IBM RS/6000 - R30

GodHandPrime · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 7 Location: Boise, Idaho

So, in the middle of a hardware warehouse bankruptcy sale, I came across two large racks of servers: IBM RS/6000 - R30's there is probably about a half dozen of them, fully loaded with processors and memory and also a half dozen corrseponding harddrive bays with 2.2 Gig SCSI drives. I believe these servers are based on the PowerPC architecture and I am also under the impression that they ran some form of UNIX when they were in use.

Does anyone have a clue if I could drop some gentoo on one of these monstrosities? (I have the funny feeling that it would be slightly more difficult than my gentoo installs on both of my Athlon Systems *smirk*)

IF anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Lastly, if you are getting that feeling that you want to say "send it to me and I'll try it" you can take a long walk

just because I got them for free doesn't mean you are going to get them for free.

Also I should put a little more clarification down here: I have no clue whatsoever about these things. I know the guy that was going out of business and they were guaranteed to him in perfect working order, so I'm sure they are in perfect working order.. other than that I can phyisically see that these things are fully loaded. Every expansion slot on these things has something crammed in it, including but not limited to: Memory Slots, Processor Slots, HardDrive bays... you name.. seriously.. its got something stuck in it.

Again, thanks for any suggestions.. discuss amongst yourselves.

One more P.S. because I love gentoo so much: Thank you everyone in the forum and all of the gentoo users, you all saved me from ever having to ask a question when I was installing my first gentoo systems. Gentoo Forum Posters / Gentoo Users are the best. My personal thanks!

DooBeDooBeDo · Apprentice Joined: 21 Aug 2002 Posts: 220 Location: UK

Ahh, RS6000's good solid workhorses.

They run AIX as the OS and can come with multiple RISC (usually PPC) processors.

AIX is nice, it's had LVM for years.

Specs here : http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/library/hardware_docs/7015_r30.html

They're probably fairly old and not super fast, unless they're fully loaded with CPU's and memory, even then they won't break any records. But they won't break. They make excellent servers and just keep on going.

If you got 1/2 dozen of them, there's no harm in trying to get Gentoo on one, although you might find it easier to just leave AIX on there - but then where's the challenge?

pilla · Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2003 8:29 pm Post subject:

Until you discover that you have a PPC or not, I'll move it to Alternate Archs.
_________________
"I'm just very selective about the reality I choose to accept." -- Calvin

GodHandPrime · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 7 Location: Boise, Idaho

It is definitely a PowerPC. Its got PowerPC labelled all over it.

Also, the reason that I am not leaving AIX on it, is because... whoever owned it before wiped the drives out entirely. I've checked, no partitions, no data, nothing on any of the drives.

So, has anyone that has worked with these before got an idea on where to start installing Gentoo / linux in general at?

Thanks.

DooBeDooBeDo · Apprentice Joined: 21 Aug 2002 Posts: 220 Location: UK

A quick google for 'rs/6000 linux' brought me this: http://adequat.c2a.fr/linux/howtos/rs6000 or http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/ to install Debian.

http://penguinppc.org/ may well be worth a look too.