Right now one machine is running an old way out of support RHEL4 installation and the other is on Fedora 12, which is no longer supported by the Fedora Project. Paid support/subscription is not a consideration yet for this project, but I do want to run a modern Linux distribution for the associated modern application software and maintenance.

I basically need to move these servers to something free and supportable. I’m finding out that there aren’t a lot of options in PPC Linux as when I was last interested in this architecture. It’s pretty much just:

• Debian
• CRUX PPC
• Gentoo

I realize there is RHEL and SuSE Enterprise for PPC64 but those are subscription products without free binaries available. I’m not prepared to build an RPM-based distro from source at this point so I need something with binaries or something where building from source is highly automated and integrated, such as Gentoo. Digression…

The question is which of these distros do I go with? To answer the question I suppose I need to define the roles.

These two pSeries servers a redundant pair running LDAP/Auth Service, NTP, DNS and DHCP. The load is low but I want a solid modern software platform on both these servers from now until they are replaced with in the future (which is likely to be integration into a centralized architecture).

With that said, and with my familiarity level of these distros, I would first lean towards Debian and then to Gentoo and finally to CRUX PPC.

Debian is a binary distribution, which is nice for maintaining a server. Debian is more familiar to me. What are the arguments for Gentoo or CRUX PPC?

Agree or Disagree?

No related posts.

We’ve got these two IBM p505 servers that actually work pretty well. They were purchased on some kind of clear out two-for-one deal that my predecessor jumped on and while I probably wouldn’t be the guy to buy these machines in the first place, I’ve come to strangely like them. These server run our DNS, DHCP and soon-to-be LDAP stuff. It’s all distributed, replicated and zone-transfered goodness.

However, as of this writing they are both sportin’ a solid amber light on the LightPath diagnostics and the procedure to clear the amber light is… well… rather unclear. I think it’s unclear because we don’t have an HMC (Hardware Management Console) so we don’t get a lot of the spiffy external management features that these systems offer. Add to the fact that we run Linux on these hosts as opposed to AIX, which apparently has OS-level tools for querying the event log and flipping the light switches. I can’t find anything equivalent on Linux for p-Series systems… yet.

Googling doesn’t offer much in the way of help for clearing amber lights without an HMC and neither does IBM’s website. Looks like I’ll have to reboot one of them and go into the management controller to see if there are any options in there.

Updates coming if I can find the dang off switch…

Update 2: Yay! I finally discovered the utility necessary to turn the amber lights on an off via software on a live Linux p5o5 system! It’s usysattn from the Powerpc-utils or “Linux on Power Service Tools” project. It seem backed by IBM in some way because they link to these tools quite heavily throughout their online documentation, but I haven’t investigated any further at this time.

Regardless, once you have the latest usysattn from Powerpc-utils installed just use this command to turn off the amber light:

# usysattn

To list all indicators (lights). Then once you have the “location code” of the light you want to turn off:

# usysattn -l [location_code] -s normal

The amber lamp is now off!

Update: I Found the option in the service processor configuration menus available over the serial port. Unfortunately this means I have to reboot my servers to clear the lights but I suppose if something caused the lights to go on in the first place, it’s probably worth checking it out and scheduling some downtime to resolve it.

For posterity, the sequence necessary to turn off the amber lights after logging into the service processor is:

System name: Server-9115-505-XXXXXX
Version: SF240_358
User: admin
Copyright ? 2002-2008 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.
1. Power/Restart Control
2. System Service Aids
3. System Information
4. System Configuration
5. Network Services
6. Performance Setup
7. On Demand Utilities
8. Concurrent Maintenance
9. Login Profile
99. Log out

S1> 4

System Configuration
1. System Name
2. Processing Unit Identifier
3. Configure I/O Enclosures
4. Time Of Day
5. Firmware Update Policy
6. PCI Error Injection Policy
7. Interposer Plug Count
8. I/O Adapter Enlarged Capacity
9. Hardware Management Consoles
10. Virtual Ethernet Switches
11. Hardware Deconfiguration
12. Program Vital Product Data
13. Service Indicators
98. Return to previous menu
99. Log out

S1> 13

Service Indicators
1. System Attention Indicator
2. Enclosure Indicators
3. Indicators by Location code
4. Lamp Test
98. Return to previous menu
99. Log out

S1> 1

System Attention Indicator
Currently: On
Turn off the system attention indicator
Enter 1 to confirm or 2 to cancel:
The system attention indicator is turned off.
PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE:

Related posts:

1. Which Distro for PPC64 Server?

I did discovery yet more small misconfigurations and strange behaviour along the way:

1. OpenLDAP’s syncrepl using “refereshAndPersist” wasn’t working how I expected it to, no new changes were replicating to the slave LDAP server! I changed the directive to “refreshOnly” and set a 10 minute interval. I made several changes and monitored the slave LDAP server. Changes propagated in about 10 minutes, every time.
2. Despite iSCSI’s maturity and the maturity of QLogic’s HBAs I still noticed strange, unexplained target drop outs. Two HBAs per server, two controllers in the IBM DS3300 and just one target out of four was dropping. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to properly reconnect the target on a live system so I rebooted. Later, I discovered you can “disable” and then “enable” the specific target in SANsurfer or iscli, which worked to bring back the dropped target on a live system. Multipath picked up the “new” path right away, as expected.
3. Always remember to leave free physical extents in any LVM Volume Group in which you are taking snapshots of the Logical Volumes. It’s freakin’ obvious but I forgot and when I went to do snapshot backups, the snapshots were failing. Now I’m growing some LUNs on the DS3300 so that my VGs have room for snapshots.

All in all, a good weekend that was mostly filled with success.

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This won’t have a large functional difference but it pisses me off none-the-less. I’ve been using Network UPS Tools (NUT) with our APC UPS devices over USB and now I come to realize that this Eaton UPS doesn’t support USB, or rather it doesn’t come with a USB cable although the documentation says it does. Now to integrate this Eaton UPS with NUT I need to use SNMP since the Eaton only comes with a serial cable, which is useless to me for monitoring purposes. I guess I get to find out how NUT’s SNMP support is now.

This silent switch with a minor model change/update just rubs me the wrong way. I’m not so happy with the management of this UPS either…

UPDATE: Got the Powerware 5125 working with NUT via SNMP… seems good so far.

For the sake of posterity, here is my /etc/ups/ups.conf for the 5125 to work with NUT:

[ibm3000_1]
  driver = snmp-ups
  port = ibm3000-1.mydomain.com
  mibs = pw
  pollfreq = 30
  community = mycommunity
  snmp_version = v1
  desc = "Rack \#1 - IBM UPS 3000 HV @ U1/2"

This of course assume you’ve already properly configured the 5125 with a DNS name or IP address and properly enabled SNMP, allowing your NUT client to connect

UPDATE 2: The Powerware is starting to grow on me a little. It looks like it packs more juice than the same 2U unit from APC: 45% load and 12 minutes run time compared to an APC with 48% load and 8 minute run time. As long as I ignore the web management interface and stick to NUT via SNMP, I actually kind of like this UPS.

Related posts:

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