Frankly, you talking about why a particular server "lid" is better than others, showing us the tricks they used and what makes that particular machine special, is EXACTLY why I watch your videos. Keep it up!
HP is miserable to deal with but the fit and finish of their servers is genuinely exceptional. I bought a DL325 Gen 10 for work and was amazed by how well and easily everything went together. The lid latch, drive mounting mechanism, rails, and component modules are head and shoulders above any other vendor I've ever used.
A bummer they suck to deal with, you're not the first person to mention that. This thing is almost 20 years old so I don't know about the new ones but it's super well built.
I always buy outgoing generations so I've never had to deal with HP, but man I agree I absolutely love my HP Servers. ILO is generally reliable, and parts are SO easy to get for them
most of HP's design/manufacture tech from the early years, came from Compaq acquisition. if you've worked with compaq servers, you can spot various things in old hp servers immediately. early hp own server tryouts were pieces of crap. fit and finish is one of the few things they kept at very good levels but their customer support and feature lock (in some of the stupidest ways immaginable) is pain. in terms of reliablility, i have mixed cases which boils down to: if you don't have early problems, you won't have at all. if you do, you will always have. but i guess this is what you have to deal with, when you're into the "affordable" part of the enterprise market. meh.
I work professionally in a mostly HPE datacenter environment. Seeing how so many features that exist today in the C-series, Synergy and newer ProLiant servers all originated with Compaq so long ago is really fun to explore. Unironically, the memory modules are still the first to fail in almost all my servers still.
I work in the ITAD industry and often come across legacy units. It's always fascinating seeing the progression and design philosophy as technology advances
I work for a company that owns two small DCs, we are just NOW putting these into production running OmniOS and bhyve as hypervisors attached to 3 large disk shelves.
Great video. I thought it was really cool to see how much redundancy was built into these systems back in the day. Nowadays all our servers are just cattle - memory can fail the server goes offline and nothing happens
Exactly what I was thinking. These days if you're still an on premise shop you're not just running one server, you might have three (or more) servers behind a load balancer. So if one goes down, everything just keeps trucking with the other two. If the load balancer goes down, the entire thing fails over to the backup cluster.
LOL, I was sitting here working on my ProLiant DL385 G5 when I started watching this video, only to find you using the old RAM from it in this one! :-)
Nice work. I worked for a Compaq dealership in the early 2000’s I never saw one of those machines in the flesh but it’s very similar to the things I did see. I hated the smart start disk that was needed to boot Compaq/HP servers. Be thankful yours was already configured. Great content as always.
It's interesting to see how quick hardware swaps, down to the CPU level, were important design elements before modern virtualization really took hold in the server space. Nowadays no one would really care too much about being able to swap out a CPU cage fast because if something goes wrong with a physical machine, you'd just migrate the VM to a different one, but back then it could have been incredibly important to get up a particular machine as fast as possible.
Used to build these back in the day at Hp in Erskine. The reason the DL580 G3 gained so many of these features is because it was a consolidation product, it moved up a tier from the G2 in that it entered the quad socket arena, as it was also a replacement for the old DL740 & DL760G2 high end servers at a much lower price. For such an expensive intel based mid/high end server we built an awful lot of them as people were still unsure of the higher performing AMD based DL585 until the G2 version of that was released.
I love the designs and of HP products as i work on them, however hp can also be terrible to deal with.I personally deal with them so much i decided to buy a dl360p gen 8! Wonderful video, very well done keep it up!
I actually set up several PHPbb servers in the mid 2000's, but I couldn't even convince my friends to post on it... The most use I got out of one of them is when I convinced some classmates in my linux OS class to use it for the group project we were working on...
Very interesting to see how x86 server manufacturers were trying to differentiate themselves as the platform became such a commodity product. Even at the time I wonder if amortizing the cost of developing a fancy redundant memory system over sales versus "just buy a second server" ever worked out... Great video as always!
@@clabretro Back then, you were a Dell shop, an HP shop (or a Compaq shop), an IBM shop or a no-name shop, mainly dependent on who got there first, based on the remote management platform you would have standardised on (or whatever the contractor would supply if you were in government at the time). This server would have been either an application server, a database server or an ESX server (though that came a little later). For these applications, having the redundancy was a life-saver (and well worth the money). I would agree with you on the price statement, but you should try and look up some enterprise software list prices from those days ;-)...
Great to see the old kit working in 2023... that in itself says a lot about the quality of these machines. HP still makes excellent hardware and when you have a decent number of machines the support is definitely better. The Gen10 machines are well built, have similar config diagrams (very handy for RAM population) and rock solid performance. IMHO the ability to hot swap is not as good, however in the last 5 years we've only replaced a handful of chassis fans with the last few able to be swapped whilst the machines are on (even though they did complain).
Oh man bringing back some good memories! 2005 was around the time I was running my first website. I was more of a fan of Invision Power Board than phpBB back then! By the way, you can search around and find a license key for that old iLO to unlock the "advanced" features. HP (and Dell) still do that nonsense today (but they'll let you at least use it to install an OS and use it to watch the server POST. After POST, the free iLO/iDRAC will kick the console.). HP and Dell are why I love Supermicro servers. Their IPMI is usable without a license (you just can't do a remote BIOS upgrade and maybe a couple other things), they'll accept any compatible hardware without major complaints or throwing a temper tantrum like HPE servers like to do for even something as simple as storage without HP's blessing. You're making me want to dig out the old servers in my attic now!
haha that's awesome. some other folks mentioned about finding the iLO keys, it might even have one on a sticker on the machine I just noticed. I hear you on supermicro... way more flexibility. what gear do you have hiding in the attic?
Nice to see some folks showing some old servers some love, Servers are the most unloved of all computing equipment. I would collect them myself except i just lack appropriate storage for them without damage.
