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My barn-find IBM mini

The crazy thing is that the x64 system in question is a recent quad-core Asrock AM3+ board. Not obsolete by any means. I've tried it on a couple of other 64-bit mobos with the same results.
 
Not that there's much to see, but here's the video of the machine failing to bootstrap NetBSD 6.1.5:


And, apparently I have a dead (but unused anyway) hard drive..
 
Do you have the EISA configuration utilities? ISTR that these beasts had a bunch of IBM-sourced firmware.

What happens if you cut back to a single SCSI drive and try to boot MS-DOS, or NT 3.51 Server?
 
Chuck(G) said:
Do you have the EISA configuration utilities?
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No.
ISTR that these beasts had a bunch of IBM-sourced firmware.
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That's my impression, too.

What happens if you cut back to a single SCSI drive and try to boot MS-DOS, or NT 3.51 Server?
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I may have an MS-DOS 5.00 disk somewhere, but that may require some digging, and I don't think the floppy drive in this thing works. I also may have a copy of Windows NT Server on CD, but that may be even more digging..

I did find a working IDE CD-ROM. The first one I tried (I'm pretty astounded that I own one let alone two) would give read errors.
 
I took advantage of a free WiFi location and downloaded NetBSD 5.1.3.

It installed and booted flawlessly.

Now I just have to think of a use for this thing.
 
It's pretty warm. It's nearly forty Fahrenheit.

In all honesty, this heat wave is ruining my Saturday. I intend to go skiing with my daughter. If we don't get some snow today and some cold tomorrow, conditions will be awful.

Anyway, if I need heat in the basement, half a dozen switches turn on well over a hundred electron tube filaments. :)

As for the server, I've had three hard drives give up the ghost in two days. If I'm going to use it for something, I'm going to need some serious redundancy, and a way to connect some tape drives.

I can find legitimate uses for a PET 2001, but not something with two to four processors and two ultra wide SCSI buses. Ten years ago it would have made a nice file server and Screamernet node. Today, I can't justify turning it on just to do that.
 
KC9UDX said:
I can find legitimate uses for a PET 2001, but not something with two to four processors and two ultra wide SCSI buses. Ten years ago it would have made a nice file server and Screamernet node. Today, I can't justify turning it on just to do that.
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A couple Xmases ago I bought a laptop from Dell; at the time they were running a promo where you could get one of their Atom-based tablets practically for free with a computer purchase so I bit. When I took it out of the box I had to admit I was pretty blown away at how that little thing that weighs well under a pound and runs for a good 6 hours on a tiny battery had almost exactly the same RAM, storage, and CPU specs as the Microsoft Exchange 2000 server I was admin-ing back in 2002. (Well, okay, the CPU is probably significantly faster than the dual PIII Xeons were.) Sort of put the value proposition of using an old giant big-iron server for anything at home in perspective, I guess.
 
-5ºF! If only we had more snow.

It's almost a sincere winter. Sure beats the wishy-washy weather we've had for the most part the past twelve months.
 
As long as the roads are clear, I don't mind the cold weather. I hate low blowing, drifting snow and deep, heavy slushy stuff. There has been a couple of occasions in the last couple of winters where the road I live on drifted shut, or the county wasn't going to run the plow trucks until the storm was over.
 
I wish it was like that here. I like driving down roads like that.

It used to get that way here once in a while, but the last couple decades they not only plow, but salt the )BLEEP( out of the roads.:mad: The only place that doesn't get plowed is my driveway.

It's -4ºF right now, with 25+MPH sustained wind. I'm in a part of my house where there are no leaks and it's usually very warm, but there's a distinct cool breeze coming from the exterior walls. In places where it's normally colder, I expect they have a lot of snow up against the houses for insulation!
 
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5.1.3 works, I'm going to try 6.0 soon.

Also, I found a working 10baseT PCI ethernet card.
 
I got NetBSD 6.0.6 installed and working. I am posting this on it, with the Links browser.

Unfortunately, I have to use the local terminal (VGA / PS2 keyboard) to use this browser because apparently I have my terminal type set wrong. My VT100 compliant serial terminal displays garbage when I run Links.
 
My terminal settings are correct. I cannot make a VT-220 compliant terminal set as a VT-220 terminal work either. For some reason, Links overrides the terminal settings, and I have no idea what type of terminal it is expecting. Nor will any of the terminal emulations I can use on my serial terminal work.

It stinks, because Links works well, and frankly, this forum is more fun to use in text mode.

I wonder if there are any other text browsers I can use. I don't think Lynx will work. Of course, I wouldn't really know; I haven't tried using it in a very, very long time.
 
KC9UDX said:
My terminal settings are correct. I cannot make a VT-220 compliant terminal set as a VT-220 terminal work either. For some reason, Links overrides the terminal settings, and I have no idea what type of terminal it is expecting. Nor will any of the terminal emulations I can use on my serial terminal work.

It stinks, because Links works well, and frankly, this forum is more fun to use in text mode.

I wonder if there are any other text browsers I can use. I don't think Lynx will work. Of course, I wouldn't really know; I haven't tried using it in a very, very long time.
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Have you tried running Links inside GNU Screen? Some applications like the emulation layer that Screen provides, and you'd also gain virtual terminal support on your hardware terminal (any terminal session, really).
 
HoJoPo said:
Have you tried running Links inside GNU Screen? Some applications like the emulation layer that Screen provides, and you'd also gain virtual terminal support on your hardware terminal (any terminal session, really).
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Identical results.

I wonder if I have a bum terminal. It acts as though it's losing bits on receive. But, I can send text to it as fast as I can from the command line and it doesn't skip a beat. So maybe it's responding incorrectly to some control character.
 
It turns out to be a serial handshaking problem. I dropped the console speed to 9600bps and it works just fine.

In fact, I am typing this on the serial console right now.

KIMG0507.jpg

Either Links does something to the handshaking (how?? why??) or it's just a coincidence that I never ran into a problem before, and my handshaking settings are incorrect anyway.

It's too bad this thing is such a power hog. I sure could get used to using it. I'd probably have to add a boatload of serial ports though. I'll have to see if I can determine how much power it uses; but it must be a lot. Although, it's probably not as much as my A3000 used to draw, and I left that on for years.
 
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