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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! :-)
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 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. 😎
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.
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!
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.
Ran dl380,dl580,dl980 servers over the years, on top of the c7000 and newer synergy systems. The dl580 boxes were good boxes but the memory speed was slower to match the slower Xeon speeds. Moved one Oracle RAQ cluster from dl580 to dl380 nodes when the DB needed more oomph in the cache and memory department over core count.
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)
memory mirroring is still a thing in modern servers my Cisco UCS C220 M4 has it believe my Poweredge R720 does too...as for your Proliant wow that thing can hold 64GB of RAM dang! supposedly its socket 604 and it can take 4x dual core with HT 3GHZ 165W (!!!) CPUs LOL they allegedly support Virtualization so you could roll that thing with a oldie version of esxi like 6.5 or something for fun . HP letting you see a remote console but text only and you need a license to actually see GUI is got to be the most pickish HP thing I have seen in awhile lol. Where do you get all these servers from lol Ebay?
haha. this one came from eBay, let's just say I'm pretty sure the seller lost money on shipping this thing (usually I'm getting ripped off). this thing is HEAVY
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
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. 😂😂
The ILO errors may indicate that the license is not set because the NVRAM ran out of power. There should be a license key as part of the iLO label, ,along with the default admin password and username. When I got my second hand ProLiants, I had to reset the iLO license due to that NVRAM issue.
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.
if it makes you feel better, i set up a PHPBB forum on my raspberry pi 1b like last year just to see if it could and it did indeed could, but i really shudnt because it was very easy to overwhelm
You forgot the existence of VMware and other virtualization vendors. In 2008 most of the HW based services had moved onto VMs running in your own datacenter.
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?
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!
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 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...
Virtualisation and clustering existed in 2005. The extra redundancies are for workloads where even a downtime of a few seconds or minutes results in severe consequences. Also, 4-way systems are super niche and really expensive. Nobody buys only 1 of those. If you can afford one, you can afford 2. Everybody else should buy 2 smaller boxes. Nobody should run only one prod box. That's horrible. Edit: HPE still has Advanced Memory Protection. It can map out faulty regions of RAM with online spare. Oh, and google iLO advanced key.....
What makes me really sad that the power efficiency of that thing (say GFLOPS per Watt, or whatever else) is terrible when compared to 3-4 years old smartphones. So if you really wanted to use it as a server, you'd probably get similar computational power from several modern SBCs like Raspberry Pi that would use ~90% less energy. Don't get me wrong, I really love old PCs and servers, but economically their place is in a recycling facility, and not on a desk, connected to mains.
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.
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.
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
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.
We had these back in the day for a packet sniffer tool for monitoring what people were doing in a system containing sensitive data. Needed the speed and resilience these offered. We had such a big discounts with HP that our local supplier charged us less than they paid to the supplier network and then got a refund from HP of the difference 😂 Before the 2007 global banking crisis the money we spent on hardware was crazy🎉
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.
About iLO: You can't use the advanced features (including the remote console) without a license. Without it, the remote console stops working shortly after the system boots. If you need a key, reach out to me. See it as a donation to the channel.
Holy heck PHP brings back memories of school. I did a GCSE in compsci and wrote our coursework project in PHP. PHP was a joy (and nightmare) to use and I do and don’t miss it. In many ways the hot reload stuff I have with the JS stuff I do now is similar but that simple F5 and it just works? Can’t beat it. No config needed!
I think I have some memory modules that would fit one of these from this machine's bigger brother (a 6U unit?). Help me get a hold of you, and we can figure out how to ship them to you if you want them.
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?
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.
Bowed pcb's are usually ok internally, the issue is surface mount caps and resistors sometimes pop off. Or really anything soldered to the board that doesn't have the same ability to flex can crack its solder joint.
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?
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!
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.
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
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 ;-)...
Oh man, forgot about PHP-NUKE. I almost threw phpMyAdmin on there. For the RAM you can reach out to the email in the channel's about page if you'd like!
Although the memory card/module is most likely bad, you do need to lock the tray to stop ro the server knows it's not going to be removed. :) I worked on 15 on those servers back in the day :) The hot swap memory cards were great but you need to be sure NOT to just pull out the card. When you unlock the tray the hardware will start the fail over assuming you have all the drivers/support packs loaded for the OS installed.
Woah! Hold on there...don't forget about VMware. It was and still is a very important part of the landscape, especially pre cloud and docker stuff. We ran tons of the old HP esx clusters before Cisco UCS came along.
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.
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.
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.
About 10 years ago I purchased a used HP dl585 G1. This uses the amd socket 940 processors. What I found out later on is the even though they are 64bit processors. They didn't have the AMD-V extension. Thus, running virtual machines on it via 64 bit is a no go. Another thing is the server did not officially support windows 2008r2. I can't remember why. I know the server installation discs didn't support it. But, I was able to install 2008r2 with no issues. Other people around 5 years before that had no issues either. One last note is I finally picked up a rack mount kit for it. The prices on e-pay came down enough.
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 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.
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 !
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.😉
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
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).
Stunning machine. Shame about the memory board. At least you got a working server. LOL, that server lid is almost as satisfying as racking a pistol slide 😆
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.