4 Xeon 7040 CPUs with 2 cores each at 3.00ghz and 165 watts of TDP per chip. Gotta love that Netburst powa!! This kinda reminds me of an older Dell Precision 670 workstation I got for dirt cheap in the early 2010's. I won the lottery with the motherboard revision and was able to upgrade it to two dual core xeons paxville chips with hyperthreading. Thing was insanely crazy hot but fun to mess around with, especially when my budget Phenom x3 I had at the time ran circles around it and only used 65 watts of power.
I really enjoyed the way you spoke about the convenience of cloud computing nowadays from an admin perspective. Another certified clabretro classic. I cut my teeth on the 1RU versions of the G4 or G5 of these, I can't exactly remember. It was prob ESXi 4 with a bunch of windows VMs... good times. Last time I saw one in the wild was a DL580 G5 2RU which was my old jobs SQL server, decommed and now just another Hyper-V vm! I would've taken it home but it was a loud and heavy beast... kind of regretting it now...
Mezzanine cards originally (and some still do) sat atop a motherboard/mainboard, often on standoffs so kind of like a little mezzanine :) And I agree with what some others have expressed: HP's excellent mechanical design is usually let down by the actual thing running inside the chassis. I always assumed the inner instruction stickers were done so well because they knew their field techs would be in there so often.
A mezzanine is a daughter board parallel to and very close to the system board. Like a mezzanine in a building is between two floors, a mezzanine in a computer is not quite the system board, but also not really a classic expansion card.
@@Dummvogel Yep. Its still really common to find RAID mezzanine boards. It lets them sell the system with out a raid controller but it lets them have better integration into the motherboard then a standard PCIe expansion would let them have. Like you can have the onboard sas ports be controller by the mezzanine board if its plugged in.
It's interesting to see the shared design language between that machine and a DL585 G2 I've got. It's basically the DL580's slightly bigger AMD Opteron brother with lots more RAM slots (but no hot swap) A more symmetrical layout, SAS and PCIe. But other than that, very similar!
30:35 Programming only from documentation, or some book is really cool. It reveals designers point of view. I can read Perl because of Nagios plugins and it can be done without pasting from stack over and over. I'm still using a crap of phpBB and made a painful transition from PHP 5.6 and ~2018 phpBB version to a newer one. It is 18 years old now. The amount of specialized knowledge over there has no cloud substitution.
Loved the coverage of this Proliant, thanks for sharing! I’m currently transitioning to more infrastructure work in my role and primarily deal with HP ProLiant & Procurve hardware. I’d be really interested to see you cover their switching gear in the future if you have any plans for that!
@@clabretro Great to hear, thanks for replying. I know we're currently still supporting switches as late as 2610 and 3500yl's and updating VLAN configurations from a previous network manager, which has been confusing to unpick due to HP's mixed use of the term "tagging" and "untagging". Recently decommisioned a 2524 which had done many years of service. Looking forward to it!
Great memories from this video. a LAMP stack ha ! What a beast of a machine you have there, I think the bulging of the board is indeed the cause of the defect. Maybe you can try and trace some connections. Thanks for the great content, byeee !
I deployed and managed a few thousand HP DL360 Gen 8 systems between 2013 and 2017, and like others have said, dealing with HP is difficult at best... Dealing with their hardware, however, was beyond easy. Their enterprise hardware is some of the best I've dealt with.
Oh man! phpBB takes me back! I ran a semi successful gaming community with a phpBB forum starting in December 2005 and regrettably ended up moving to vBulletin. All that's left now is good memories and a Discord "server". Also that KVM multiplexer is awesome! It brings back memories of the daisy chained KVM setup we had in our racks for work. One day the multiport IP KVM died and as half of everything by that point had iDrac, a one port IP KVM daisy chained with other multiport KVMs did the trick but the IP KVM software had a product key... on the back of an installation CD... left in the data centre, so I called in a favour and let's just say the jnlp could be easily massaged to bypass the ridiculous product key prompt. I'm not sure what sort of psychopath would try and DRM software that only works with proprietary hardware and you need it to work when you've had a catastrophic failure. Anyway sorry for the text wall. TLDR, great memories, love the adventure, looking to see what you come up with next!
Wow, that looks familiar (sort of)). I had the Compaq variant of the DL580 Gen 2 (5u server), back in the late 2000's. We used it as a fileserver and database for the local school at the time. They were pretty bulletproof except for the SCSI drive sled contacts were kind of troublesome.😉
Installing phpbb brings back a lot of memories. Thank god I moved out from web dev :) As a side note, I could've owned an old G1 DL something (much more older than this, I think it had 2xXeons in slot 1), but the seller didn't respect the auction price, and wanted more for it. Sad :(
cant believe im this early, I love your content and its always great to get inspiration for my lab :) keep it up! thank you for keeping me entertained haha
A DL380 G7 has been wurring away in my front porch for the last 6 years with only a handful of reboots. Its very hot in there running all kinds of vms from game servers to databases and web servers. Its full of dust, and mounted vertically on the wall with a 4u mount, surrounded by coats scarves and a shoe rack, and in all these years ive only ever lost 2 disks. Even then she kept on chugging thanks to raid 10. HP build very reliable and capable machines. Sadly though i fear her time is coming to an end due to it consuming 250-350w on average these machines really aren't econmical to run any more. When you consider performance per watt a modern gaming pc would blow it out of the water hands down.
Love it! Yeah I'm running a Dell R510 and R720 around the clock and even the "newer" stuff like that pull some serious watts. Eventually I'd like to figure out a solar solution to offset things so I can justify running this older gear more often ha.
@@clabretro absolutely im with you on the solar thing. Been collecting old ups batteries from work over the years and currently on the lookout for deals on used solar panels. I figure if i can build up enough battery capacity to run all the equipment through the night, while having enough solar input to both fill the batteries and power the equipmemt though the day, then i will be laughing! At least until my house burns down
The kvm keyboard and mouse connection can be refreshed through the online ui with the Command and PS/2 setup selections. I have to periodically do it for some servers connected to my Avocent kvms.
