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My barn-find IBM mini

KC9UDX

KC9UDX

Space Commander
Joined
Jan 27, 2014
Messages
7,468
Location
Lutenblag
I didn't find it in a barn, but when I got it over a decade ago you'd sure think so.

I completely disassembled it, deemed it not worth cleaning, and put it away in storage.

Yesterday I unearthed it and went about reassembling. A few things are missing.

It's an IBM 8650. It has sockets for two processor cards and one memory card. It has a slew of expansion slots and twelve hard drive bays. It originally had four Pentium Pro microprocessors, but I could only find three and only two heat sinks. So I put in two processors, and one empty processor card, since I don't have a bus terminator. I could only find a bank and a half of RAM, so I only installed one (500Mb).

There are six identical drives which I assume used to be a RAID array. One is dead. There are a bunch of mismatched drives, and I installed as many as I could; I only have eight drive caddies.

I'm currently trying to install NetBSD, but I think I have a bum CD-ROM drive.

I don't have (and don't really want to acquire) a network card, or any other peripherals. It has two inbuilt RS-232 ports, a VGA output, and PS/2 style keyboard and mouse ports.

I don't think this belongs in any of the main forums here because it's hardly 'vintage'. But it isn't exactly current technology.

Does this sort of thing interest anyone here? Do you have anything like it? What do you use it for? The previous owner of this one used it for running Amithlon of all things.

I'll post a picture as soon as I am able.
 
I wonder how it compares to a quad-core Raspberry Pi, maybe run some benchmarks to see :)
 
I can't get NetBSD to run on it, therefore it's totally useless.

7.0 crashes during install, 6.1.5 installs but hangs on boot.
 
It should run Windows NT 4 extremely well. You'll never find a modern Linux distro that will properly support it and frankly Linux is trash in general.
Quad chip Pentium Pro servers were generally really uncommon because of how expensive they were. Most people only used dual chip machines. I'd hold onto it and try and get it back up to a quad just for bragging rights.
 
NeXT said:
It should run Windows NT 4 extremely well. You'll never find a modern Linux distro that will properly support it and frankly Linux is trash in general.
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Precisely why I don't use Linux. Incidentally, the previous owner of this one had (or has) another one just like it that does run Linux. This one did too at one point, being that it ran Amithlon.

I can't imagine running Windows. There should be a release of NetBSD that will work. If not, I could try one of the other BSDs or Solaris (which I don't think would work well). Unfortunately, I can't download NetBSD (or any other OS), and buying multiple discs to try out different versions could get expensive.

Quad chip Pentium Pro servers were generally really uncommon because of how expensive they were. Most people only used dual chip machines. I'd hold onto it and try and get it back up to a quad just for bragging rights.
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That's what I was thinking. All I really need is one more Pentium Pro, and two heat sinks that will fit.

The trouble is, if I can't find a use for it, I can't justify the space it takes up. 'specially since there's a PDP on the way that will take up six times the space. :D
 
Chuck(G) said:
NetBSD isn't Linux--and, AFAIK, there's a more or less complete archive of old NetBSD versions.
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Yep. Very true. If I had a "regular" internet connection, I'd have no trouble downloading the lot of the old versions, and no doubt find one old enough to work, recent enough to use.
 
Here's a rather boring picture of it; click on it to see a better size. (I've no idea how to attach a larger picture here).

KIMG0448[1].jpg

I should add that these were marketed as the "PC Server 704". If memory serves, the flagship product of this line was the same machine minus the hard drive bays and with Microchannel. This one has PCI, I think; frankly, I didn't look at that when I had it apart.
 
NeXT said:
You'll never find a modern Linux distro that will properly support it and frankly Linux is trash in general.
Click to expand...

If you ask me, Linux is amazing for the most part. I honestly never had a negative experience, except for when I did something really stupid.
 
Honestly sounds to me like the system might be broken if a "Modern" NetBSD just crashes. Are you attempting to run a kernel with APIC and/or SMP enabled? (It's been so long, do you still need to compile your own kernel to enable options like SMP?)

Clearly you're not a fan but... personally I'd try a vanilla Debian install on it and see if that runs. Counter NeXT's assertion I've generally found the legacy hardware support in Debian to be very solid. Ran fine on the last 1990's vintage PC I installed it on, anyway. (I'd totally say NetBSD is better than Linux for just about anything non-x86 of that age, with the *possible* exception of PowerPC, but i386... I dunno.)
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Honestly sounds to me like the system might be broken if a "Modern" NetBSD just crashes. Are you attempting to run a kernel with APIC and/or SMP enabled? (It's been so long, do you still need to compile your own kernel to enable options like SMP?)
Click to expand...
I've tried with APIC and SMP and without both (it's an installation option). The only option I didn't try was APIC but not SMP. I didn't see the point in trying that one.

What I find odd is that the entire installation works, but after install the bootloader fails immediately (or appears to). I would think the installation bootloader would fail.

