IBM System p5 Enterprise Server 

I ran these servers in the financial services industry for over a decade. They are built like tanks and are rock solid. The last model I was running was a P9 before I moved to an organization that no longer used them.

The downside to these proprietary enterprise servers is they're built to be about as user unfriendly as possible - unobtanium interposers for disks, arcane menus on the display that are in numbers instead of text, other similar proprietary stuff. That way the customers are supposed to buy the yearly service contract and let IBM take care of all that "hard stuff". Pretty sure they make more money off the service contracts than they do off of initially selling the machine.

You aren't helping disuade me from picking up some old enterprise equipment for the home lab. But i dont have a home lab at all! Living vicariously through you haha

AHHH the memories. I worked on these boxes for 28 years, retired last year. You have earned a follow.

I worked on these systems for years, until around the time this machine came out. If you can get a working HMC, you can do some cool things. You can split up your machine into LPARs (logical partitions) which are sort of like virtual machines but run on the hardware via a hypervisor instead of software translation. You can then split up your resources, like tenths of a CPU to each LPAR. Not much to split up, however with only two CPU cores. This video brings back a lot of memories. Some of the earlier high-end rack-mounted RS/6000 systems took about 45 minutes to boot to the SMS prompt, then you had to be there to hit the key to get into SMS so you could install the AIX OS. That was painful.

IBM-POWER wow, I love it! Thanks. This non-s86/x64 CPU architecture is quite unique. Still alive with new products after so many years, whereas MIPS and SPARC have disappeared from the server market. 30 years after, IBM-POWER is still alive today, with POWER-10, that's very impressive.

I really want one of these with AS/400 (er... IBM i) licensed and running.

logg, logg, it's better than bad; it's good! everyone wants a logg, you're gonna love it, logg

That system just looks so slick. I know enterprise gear usually doesn't get a ton of love, but youve gotta admit that IBM made some darn attractive machines.

Welcome in the magic world of IBM-I platform (formerly known as AS/400, eSeries, Pseries, Power, Power-i). I ran that system from 16 years! The 5.25 bay is for tape backup unit. Fiber channel normally will be used for a SAN (most machine is diskless). Thanks for this time travel

Love the old enterprise gear! And cool to see you getting this stuff actually working.

Gotta love enterprise stuff. It’s over engineered but super simple to understand.

I love this stuff and I don’t really know why, I’m not old enough to have worked with this stuff. The videos are super well done, audio levels are lovely and even, and you shoot really well. Keep it up, I love these videos.

For such a small channel you make great videos!

Yess! A perfect saturday evening with some clabretro and old IBM servers :)

That web interface hasn’t aged a day, what a beauty to behold!!!🥰

The SCA to SCSI-50/SCSI-68 pin card that you use requires external power with that molex connector on the card. It supplies power to the hard drive so that it can be seen. I have one of them in my 43P-150 to connect a SCA hard disk to the 68pin UltraWide SCSI channel in that machine. Those POWER5 machines were until recently the backbone of the FAA EnRoute system (ERAM). They have been replaced in the past few years with HPE Proliants running RHEL. Those P5s were used as deskside machines for air traffic controllers and the backend servers.

Always like learning about these type of server hardware, never been exposed to one except seeing their ads in my dad's Business Week or The Economists magazines. Seeing how you get it up and running is fascinating.

I worked on these at Ford Motor - only the big refrigerator power5 main frames connected to IBM Shark storage. I was responsible for carving & deploying LPARs running Linux and AIX. and one of my best friends worked at ebmpapst (maker of those fan motors).

Ah Yes Quality computing from the early 2000's, Great Video!!

Just found your channel a few days ago and can now proudly say I’ve binge watched all your videos. Amazing content, been having a blast watching it. People are probably tired of hearing me talk about your channel hahaha

I never comment on videos, but this stuff is gold. I had no idea I was into retro enterprise obscura! Keep up the good work!

Love your channel! Finally a well done, long format, bag of awesomeness on RU-vid. Keep it up please 😊

Your content is great my man, really looking forward to this IBM hardware.

I still use these in the FAA. Currently going under tech upgrades. I hate these things so much 😂. The boot process is SO SLOOOOW.

Man this is an old box. Still rock solid..❤

Been so looking forward to this video after your last. These old enterprise servers are a gold mine to a young IT Data center tech! Keep them comming.