I remember recylcing some of these servers and we needed to test the machines remotely so slapped a *Cough* Ilo advanced license key in that may have been found on the internet, those old servers never verified them (Not that I condone that of course :P)
When I started at my current school job, the school had a ML380 Gen 5 server as the main server running Netware 6.5. It was my first time working with a proper server and it was beautiful. However Netware was seriously unstable on that system in 2009. Still have the unit sitting in out storeroom, with no idea what to do with it. Draws too much power to be a useful system and the 36GB SAS drives are too small really for much of a modern OS boot volume. Still, from a physical layout and labelling point, it was beautifully done
Maybe the rust is because of galvanic corrosion. Different metals close the electric circuit and voltage differential causes redox reaction. Moisture in air would be enough.
Amazing video! Small question, why not keep the kvm in the server room and access the connected machines via the network to the kvm? Is local connection (vga and ps2 direct to the kvm) that much better? Thanks for another great vid and hope you have a great day!
great question, this KVM has pretty outdated remote management software I have to access via an XP VM and the video quality is low, so the local hookup is better, especially for screen capture. but I might see how far I can update it though, maybe there are newer software versions available.
@@clabretro ah yep, makes sense! That remote extension thingy will help with having to run only one line back there though! were you able to source more adapters for hooking up more servers?
Me and a partner ran a PHPBB server when we were 13, haha. (As a companion to a Wordpress blog!) We actually had about a dozen users on the forum at one time, because for about a year we ran a small podcast with some friends! x) But they all stopped coming when we stopped making episodes, understandably. I think it was about Gaming. Mostly console but not exclusively. With hindsight I think we should've picked a bit more of a niche, like retro gaming or maybe even a specific brand. We made sure the forum and blog were matched to the colour scheme of our podcast-thumbnail, which I had slapped-together in an illicitly-obtained copy of Photoshop. It was a lot of fun honestly, and certainly an educational experience - we already knew not to bother in some of the later "let's start a podcast with pals" resurgences! (No I will not tell you what it was called! I'm 28 now, 13 year old me is far too embarrassing in a multitude of ways. But (at least some) episodes ARE actually still hosted on UA-cam, which is incredible.)
I'm not 100% if this is true. To me those memory boards would seem to be easier to put into machines with a front side bus as you wouldn't have to worry about latency as much as long as you were able to keep up with the front side bus speed. We are pushing speed and latency so fast that DIMMS are every closer to the cpu every generation. Could be totally wrong though. Made sense in my head
Thanks! With just the power supply plugged in running the iLO (machine not turned on) it pulls 36W, but when it's powered up it draws anywhere from ~380W-440W. I should have put that in the video!
I got to thinking about it, and what would be super cool would be a comparison of compile times for the Linux kernel (might have to be an older one, not sure) VS a modern 4 core CPU. This thing is nuts, but I wanna see HOW nuts haha
Still have one of these running a custom app on RHEL 6 at work because the admin of the system is insistent they need to use RHEL 6. They bought a new server a year or two ago and were surprised that it wouldn't work correctly on a new server and hardware wasn't detected in the OS... I've intentionally avoided dealing with it, but I did have to swap some RAM at one point when I visited our DC and noticed the RAM failure LED on one of the modules.
@@clabretro if you saw some of the shenanigans that happen in the financial sector you'd shake your head. VB6 powered apps, some of them running on virtualised Win XP Pro VMs (not even Windows server!), contractors hired for hundreds of dollars a day that literally act as human InstallShield setups because that's more profitable than building a proper update app (I wish I was joking), contractors who think network shares are black magic (he literally said 'I need a folder where I copy files in it, and it appears on this system too'). It boggles the mind. I understand why Frank Grimes flipped out in The Simpsons. It all makes perfect sense now.
I still have my cheat sheets from back then. I also have a deploy :) You should get sugar on it as that was pretty much a go to. Plesk? Back office... Obviously. Buddy press, maybe ispconfig... Astrix... I think it's of an era, that not effective but not too bad and will run some near modern stuff. I kinda skipped this gen , and retro before (gen1 P3). I did have one on the bench, but it would play ball and I chucked some money at it..... Oh cook the board and put something on there to level it out, may work for you.
I"m sure you found out, but it won't stay as loud once you get it past POST. Hopefully you got iLO working and then no need for a KVM. Ah, I see you were able to get the iLO setup. Not sure what features the iLO of those days supported, but not not only does it fully mirror the same things the KVM would show you, but you can mount an ISO to patch (like an SSP) and/or install from.
wow, 64bit PCI-X slots and SCSI, haven't seen those for a while. good piece of hardware but i guess power consumption will be a concern if you want to keep it running.
Antistatic bags are not insulators. They are conductive. This is so that accumulated charge can dissipate. Your RAM BOARD may still be non-functional. Your test is flawed using the antistatic as layer between the board and the metal casing will not give the result you expect, namely isolation. Use something else and retest.
I had a dl380, I think I found either a way to get a trial Ilo key or a Kayden to let me manage it remotely. You should revisit your fancy kvm, can you boot a server off the usb now that you have a usb module?
@@MrKrezol Actually, you'll love this - the board needed to be set to the locked position for it to work. Worked fine even with the anti-static! I don't know why the machine would allow the other board to init while unlocked, but once I started locking the "bad" one it worked just fine haha.
Haha I know. I'm kinda glad I didn't have to do that on the HP 😂 I did actually have to use smart start when I first setup the Compaq DL380: ua-cam.com/video/gyyhqHBmKg4/v-deo.html
I'm curious how this will run Ubuntu server 22.04LTS. I have a Dell server of a similar vintage running it. Does amazingly well, crazy to think how far back the 64bit CPU extension goes.