Clearly you're not a fan but... personally I'd try a vanilla Debian install on it and see if that runs. Counter NeXT's assertion I've generally found the legacy hardware support in Debian to be very solid. Ran fine on the last 1990's vintage PC I installed it on, anyway. (I'd totally say NetBSD is better than Linux for just about anything non-x86 of that age, with the *possible* exception of PowerPC, but i386... I dunno.)
Click to expand...

I'd be willing to try it except if I have to buy a CD anyway, it's going to be something else.
 
Hrm. So the bootloader appears to blow up before it even loads a kernel? I guess you said this thing doesn't have a network card, of any form? If you had an ethernet port to work with I'd almost suggest trying to boot the thing diskless and seeing if it behaves, maybe the disk controller is the culprit somehow. (You can PXEboot with just about any network card using an appropriate bootdisk and it's pretty easy to set up a suitable root environment on any kind of NFS server.)

(Since this happens to involve an IBM machine I'll mention offhandedly that coincidentally enough a while back I had a really annoying "it would install but wouldn't boot" problem with Linux on a 2007-ish vintage Lenovo machine that I was able to trace to some weirdness in the system's BIOS that made GRUB2 go kaboom when it tried to set up a VESA graphics mode for the boot selector/loader. Seen similar oddities with Thinkpads, actually. IBM and their successors have a track record for doing weird BIOS things, wouldn't surprise me a whole lot if the tradition goes back to their Pentium Pro servers.)
 
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The BIOS in this thing is definitely weird, but it's a weird machine anyway.

It does seem to crash in the bootloader. I get the bootloader message, and then nothing. I do not get the familiar numbers/animation associated with the kernel loading. I'll try to take a video of it tonight.

There are two identical disk controllers, and I have eliminated one being bad already, but that doesn't mean they both don't work with the bootloader. It's entirely possible that the bootloader just won't work with that controller. I regret answering yes to "Do you want to install the latest NetBSD bootloader" during install. I wonder what other bootloader I could use.

*IF* I can get a working OS, and, find a real use for this thing, I may cave and buy a network card for it. Really, there isn't anything I can think of doing with it without one anyway.
 
I looked up the model number and the spec sheet I found said the system had both EISA and PCI slots? I'd offer to send you an old PXE ROMed Intel PCI card from my stash if it wasn't likely there are more local to you sources.
 
Chances are that Linux probably had the best support for odd-ball PC server hardware back in the day. You might try one of the earlier Centos (Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone) distributions, maybe Centos 3 or Centos 4 ( https://wiki.centos.org/Download or even 2.1: http://vault.centos.org/2.1/final/isos/ )

From your description, the NetBSD distribution is able to find the system hardware, initialize it, then load the OS. It's the OS bootloader installed on the system that is failing.

Is there a recovery mode in NetBSD to boot the system from the distribution CD, but load the OS installed on the system instead of the one on the CD?

With both EISA and PCI slots with Pentium Pro processors, that's a 1995/1996 or so vintage system. So maybe Red Hat 5.2 or 6.2? http://legacy.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/en/iso/i386/ or http://redhat.lsu.edu/dist/5.2/iso/
 
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Definitely do not try modern Linux distros on this sort of thing. There was a shift when the Debian kernel was reworked and a lot of support was dropped for older devices. For instance, if you've got a device that uses the VIA CPU and chipset (e.g. Esther), all recent Linuces will load up, install the kernel and then die because "no hard disk is available". I keep older distros around for just that reason. NetBSD is somewhat better, but it depends on the platform.
 
I'd guess that this system is based on the old Orion server chipset? I'd be *really* surprised if the kernel maintainers have dropped support for that, as derivatives of it were used in P6-based Xeon systems into the early aughts.

As the... not so proud owner of an HP2133 NetBook I can totally understand why they might have cleaned house on VIA support, the drivers were a mess and the systems weren't exactly hugely popular.
 
You ought to see the mess that legacy floppy support is in with current versions of Linux. I have yet to get it working correctly on X64 Ubuntu.

The attitude seems to be that "if it's old, it's not worth supporting". NetBSD, for example, still has drivers (you have to recompile the kerned, but that's the way it works) for QIC-02 interface tape drives--and it works.
 
On my to-do list for a while has been setting up the closest thing I have to a "tweener", a fat rackmount case with an Abit BP6 dual Celeron motherboard, as a host for a couple 5 1/4" floppy drives to see how capable the might be of creating disks for the TRS-80. I should make a point of getting around to that and see just how broken it is these days. The Abit is based on the *dirt common* 440BX chipset so there should be basically zero hardware excuse for anything not to work. The last ancient machine I set Debian up on was 1996-vintage Pentium 200 lunchbox and everything pretty much worked fine once I got around some hurdles with getting the installer booted up, but that was... four years ago?

Not saying it's excusable or anything but floppy support on x86-64 might be sort of an edge case. One thing that Linux *has* always been bad at compared to NetBSD is ensuring that a given hardware driver works equally well on any CPU or bus architecture that piece of hardware might be connected to. Have you tried booting i386 on the same hardware and seeing if the floppy works? (Again, I'm totally not apologizing for the situation if it does work, it's just... the sort of thing I've seen often enough.)
 
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