from IBM (73GB 15 000 rpm), and would like to use it in server which does not supply the hot swap IBM U320 scsi 80 pin backplane. What is more, I have a controler which has just 68 pin u320 plug. If you have a problem how to connect hot swap drive into standard 68 pin u320 scsi this is the solution:
First: buy the adapter like this:
Connect one side to power plug and 68pin cable, and the disk to another side, and that’s all, your drive should be seen by your contoller.
Next thing is to uscrew this strange screws! To do this you will need a T10 TORX with a hole iside of it - that is all!
problem with brocade4Gb web tools
I have some problem with starting a Web Tools from Brocade 4Gb SAN Switch Module (for IBM BladeCenter). Every time i tried to start, I got a message:
Initializing switch details …
This problem can be overcome by change the regional settings for the operating system to English and re-load Web Tools. Other supported language are: English, Brazilian, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese or Spanish. Enjoy!
Unknown blade type
In IBM BladeCenter management module (MM) I found imposible to power on the blades, WHY?
The info was like this:
Unknown blade type. Blade 1 is not ready for management.
The answer is that I have 8853 TYPE Blade Servers and rather old MM firmware
DS3200 performance tests #1
today I made some tests at DS3200, I’m fully dissapointed of it’s power, but maybe I do sth wrong? Take a look:
# mount |grep reiser
/dev/sde1 on /tmp/test type reiserfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
/dev/sdf1 on /tmp/test2 type reiserfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
/dev/sdg1 on /tmp/test3 type reiserfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime)
everything connected from dual controller IBM DS3200 (SAS), with SATA 750GB disks.
/dev/sde1 is raid0 at 4 disks
/dev/sdf1 is raid10 at 4 disks
/dev/sdg1 is raid5 at 4 disks
and the tests:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test/pliczek count=5000 bs=1M 5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, 66.6999 s, 78.6 MB/s
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test2/pliczek count=5000 bs=1M
5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, 191.962 s, 27.3 MB/s
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test3/pliczek count=5000 bs=1M
5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, 130.41 s, 40.2 MB/s
raid5 looks better than raid10?????
now read tests:
# dd if=/tmp/test/pliczek of=/dev/null count=5000 bs=1M
5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, 21.179 s, 248 MB/s
# dd if=/tmp/test2/pliczek of=/dev/null count=5000 bs=1M
5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, 33.007 s, 159 MB/s
# dd if=/tmp/test3/pliczek of=/dev/null count=5000 bs=1M
5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, 22.7079 s, 231 MB/s
why raid10 is much slower than raid5?
raid 10 at DS3200,3300,3400
In every marketing documentation I can find, that IBM TotalStorage DS3xxx series support RAID10. But reality is not always such nice as the marketing shit. The official ds3200 documenation says that It can do raid 10. Because as you can see below it is not listed:
I tried to do two raid 1 arrays and make a raid 0 from them, but it is imposible… So i have to read and search a lot of IBM Redbooks, and finaly find that:
When RAID level 1 is implemented and the number of drives increases to more than two, RAID level 10 is automatically implemented.
Very good news 
and it really works:
x3650 pci device resource allocation failure
After plug in the two SAS controllers and RSAII into the IBM SystemX x3650, I would like to set them up. The startup combination was ctrl+c while initialization process of SAS HBA Controller (LSI), and it should make the controller BIOS to appear, but I got for 3 seconds alert:
00180106 10000058 pci device resource allocation failure
then I got:
Please wait, invoking SAS configuration Utility…
I waited about 50 minutes (I went for my lunchtime), and after that - I was sure, that something was wrong!
Google… hmmm forward me to developerworks and this linked to IBM MIGR-65754, answer is not clear:
If an “1801 PCI resource error” occurs, disable “PCI ROM Control Execution” for the second controller. This will free enough ROM space for both controllers to run properly.
Disabling this option is done within system BIOS setup.
After the system is powered on, press F1 when prompted.
Select the following menu choices:
* Advanced Setup
* PCI Settings
* PCI ROM Control ExecutionWithin the “PCI ROM Control Execution” Panel, select the slot number for the secondary controller and disable that slot.
Save the new BIOS settings and restart the server.
First reboot - no difference, second boot, no diference (note that this system reboot last about 10 minutes!), after leaving just one PCI ROM Slot active, everything worked well. But, after installing the OS i noticed that my network interfaces work but with no communication. The reason was that i turned off too much :). Ethernet card has it’s own ROM and it has to be activated.