Well, the servers of our twenties LOL! Of course nobody would allow a greenhorn to mess with such hardware, especially in poor countries. So older guys were securing that job for themselves. 😂😂
It is Debian/Ubuntu. You should not be building from source. Installing PHP from source is even worse. You need dev packages for system libraries used by enabled php modules. Period correct Ubuntu Hoary should be running PHP 4.3.10.
Looking at the specs for that server it probably has single core Xeon cpu's that were derived from the Pentium 4 which were for its time the worst CPU Intel ever made. Otherwise that server is wonderfully overengineered.
It's hard to believe that stumbling my way through hosting a phpBB forum in 2005 basically paved the way to the network admin career I'm in today. Nice trip down memory lane with the LAMP install and head scratching when they don't communicate properly. Love the content and love seeing old hardware (especially stuff that I've never heard of) get a new lease on life. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for exploring all this heavy junk for us. The kid in me would have loved to play with all this stuff, but as I get older I lost some enthusiasm, but especially lost my patience for lugging these boat anchors around. The extra energy you have to set them up is just completes the trifecta of what I'm missing. I guess what I'm saying is I like this stuff but I have no energy or time to mess with it, so thanks for letting me live vicariously. Cheers
Cool machine! I'm curious if the errant memory board would work if you use another material to insulate the bowed board from the caddy. Anti-static bags are actually slightly conductive themselves - this is how they create the anti-static protection for the bag's contents. I'd try again with paper or vinyl and see if you get any different results.
I remember when one of the HP server where I work had a faulty PSU, our contractor shipped out a whole new server. I was genuinely shocked by this because I had an expectation that something like the PSU would be a relatively simple in field replacement.
I ran a forum, hosted on a dialup connection with dynamic DNS to keep it "available" through reconnects back in the early 2000s. But I was an ASP weenie back then rather than PHP. Later I moved to Perl when I started messing about with FreeBSD more, and now Python. Fun stories from that time of my life. I used to attend a LAN gaming event at a local community centre, and got involved with running it. Later on I wrote an online booking management system to help manage the attendees and make sure we didn't go over capacity. That was in ASP of course. 😎
Frankly, you talking about why a particular server "lid" is better than others, showing us the tricks they used and what makes that particular machine special, is EXACTLY why I watch your videos. Keep it up!
Haha thank you!
HP is miserable to deal with but the fit and finish of their servers is genuinely exceptional. I bought a DL325 Gen 10 for work and was amazed by how well and easily everything went together. The lid latch, drive mounting mechanism, rails, and component modules are head and shoulders above any other vendor I've ever used.
A bummer they suck to deal with, you're not the first person to mention that. This thing is almost 20 years old so I don't know about the new ones but it's super well built.
I always buy outgoing generations so I've never had to deal with HP, but man I agree I absolutely love my HP Servers. ILO is generally reliable, and parts are SO easy to get for them
most of HP's design/manufacture tech from the early years, came from Compaq acquisition. if you've worked with compaq servers, you can spot various things in old hp servers immediately. early hp own server tryouts were pieces of crap. fit and finish is one of the few things they kept at very good levels but their customer support and feature lock (in some of the stupidest ways immaginable) is pain. in terms of reliablility, i have mixed cases which boils down to: if you don't have early problems, you won't have at all. if you do, you will always have. but i guess this is what you have to deal with, when you're into the "affordable" part of the enterprise market. meh.
Yeah, from personal experience, HPE Support is absolutely dreadful. It's why we switched to DELL.
@@giornikitop5373 the feature locks in ILO are very dumb, but I just spend $5 on eBay and get the ILO advanced keys for my servers lol
I work professionally in a mostly HPE datacenter environment. Seeing how so many features that exist today in the C-series, Synergy and newer ProLiant servers all originated with Compaq so long ago is really fun to explore. Unironically, the memory modules are still the first to fail in almost all my servers still.
Ha, funny to hear memory modules are still an issue.
@@clabretro So annoying tbh. I had never seen such high failure rates until I worked with this gear. I was always a Dell guy until I worked here lmao.
I work in the ITAD industry and often come across legacy units. It's always fascinating seeing the progression and design philosophy as technology advances
I work for a company that owns two small DCs, we are just NOW putting these into production running OmniOS and bhyve as hypervisors attached to 3 large disk shelves.
Wow.
Great video. I thought it was really cool to see how much redundancy was built into these systems back in the day. Nowadays all our servers are just cattle - memory can fail the server goes offline and nothing happens
Exactly what I was thinking. These days if you're still an on premise shop you're not just running one server, you might have three (or more) servers behind a load balancer. So if one goes down, everything just keeps trucking with the other two. If the load balancer goes down, the entire thing fails over to the backup cluster.
LOL, I was sitting here working on my ProLiant DL385 G5 when I started watching this video, only to find you using the old RAM from it in this one! :-)
Haha it all worked, kinda saved this video. Thanks again!
Man, I remember those days. Got my start in Linux using Ubuntu 8.04. I haven't seen a single node LAMP stack in a long time =D
Love the videos!
8.04 was great. Thanks for watching!
Man, you don't stop! I like your knowledge and presentation pace here & in your other videos.
Thank you!
Antistatic bags are conductive! That’s how they suppress the static.
Ha - I'll try something else then, good point!
@@clabretro Unfortunately based on the state of the board, you are likely screwed anyway - but thought I’d mention it regardless 😅
Haha yeah it's pretty warped
Nice work. I worked for a Compaq dealership in the early 2000’s I never saw one of those machines in the flesh but it’s very similar to the things I did see. I hated the smart start disk that was needed to boot Compaq/HP servers. Be thankful yours was already configured. Great content as always.
Thanks! Yeah I was relieved I didn't have to do any smart start stuff, had to do that on the gen1.
