What is going on here?
Stories From Beyond the ZX6000 Workstation!
This log will describe my experiences with the HP ZX6000 Itanium 2 Workstation running GNU/Linux and OpenVMS. Why stories from beyond? Because HP discontinued its Itanium workstations during 2004, so it is very dead, but they live on due to hobbyist like myself!
System Specifications:
- 2 x Itanium 2 (IA-64) Madison Processors clocked at 1500 MHz (1.5 GHz)
- 4043 MB (~ 4 GB) of System Memory (RAM)
- 2 x 36.4 GB Ultra320 SCSI Disks (using 2 of the 3 bays)
- Had a Nvidia Quadro4 980 XGL, now swaped out for the ATI 7500 Series video cards (for OpenVMS)
- Northbrige Bus Speed:
- Southbrige Bus Speed:
- More to the list?
20-MAR-2009
Well I found out that I need to update the firmware because <= 2.6.8 series of the GNU/Linux kernel wasn't supported by the very old 2.21 firmware (it was from 2002). In order to reslove this problem, I needed to reflash the System ROM to the current (from 2004) 2.31 verison.
EFI Reflash HOWTO
From the EFI Shell:
- Take downloaded *.efi file and copy it over to a vfat USB disk.
- Take USB disk and connect it to the workstation and reboot.
- Boot to the EFI shell and you should get a Shell> prompt.
- Assume the USB disk is fs0, you can find this out by the output above the prompt, listing all disks and type. Look for the one with usb in the long string for location.
- Type `fs0:' to change to that device, once there, type `ls' to list the current directory.
- Type in `PF_CPEAKSYS0231.efi', to call the update program, follow the directions... machine will reboot with new firmware within 5-7 mins.
- Done!
From then on, I could then install Debian with out any problems! Yay! (-:
19-MAR-2009
Machine was shipped from California (took about a week, waiting was the hardest part) bought off of eBay for 375 USD (what a steal! At least I thought so). It was everything that was described on eBay and started right up. Comming from the x86 world, with BIOSs -- which now seem very primative, the world of EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) was quite new to me. Kinda slow compaired to a x86 BIOS, but the power behind it is far greater than any BIOS I've seen. This was pre-loaded with HP-UX (I forget what verison) which started up with no problems at all. Connected it up to a UART console and played with it a bit, but I was really all ready to start installing Debian GNU/Linux or Gentoo. I downloaded the lastest netinst ISO for Debian and I was on my way.
With the freshly burnt disk, I popped it into the slot loading DVD-ROM tray and rebooted. TODO this was a bit diffrent from a `normal' BIOS, with EFI, to boot from another type of media, your must:
- Within the EFI Boot Manager, select system configuration then Removable Media Boot option.
Disk spins up and it starts to boot, I get the ELILO bootloader, select install and it starts to boot... Loading Linux ... done! Loading init whatever.gz... reaches done.. but doesn't do anything from there! Like it was frozen. With major dissapointments, I called it a night... but before that, just to make sure it wasn't the install media, I reburned it and with still no luck. It was a sad night. )-:
What else is going on here?
- MythTV Network Remote Controller, written in C and GTK+.
- Had all of my BNL project work on here, couldn't recover that.. )-:
- More to come (attempt to recover some of the data)
Whats up, doc?
- SSH Server - OpenSSH
- WWW Server - Apache/2.2.9
- FTP Server - Pure-FTPd
- Kernel Patch - Linux Kernel 2.6.24.5 with grsecurity-2.1.11-2.6.24.5-200804211829.patch.gz