So what is the reason of this state:
When two or more of the affected controllers are installed, the BIOS for each controller will be allocated system ROM space for execution with default system BIOS settings. It is only necessary for the first controller to load its BIOS into ROM space. This single instance of the respective controllers BIOS will manage both adapters of the same type. By disabling “PCI ROM Control Execution” in the system BIOS for the second controller, less ROM space is used and avoids the BIOS POST event “1801 PCI Resource Allocation Errors” when launching the WebBIOS Configuration Utility.
Various onboard devices and adapter cards can have special option BIOS enabled. During system boot, these device will occupy the system option ROM space. The option ROM space is limited to 128K and if too many devices have their BIOS enabled, then there will not be enough room for all of them. For example the iSCSI TOE adapter needs 46K of the option ROM space during boot (of the adapter) and 10K once the adapter is running. Other devices that may occupy the option ROM space in this configuration are ethernet adapters (including the two onboard NICs) with PXE boot enable, system video and the SCSI hard drives.
new toys arrived :)
Today I got some toys to configure… some of this is a really cool (sometimes just expensive 
) stuff, some photos
IBM DS3400 (dual fibre channel) with twelve 750GB dualport sata drives
Back of DS3400, as we can see - two FC ports (per controller), management port, and drive expansion… at the bottom - redundant power supply
DS3400 controloller (one of dwo) with 512MB cache, work in active-active mode
HS21 blade memory… two 2GB modules and two 1GB modules… looks nice in pairs
Qlogic fibre channel expansion card for IBM blade
Feel out of memory?…
… or maybe out of power?
can I mix a chipkill and non-chipkill
Totday my client asked me about mixing memory with chipkill and non-chipkill in the IBM System X 3650. First, you have to know, what is chipkill:
In computer memory systems, Chipkill is IBM’s trademark for a form of advanced Error Checking and Correcting (ECC) computer memory technology that protects computer memory systems from any single memory chip failure as well as multi-bit errors from any portion of a single memory chip. It performs this function by scattering the bits of an ECC word across multiple memory chips, such that the failure of any one memory chip will affect only one ECC bit. This allows memory contents to be reconstructed despite the complete failure of one chip. The equivalent system from Sun Microsystems is called Extended ECC. The equivalent system from HP is called Chipspare.
Chipkill is frequently combined with dynamic bit-steering, so that if a chip fails (or has exceeded a threshold of bit errors), another, spare, memory chip is used to replace the failed chip. The concept is similar to that of RAID, which protects against disk failure, except that now the concept is applied to individual memory chips. The technology was developed by the IBM Corporation in the early and middle 1990s. An important RAS feature, Chipkill technology is deployed primarily on SSDs, mainframes and midrange Unix or Linux servers.
I looked up in IBM doc’s and the answer is (referfing to: IBM SystemX x3655 sales guide):
If Chipkill-enabled and non-Chipkill memory is used in the same system, Chipkill protection is disabled for all DIMMs.
I’m a member of IBM technical expert community :)
Huh… I have just opened my mailbox (yes yes this normal one - with paper letters ), and I finally got my paper version of the IBM System Connect certificate
You can find the scans below…
RSA II, funny thing
Today I tried to solve the problem with RSA II card (sometimes it does not show anything), and I find sth like that on IBM Support site:
Symptom:
When a user logs in remotely to the IBM Remote Supervisor Adapter (RSA) Web interface and launches the remote control option, an applet window will open but no graphics will be displayed on the window. There may be repeated attempts to launch remote control (graphics), but no video data will be displayed.
Solution (the “funny” one):
It is assumed that the RSA and the server were restarted (i.e. rebooted) in order to resolve this issue, but the problem still persists. To resolve this issue, power must be removed from the RSA. This usually requires removing power to the entire system (i.e. unplugging the box). Wait about 20 seconds, then restore power to the system and restart it. This will clear the issue discussed above.
Sorry, but it smells like windows, and “what if windows were a car”:
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
I think that power off and power on (ohhh sorrry, not only power on and power off, just pull off the cables!!!) - is no solution (notice that RSA card is used only if the operating system does not response - so for me it is critical situation, and usually if you have no phisical access to the server) . I writed and e-mail to the IBM support, to fully solve the problem.