It's interesting to see how quick hardware swaps, down to the CPU level, were important design elements before modern virtualization really took hold in the server space.
Nowadays no one would really care too much about being able to swap out a CPU cage fast because if something goes wrong with a physical machine, you'd just migrate the VM to a different one, but back then it could have been incredibly important to get up a particular machine as fast as possible.
Exactly, now days you'd have a hundred of these things running and wouldn't care when one failed.
I worked a few of those ProLiant. Nice machines. Good assembly too.
I had the towers. Very heavy beasties!
The 3rd 4th and 5th 4u and 2u proliants were so damn nice to work in.
Used to build these back in the day at Hp in Erskine. The reason the DL580 G3 gained so many of these features is because it was a consolidation product, it moved up a tier from the G2 in that it entered the quad socket arena, as it was also a replacement for the old DL740 & DL760G2 high end servers at a much lower price. For such an expensive intel based mid/high end server we built an awful lot of them as people were still unsure of the higher performing AMD based DL585 until the G2 version of that was released.
Fascinating. Yeah this thing is absolutely maxed out with features.
I love the designs and of HP products as i work on them, however hp can also be terrible to deal with.I personally deal with them so much i decided to buy a dl360p gen 8! Wonderful video, very well done keep it up!
Thanks!
I always loved HP Proliant Servers. Very easy to service. Also very good at indicating what is broken or not working properly.
Pricing it out was awesome. Made my night
I actually set up several PHPbb servers in the mid 2000's, but I couldn't even convince my friends to post on it... The most use I got out of one of them is when I convinced some classmates in my linux OS class to use it for the group project we were working on...
sounds about right haha
Very interesting to see how x86 server manufacturers were trying to differentiate themselves as the platform became such a commodity product. Even at the time I wonder if amortizing the cost of developing a fancy redundant memory system over sales versus "just buy a second server" ever worked out... Great video as always!
Definitely now, but hard to say back then. Amazing how expensive it all was back then. Thanks for watching!
@@clabretro Back then, you were a Dell shop, an HP shop (or a Compaq shop), an IBM shop or a no-name shop, mainly dependent on who got there first, based on the remote management platform you would have standardised on (or whatever the contractor would supply if you were in government at the time). This server would have been either an application server, a database server or an ESX server (though that came a little later). For these applications, having the redundancy was a life-saver (and well worth the money).
I would agree with you on the price statement, but you should try and look up some enterprise software list prices from those days ;-)...
Okay, I must admit that you are making me reminisce about the old days. Totally nerding out here! ✌️
glad to hear it!
The LAMP phpBB stuff is taking me back to setting up a forum for my World of Warcraft guild in college. Incredible.
Nice!
Great to see the old kit working in 2023... that in itself says a lot about the quality of these machines.
HP still makes excellent hardware and when you have a decent number of machines the support is definitely better. The Gen10 machines are well built, have similar config diagrams (very handy for RAM population) and rock solid performance. IMHO the ability to hot swap is not as good, however in the last 5 years we've only replaced a handful of chassis fans with the last few able to be swapped whilst the machines are on (even though they did complain).
Oh you're a Perl buddy 😊 I used Perl extensively between 2001 and 2007. Very fast and versatile
I used it a lot briefly around 2009 or 2010, have a bit of nostalgia for it
Oh man bringing back some good memories! 2005 was around the time I was running my first website. I was more of a fan of Invision Power Board than phpBB back then! By the way, you can search around and find a license key for that old iLO to unlock the "advanced" features. HP (and Dell) still do that nonsense today (but they'll let you at least use it to install an OS and use it to watch the server POST. After POST, the free iLO/iDRAC will kick the console.). HP and Dell are why I love Supermicro servers. Their IPMI is usable without a license (you just can't do a remote BIOS upgrade and maybe a couple other things), they'll accept any compatible hardware without major complaints or throwing a temper tantrum like HPE servers like to do for even something as simple as storage without HP's blessing. You're making me want to dig out the old servers in my attic now!
haha that's awesome. some other folks mentioned about finding the iLO keys, it might even have one on a sticker on the machine I just noticed.
I hear you on supermicro... way more flexibility. what gear do you have hiding in the attic?
Nice to see some folks showing some old servers some love, Servers are the most unloved of all computing equipment.
I would collect them myself except i just lack appropriate storage for them without damage.
I was like, this is awesome! And also, my server rack is full already I don't need any more hardware
At my last job they still had some G4s running, these things just don't die.
Gotta love that classic Microsoft natural keyboard!
4 Xeon 7040 CPUs with 2 cores each at 3.00ghz and 165 watts of TDP per chip. Gotta love that Netburst powa!! This kinda reminds me of an older Dell Precision 670 workstation I got for dirt cheap in the early 2010's. I won the lottery with the motherboard revision and was able to upgrade it to two dual core xeons paxville chips with hyperthreading. Thing was insanely crazy hot but fun to mess around with, especially when my budget Phenom x3 I had at the time ran circles around it and only used 65 watts of power.
I really enjoyed the way you spoke about the convenience of cloud computing nowadays from an admin perspective. Another certified clabretro classic.
I cut my teeth on the 1RU versions of the G4 or G5 of these, I can't exactly remember. It was prob ESXi 4 with a bunch of windows VMs... good times.
Last time I saw one in the wild was a DL580 G5 2RU which was my old jobs SQL server, decommed and now just another Hyper-V vm! I would've taken it home but it was a loud and heavy beast... kind of regretting it now...
Thanks! These things are ridiculously heavy (I know I say that about all of them, but I really mean it about this one).
Mezzanine cards originally (and some still do) sat atop a motherboard/mainboard, often on standoffs so kind of like a little mezzanine :)
And I agree with what some others have expressed: HP's excellent mechanical design is usually let down by the actual thing running inside the chassis. I always assumed the inner instruction stickers were done so well because they knew their field techs would be in there so often.