The reason for the long boot process is that the POWER5 processors cannot boot themselves. Rather another chip has to initialize everything due to the GX bus calibration stages upon boot. This is due to the GX bus running a division of the processor speeds vs. using a multiplier based off an external system clock. This required synchronizing clocks between all the processor dies. Note that the POWER5 die contains two cores, IBM would often put two dies into a single package for a quad core per socket. The speeds inside the package would be different than jumping out to an external socket which added another layer of synchronization complexity as they ran at different rates. While you didn't get a quad core model, the POWER5 does support SMT so you can run four threads simultaneously on this box. While the p-series ran AIX, IBM's Unix offering, it also supported OS/400 aka i5/OS aka IBM i. Previously IBM had two related but specialized versions of POWER and PowerPC that merged together with the POWER4. This is also where IBM started to add specific features for their PowerVM hypervisor in hardware, though with only two cores and four threads with 4 GB of RAM, virtualization is going to of limited usage. The 1994 copyright stems from the system's CHRP roots to run multiple operating systems (which included MacOS at one point in history!).

Those front panel buttons are even-more Parma Violet-y than the NA SNES controller buttons!

IBM does love their 3 letter accronnyms for different systems and components. Just as they also like their 4 digit codes.

I had a power 7 720 it was fun running IBM i on it along with aix. However let it go to the next homelab / tinkerer. Very robust and overbuilt to exceedingly awesome standards. Very quiet too after the full boot process.

well, this was a walk down memory lane. great video. happy i found your channel.

Loving the little community that's being built up around the channel! Awesome to see the subscriber number jump every time a video comes out haha

I was thinking "the p5 isn't that old, I worked with the 520"... then I realised I'm getting old. Thanks!

Great video! Link added to our daily newsletter about IBM Technologies!

I started working on Iseries (aka As/400) from 1998 and still do to this date (though now in Application support since 2017). Moving to IBM P10 next year. AS400 lives on!!! :) the statuss code are IPL (Initial program load) codes. For HMC access, 'IBM I Access client soltion' pgm for 5250 emulation (interactive jobs/sessions) and HMC tools, interface access.

I really enjoyed plans B and C for trying to get the hard drive running, much of that same pain can be had in the industrial automation field! I've always wondered the differences between IBM System p and the IBM System i that I learned to program on in college are. Keep us posted with this IBM project, can't wait! Trying to hunt down an AS/400 system myself.

Reminds me of the old iseries IBM computers we used to use.

Been waiting for this one since the Craigslist haul video 😁

Nice video and machine. Good work!

Those fan bearings looked shot. Good fix. Good to have Deox-it on hand to get in there. I've used Evaporust on other parts, but never something enclosed like that. I'll remember to just give the oil a shot.

Oh wow that is a beautiful machine

That brings back memories. Around 2012, we salvaged a bunch of these machines for AIX testing. I've lost quite a few days troubleshooting error codes, only to discover randomly the RAM modules were between half dead and completely dead... Fortunately, secondhand RAM for these was cheap on ebay, and after that it was all good. I even install Gentoo for shits and giggles on one of the spares. I also quite liked our naming convention: Flower, Point, Austin because Flower Power, Power Point and Austin Power(s).

Been waiting for this video, its great!

I have a Power720 Express that I use as well! The hardware is definitely archaic (and the IBMi software even more so), but these things are second to none in build quality! You'll also be happy to know that the ASMI web interface hasn't changed a bit. XD

Man I have only worked at 2 places with these and it was everyone's favorite servers because of the few times we had to work on them it was insanely easy and we didn't fear power down on them.

My father did CAD engineering on a 6000 for a long while (after hand-drafting). I was kinda bummed when he said they switched to PCs for Catia V5. Still want to get one some day... I need some IBM RISC in my life!

This thing is beautiful

The HMC is most likely an IBM X3550 that runs an HMC image and a special version of IMM. Tried converting a normal X3550 M4 to a 7042 HMC some years ago, fun times. IBM at some point put ThinkPads as local HMCs inside larger POWER mainframes, always wanted one to play around

I also have had problems with those SCSI adapters. What I have found to work is using a HP DL380 G4 server hard drive backplane PCB. Works fine with a Adaptec 39160 PCI-X card (can work with regular 32 bit PCI slots). It needs custom wiring into the power connector so the 12V and 5V goes to the right places.

