5 Dec 2016 berend   » (Journeyer)

Just had an ancient HP ProLiant dying on me: simultaneous failure of a memory bank, and a hard disk. Luckily hard disks were mirrored, phew.

As it was urgent, I bought a server I could pickup: an IBM Express x3100 M4. Warning: do not get this server. On a good day the thing takes 5 minutes to get to disk boot! Very time consuming to get that going. Also needed to apply an urgent firmware update, but no clue how that worked. Tried to run the IBM UpdateXPress ibm_utl_uxspi tool, but somehow that didn't seem to want to work on Ubuntu. Tried everything to get that going, booting OpenSUSE disk, booting SUSE EnterPrise Server 11 rescue disk, simply didn't want to work.

In the end I discovered that I had to use the IBM Bootable Media Creator utility. Doesn't run on Ubuntu. So installed a supported OS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 via my VMWare Workstation tool, and could then run BoMC. Once you know how updating firmware works, it works quite well, but boy is this hard to figure out. Took me a day of trying things, before I hit on this. And five minute boot times don't help. The IBM readme's are written by lawyers, not for people in a hurry.

This IBM X Server is apparently nice with something called Integrated Management Module II, but couldn't get that going, because I needed an activation key which I didn't have for some reason. I'll email IBM support, see if helps.

Pity I was in a hurry else I would have gotten a System76 or IX Systems box, they just work without getting in the way.

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