A mezzanine is a daughter board parallel to and very close to the system board. Like a mezzanine in a building is between two floors, a mezzanine in a computer is not quite the system board, but also not really a classic expansion card.
@@Dummvogel Yep. Its still really common to find RAID mezzanine boards. It lets them sell the system with out a raid controller but it lets them have better integration into the motherboard then a standard PCIe expansion would let them have. Like you can have the onboard sas ports be controller by the mezzanine board if its plugged in.
Oh the memories!
I used to run the local VW User Group on phpBB back in 2002-2006 ish!
nice!
It's interesting to see the shared design language between that machine and a DL585 G2 I've got. It's basically the DL580's slightly bigger AMD Opteron brother with lots more RAM slots (but no hot swap) A more symmetrical layout, SAS and PCIe. But other than that, very similar!
The ProLiant was still around today under Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
yup, gen 11 I think
On the drive sled rust, vibration will wear through the zinc plating exposing the steel. Exposed steel rusts quick in air.
30:35 Programming only from documentation, or some book is really cool. It reveals designers point of view. I can read Perl because of Nagios plugins and it can be done without pasting from stack over and over.
I'm still using a crap of phpBB and made a painful transition from PHP 5.6 and ~2018 phpBB version to a newer one. It is 18 years old now. The amount of specialized knowledge over there has no cloud substitution.
Loved the coverage of this Proliant, thanks for sharing!
I’m currently transitioning to more infrastructure work in my role and primarily deal with HP ProLiant & Procurve hardware. I’d be really interested to see you cover their switching gear in the future if you have any plans for that!
would definitely like to cover early procurve gear eventually!
@@clabretro Great to hear, thanks for replying. I know we're currently still supporting switches as late as 2610 and 3500yl's and updating VLAN configurations from a previous network manager, which has been confusing to unpick due to HP's mixed use of the term "tagging" and "untagging". Recently decommisioned a 2524 which had done many years of service. Looking forward to it!
That rust could be due to anodic-cathodic rot. I.e. Aluminium pressing against steel, possibly.
oh interesting point
Yup, that was what i was thinking as well... electrical corrosion.
That memory test (20:28) interface looked just like TempleOS
Great memories from this video. a LAMP stack ha ! What a beast of a machine you have there, I think the bulging of the board is indeed the cause of the defect. Maybe you can try and trace some connections. Thanks for the great content, byeee !
I deployed and managed a few thousand HP DL360 Gen 8 systems between 2013 and 2017, and like others have said, dealing with HP is difficult at best...
Dealing with their hardware, however, was beyond easy. Their enterprise hardware is some of the best I've dealt with.
I definitely ran phpbb back then. If I remember correctly it was a security hole swiss cheese. I just turned it off when it got pwned.
yeah not letting this one online
Oh man! phpBB takes me back! I ran a semi successful gaming community with a phpBB forum starting in December 2005 and regrettably ended up moving to vBulletin. All that's left now is good memories and a Discord "server". Also that KVM multiplexer is awesome! It brings back memories of the daisy chained KVM setup we had in our racks for work. One day the multiport IP KVM died and as half of everything by that point had iDrac, a one port IP KVM daisy chained with other multiport KVMs did the trick but the IP KVM software had a product key... on the back of an installation CD... left in the data centre, so I called in a favour and let's just say the jnlp could be easily massaged to bypass the ridiculous product key prompt. I'm not sure what sort of psychopath would try and DRM software that only works with proprietary hardware and you need it to work when you've had a catastrophic failure.
Anyway sorry for the text wall. TLDR, great memories, love the adventure, looking to see what you come up with next!
haha great story about the KVM. thanks for watching!
Wow, that looks familiar (sort of)). I had the Compaq variant of the DL580 Gen 2 (5u server), back in the late 2000's. We used it as a fileserver and database for the local school at the time. They were pretty bulletproof except for the SCSI drive sled contacts were kind of troublesome.😉
Awesome. Hello from Rus!
ILO has always been my favorite out of band management. iDrac is OK CIMC can take a flying leap.
Also if you google you can find trial license keys to see the full ILO experience.
I had a feeling, was going to try that lol
Installing phpbb brings back a lot of memories. Thank god I moved out from web dev :) As a side note, I could've owned an old G1 DL something (much more older than this, I think it had 2xXeons in slot 1), but the seller didn't respect the auction price, and wanted more for it. Sad :(
Bummer. That DL380 I have has two Pentium IIIs. Yeah, web dev is brutal 😂
cant believe im this early, I love your content and its always great to get inspiration for my lab :) keep it up! thank you for keeping me entertained haha
Thank you!
A DL380 G7 has been wurring away in my front porch for the last 6 years with only a handful of reboots. Its very hot in there running all kinds of vms from game servers to databases and web servers. Its full of dust, and mounted vertically on the wall with a 4u mount, surrounded by coats scarves and a shoe rack, and in all these years ive only ever lost 2 disks. Even then she kept on chugging thanks to raid 10. HP build very reliable and capable machines.
Sadly though i fear her time is coming to an end due to it consuming 250-350w on average these machines really aren't econmical to run any more. When you consider performance per watt a modern gaming pc would blow it out of the water hands down.
Love it! Yeah I'm running a Dell R510 and R720 around the clock and even the "newer" stuff like that pull some serious watts. Eventually I'd like to figure out a solar solution to offset things so I can justify running this older gear more often ha.