I fixed a lot of fans that way. just had to do all the fans on my only 1 year old SAS backpain they where ball barring too! I think the SAS hot swop bays was stored in a Real damp environment.

Great content my man. I made sure to subscribe.

Been waiting to see this!!! Awesome job dude!

4:50 - Those "flaps" are one-way valves for airflow. If the fan stops working (and providing pressure) these flaps will close and prevent the other fans from circulation air through it.

I'm amazed that the SCSI backplane is 0.1" pitch like the old PS/2 DBA-ESDI drives - IBM had different backplanes (under the standard 'Type' nomenclature) for the PC Server lines that preceded the 'Netfinity' servers (5xx-series became 5000 models, 7xx became the 7000 models). Netfinity may have had a variety of trays for the line (with the blanks lacking compartments like here), but the drives themselves were SCA. After PS/2s, IBM started (like everyone else) using Adaptec controllers, which meant differing SCSI ID conventions (previously, the drive controller was in the highest-numbered slot, and the boot drive had the highest SCSI ID). Actually, the system reminds me more of an AS/400...

the chunky connector on the motherboard i believe adds expansion connectors for interconnecting an expansion frame along with the spcn ports.

Ahhhh those are fun machines! I went back over the video, and wrote down some notes on bits I remember from working with them: 03:03 the rack indicator was an extra set of cables that came if you bought a rack with a bunch of those, so it'd show not only which machine to service (there's already an ident light besides it for that), but also which rack in a row needed to be opened! I never saw this installed on a customer's premises 04:00 that huge connector is an IBM GX+ connector, for "high-speed" straight-to-the-CPU, cross-system communication. 04:50 the slots, just like the blanks up front and through the machine, are to keep the airflow properly contained. These machines had very well-designed cooling solutions, and in this case if the fans stopped spinning (or were removed) airflow wouldn't "leak" through that opening, and keep working as designed 07:45 the other four "modules" you see in the rack are SCSI dumb disk trays (DASD arrays), like the 7311-D20 (which I remember the code, but not if they're compatible with this specific system). Three SCSI external cards like this server has are for three of these arrays per server (the rack has two servers and six disk modules like these. The two SPCN serial ports on 10:20 are, amongst other things, to connect to arrays like these! 18:35 "I wonder if I can just reset it to 'admin'" that was pretty much the standard procedure if you wanted to be nice to the other technicians who'd eventually service this machine :D 25:21 "Remote IPL" is probably one of the most useful features in pSeries servers, you could install a Network Install Manager (NIM) software in one of your AIX servers, import the boot media into it, and use it to "serve" remote install via BOOTP (including something akin to kickstart configs/answer files) 26:39 if you can't get the hard drives working but want to give this a try on the cheap, you can try to get another server running iSCSI (TrueNAS works well enough for this) to serve up remote volumes that you can use. I never tried this on p520 machines, but I've done it a few times in p550s and p570s successfully! 27:30 there's a few of those disks *with interposers* on ebay right now! Search for "97P3030" or "ibm 4326" for a few results (though they cost a preeeetty penny, sadly) 28:30 IBM HMCs are intel "x-server" servers with hardcoded hardware models, which conveniently can be handwritten in a VM configuration :) Hope any of it is useful!

This was fun! Bummer you didn’t get further into it. Can’t wait to see what comes of that hardware interface controller. IBM always had some super interesting bleeding edge stuff, which is also kinda too bad in that a lot of it never really took off. The more proprietary these companies made their stuff, the less it seems really took any real hood in the enterprise realms. Save for AS400, anyway. 2023 and my company, a major national financial institution, which is still using as400 trash lol.

The plastic thingies underneath the fans are there to prevent the airflow going the wrong way when you remove the fan. The air pressure from other fans would make air flow thru that hole otherwise. So they are not "dust filters"

I smell a t-shirt idea with that “you have logg” message. 😂

The HMC is just a regular x86 server or PC (x3500 series, deskside tower, or a rack drawer with an IBM ThinkPad mounted in it) running a dedicated OS image. You could probably find that image somewhere and install it on just any system you have around.

I also have a p5 like yours, yes normally this model is pleasantly quiet for a server. Hopefully you have a lot of licenses on the hardware.

Nice that it has a built in SMS, the weird SCSI connectors must be for Sega Master System games!