@@clabretro absolutely im with you on the solar thing. Been collecting old ups batteries from work over the years and currently on the lookout for deals on used solar panels. I figure if i can build up enough battery capacity to run all the equipment through the night, while having enough solar input to both fill the batteries and power the equipmemt though the day, then i will be laughing! At least until my house burns down
The kvm keyboard and mouse connection can be refreshed through the online ui with the Command and PS/2 setup selections. I have to periodically do it for some servers connected to my Avocent kvms.
oh great tip, I'll give that a try
Still have a few of these in production running a voicemail app from late 90s
ha that's awesome (well -- maybe not for you, but very impressive to hear about these things still out doing work!)
oh no. im old. dang it. those gen3-5's were tanks.
I remember recylcing some of these servers and we needed to test the machines remotely so slapped a *Cough* Ilo advanced license key in that may have been found on the internet, those old servers never verified them (Not that I condone that of course :P)
yeah let's just say one might fall off a truck soon
When I started at my current school job, the school had a ML380 Gen 5 server as the main server running Netware 6.5. It was my first time working with a proper server and it was beautiful. However Netware was seriously unstable on that system in 2009. Still have the unit sitting in out storeroom, with no idea what to do with it. Draws too much power to be a useful system and the 36GB SAS drives are too small really for much of a modern OS boot volume. Still, from a physical layout and labelling point, it was beautifully done
Maybe the rust is because of galvanic corrosion. Different metals close the electric circuit and voltage differential causes redox reaction. Moisture in air would be enough.
Some other folks mentioned that too, could definitely be the case.
phpBB was honestly peak.
I agree.
About the rust on the caddies, I think that's because of dissimilar metals... at least that's how I learned it.
That actually could be the case as well, another person mentioned that too.
Amazing video! Small question, why not keep the kvm in the server room and access the connected machines via the network to the kvm? Is local connection (vga and ps2 direct to the kvm) that much better? Thanks for another great vid and hope you have a great day!
great question, this KVM has pretty outdated remote management software I have to access via an XP VM and the video quality is low, so the local hookup is better, especially for screen capture. but I might see how far I can update it though, maybe there are newer software versions available.
@@clabretro ah yep, makes sense! That remote extension thingy will help with having to run only one line back there though! were you able to source more adapters for hooking up more servers?
yeah I've got three with ps2 and one with USB... now that I'm typing this out I'm realizing I should've tried the USB one haha
Me and a partner ran a PHPBB server when we were 13, haha. (As a companion to a Wordpress blog!) We actually had about a dozen users on the forum at one time, because for about a year we ran a small podcast with some friends! x) But they all stopped coming when we stopped making episodes, understandably.
I think it was about Gaming. Mostly console but not exclusively. With hindsight I think we should've picked a bit more of a niche, like retro gaming or maybe even a specific brand. We made sure the forum and blog were matched to the colour scheme of our podcast-thumbnail, which I had slapped-together in an illicitly-obtained copy of Photoshop.
It was a lot of fun honestly, and certainly an educational experience - we already knew not to bother in some of the later "let's start a podcast with pals" resurgences!
(No I will not tell you what it was called! I'm 28 now, 13 year old me is far too embarrassing in a multitude of ways. But (at least some) episodes ARE actually still hosted on UA-cam, which is incredible.)
Ha that's awesome. I never did anything (at all) successful with phpBB but it was indeed a learning experience every time.
I'm not 100% if this is true. To me those memory boards would seem to be easier to put into machines with a front side bus as you wouldn't have to worry about latency as much as long as you were able to keep up with the front side bus speed. We are pushing speed and latency so fast that DIMMS are every closer to the cpu every generation. Could be totally wrong though. Made sense in my head
Great boys! I'm Interested in knowing the wattage/power draw, thanks
Thanks! With just the power supply plugged in running the iLO (machine not turned on) it pulls 36W, but when it's powered up it draws anywhere from ~380W-440W. I should have put that in the video!
I got to thinking about it, and what would be super cool would be a comparison of compile times for the Linux kernel (might have to be an older one, not sure) VS a modern 4 core CPU. This thing is nuts, but I wanna see HOW nuts haha
I bet this one is slooooow with its original Xeons.
Still have one of these running a custom app on RHEL 6 at work because the admin of the system is insistent they need to use RHEL 6. They bought a new server a year or two ago and were surprised that it wouldn't work correctly on a new server and hardware wasn't detected in the OS... I've intentionally avoided dealing with it, but I did have to swap some RAM at one point when I visited our DC and noticed the RAM failure LED on one of the modules.
that's wild!
@@clabretro if you saw some of the shenanigans that happen in the financial sector you'd shake your head. VB6 powered apps, some of them running on virtualised Win XP Pro VMs (not even Windows server!), contractors hired for hundreds of dollars a day that literally act as human InstallShield setups because that's more profitable than building a proper update app (I wish I was joking), contractors who think network shares are black magic (he literally said 'I need a folder where I copy files in it, and it appears on this system too').
It boggles the mind. I understand why Frank Grimes flipped out in The Simpsons. It all makes perfect sense now.
I can only imagined. Always horrifying to hear how things are really going inside big corporations haha.
I still have my cheat sheets from back then. I also have a deploy :)
You should get sugar on it as that was pretty much a go to. Plesk? Back office...
Obviously. Buddy press, maybe ispconfig... Astrix...
I think it's of an era, that not effective but not too bad and will run some near modern stuff. I kinda skipped this gen , and retro before (gen1 P3).
I did have one on the bench, but it would play ball and I chucked some money at it.....
Oh cook the board and put something on there to level it out, may work for you.
I"m sure you found out, but it won't stay as loud once you get it past POST. Hopefully you got iLO working and then no need for a KVM. Ah, I see you were able to get the iLO setup. Not sure what features the iLO of those days supported, but not not only does it fully mirror the same things the KVM would show you, but you can mount an ISO to patch (like an SSP) and/or install from.
I found a full iLO license key on the case later haha.
this is the first im hearing of the coding advent. I gotta give that a try!
glhf do it in perl
wow, 64bit PCI-X slots and SCSI, haven't seen those for a while. good piece of hardware but i guess power consumption will be a concern if you want to keep it running.
yeah this one doesn't stay running too long lol
Yeah they made some super nice servers back then.
Antistatic bags are not insulators. They are conductive. This is so that accumulated charge can dissipate. Your RAM BOARD may still be non-functional. Your test is flawed using the antistatic as layer between the board and the metal casing will not give the result you expect, namely isolation. Use something else and retest.
I had a dl380, I think I found either a way to get a trial Ilo key or a Kayden to let me manage it remotely.
You should revisit your fancy kvm, can you boot a server off the usb now that you have a usb module?
No luck with that USB module, I think my USB SIP must not actually support it.
Anti static bags are conductive
I'm going to try another type of plastic, some other commenters mentioned that as well!
@@clabretro did other kind of plastic work? If no, try with multimeter in continuity mode to check the caps. One of these might be shorted.
@@MrKrezol Actually, you'll love this - the board needed to be set to the locked position for it to work. Worked fine even with the anti-static! I don't know why the machine would allow the other board to init while unlocked, but once I started locking the "bad" one it worked just fine haha.
You should have set the Compaq and hp servers with the smart start disks to get the full experience.
Haha I know. I'm kinda glad I didn't have to do that on the HP 😂
I did actually have to use smart start when I first setup the Compaq DL380: ua-cam.com/video/gyyhqHBmKg4/v-deo.html
wow some people are really smart i believe
Curious how the 4 CPU work with only two ram modules and not even being fully populated
yeah I was wondering about that, super interesting
I'm curious how this will run Ubuntu server 22.04LTS. I have a Dell server of a similar vintage running it. Does amazingly well, crazy to think how far back the 64bit CPU extension goes.
Just thought I'd pop this here I think I have a bunch of IBM branded ddr2 in my box of ram if you wanted any
Hey there, you can reach out to the email in the about page if you want!
@@clabretro will do, better that you find a use for it 👍
@@clabretro Sent a basic Email hopefully it comes through :>
Have you come across any late model HP / Compaq Alpha servers? I have been looking for when they exceeded 1ghz.
I haven't but those are really cool
Well, the servers of our twenties LOL! Of course nobody would allow a greenhorn to mess with such hardware, especially in poor countries. So older guys were securing that job for themselves. 😂😂
It is Debian/Ubuntu. You should not be building from source. Installing PHP from source is even worse. You need dev packages for system libraries used by enabled php modules. Period correct Ubuntu Hoary should be running PHP 4.3.10.
Try cleaning the golden finger of the memory board with ipa
I did, no luck unfortunately
Looks like it's dead Jim
Sehr Schade das die Stromkosten in Deutschland so hoch sind so kann ich leider solches Equipment nicht nutzen 😢
Definitely shouldn't put that bad boy on the internet
nope 😆
Hey what about the part 2 of the m3250 lenovo server
Needed a break from it lol
What kind of camera do you use?
Believe it or not, it's just my Galaxy S22+ and then a Nexigo 4k webcam for anything where I'm at the computer.
I think I have a license key for your version of iLO if you want to try it
I found one on the case later haha
antistatic bags are conductive... oof
Looking at the specs for that server it probably has single core Xeon cpu's that were derived from the Pentium 4 which were for its time the worst CPU Intel ever made. Otherwise that server is wonderfully overengineered.
haha yeah
In re that it thinks it's 2005 and you're fine with it - didn't you get bit by wrong set clock before? No lesson learned. :P
worked this time 😆
It's hard to believe that stumbling my way through hosting a phpBB forum in 2005 basically paved the way to the network admin career I'm in today. Nice trip down memory lane with the LAMP install and head scratching when they don't communicate properly. Love the content and love seeing old hardware (especially stuff that I've never heard of) get a new lease on life. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for watching! It's been fun hearing how many other people messed around with phpBB back then.
Thanks for exploring all this heavy junk for us. The kid in me would have loved to play with all this stuff, but as I get older I lost some enthusiasm, but especially lost my patience for lugging these boat anchors around. The extra energy you have to set them up is just completes the trifecta of what I'm missing.
I guess what I'm saying is I like this stuff but I have no energy or time to mess with it, so thanks for letting me live vicariously. Cheers
That means a lot, yeah I totally get it. It can drain you haha.
31:48 Man, I love the "news" on that HP website. Literally "Itanium's future is promising"...
haha I know
Cool machine! I'm curious if the errant memory board would work if you use another material to insulate the bowed board from the caddy. Anti-static bags are actually slightly conductive themselves - this is how they create the anti-static protection for the bag's contents. I'd try again with paper or vinyl and see if you get any different results.
Well interesting, I'll try that!
Here's a good explanation of pink anti-static vs. silver static shielded bags
ua-cam.com/video/imdtXcnywb8/v-deo.html
I remember when one of the HP server where I work had a faulty PSU, our contractor shipped out a whole new server.
I was genuinely shocked by this because I had an expectation that something like the PSU would be a relatively simple in field replacement.
heh kinda defeats the purpose of the modularity
Honey stop the car new mid-2000s server video just dropped
I ran a forum, hosted on a dialup connection with dynamic DNS to keep it "available" through reconnects back in the early 2000s. But I was an ASP weenie back then rather than PHP. Later I moved to Perl when I started messing about with FreeBSD more, and now Python.
Fun stories from that time of my life. I used to attend a LAN gaming event at a local community centre, and got involved with running it. Later on I wrote an online booking management system to help manage the attendees and make sure we didn't go over capacity. That was in ASP of course. 😎
ha thats awesome
creating dead forums... yeah I def never did that either.........
"YESSS" is what I just muttered under my breath when I saw there's a new clabretro tonight. Love the content my man!
Haha that means a lot, wish I was able to get it out a little earlier!
New best tech channel on this hell hole we call UA-cam.