(22:33) Try opening the drive with the emergency eject pinhole on the front. There's a chance a ribbon cable on the inside was ripped as I remember buying a used IBM ThinkPad R51 that had a similar drive but the higher end DVD multi model and it turned out to not work becsuse the ribbon cable had completely ripped. (23:38) That reminded me of when my dad worked at a business school in the early 2000s and they, at the time, ran Windows ME. I think it was because they were a small business and couldn't afford to run Windows 2000. Our 2 identically configured custom-built PCs we had at home ran Windows 98 SE.

I love the Color coding on IBM hardware: PSUs have red tabs, meaning hot swappable. FSP has blue tabs, meaning system has to be shut down and powered off first.

Old RS/6000s used processors like PowerPC 601 and 604, which were also used by Macs. And according to Wikipedia, POWER3 and later processors also use PowerPC instruction set, or Power ISA in newer processors. And in fact, some IBM PowerPC workstations display Apple copyright message on startup, since PowerPC was created by AIM alliance: Apple-IBM-Motorola.

Only installed these from DAT-tape, but that's pretty straight forward.

This one is low end server, the real high end P5 consists from 2 servers connected by x ribon CPU cable :)

those plastic things under the fans are for backflow prevention if one of the fans dies/gets removed so airflow doesnt get wrecked

Nice, the HMC looks like it uses a very similar case to my 1U p505 (9115-505) server! I've been through a similar journey; my machine is also POWER5+ dual-core, but i ended up installing Debian 11. I tried installing 12 but it locks up booting the install media. As you can imagine the server isn't running a lot of the time, being 1U and power efficiency not a priority for these machines.

I had similar serial issues with some devices, the only solution I found which worked, was building a custom serial adapter, with non FTDI based USB->Serial chipset. It isn't terminal issues, I dont know exactly why those issues happen, but I suspect data isn't "clock" aligned to chipset expectation. Old serial systems don't seem to suffer from it, as they buffer stuff properly, but FTDI stuff seems to get confused.

The hardware that communicates prior to the system being 'powered on', and the early boot sequence items that communicate once the system is 'powered on' very likely want different status lines asserted on the serial port. This can usually be puzzled out with a serial break out box to determine which lines need to be tied together, etc.

I suppose the transparent plastic blades under the fans are to make sure the air doesn't come from here in case a fan fail. It's a kind of valve.

I just threw one of these out along with a Power6 box just a couple months ago.

You also need to power the external drive. That molex plug needs 12v at least and probably 5v for the disk controller. I've used a p520 with a SUN external hdd box. Ghetto.. I know but got me out of a jam at work. Also those drive interposer boards, few of the AS/400's from the period used the same thing. HMC you can also install to a VM with some fiddling. Looking forward to the second. I've just upgraded my home lab to p7+'s.

I remember purchasing 2 servers in an auction for 450$. They were labeled as "non functional". People at the auction called me stupid ! Fortunately, i'd checked them before hand and they were still on 24h replacement warranty ! (LOL) the next day, I had 2 brand new replacements !

Similar control panels are still on Power systems, and optional on Lenovo systems. Surprised this has commodity RAM instead of something proprietary like their later P systems. Power6 was an in order CPU

IBM default password were usually set to abc1234 out of the box. Unfortunately CPU cores had to be paid for via IBM licensing. The hard drives the P5 require something called SAS drives.

I just happen to have around half a dozen of those funky IBM disk tray/interposer boards that I have no use for. I think they're the exact part you need; I can send photos and part numbers if you're interested.

Installed VIOS and AIX on these machines so many times and I don't know if I've ever had the install process be the same any of those times. If any machine is going to have ghosts, it would definitely be an IBM P5.

Your video make me want to fix and power on my old RS/6000 44P Model 170....

We have a couple clients in manufacturing that still run P720 for custom apps

Great stuff mate. I have to wonder if the firmware update might fix that external SCSI issue? Just a thought.

Wow. That drive tray cages. Single cast metal piece. Wow. These days, they are usually 2/3 separate cast pieces with some rivets, pins or screws. This one is build like a brick. Still, wish there was a common standard for drive cages.

awesome system, and great progress getting it this far! can it run IBM's linux Z/OS ?

I once saw a fascinating looking PowerPC 970-based IBM system on Ebay. Of course it was way too expensive to buy for funsies. A shame since it's not useful for much more than goofing around on nowadays. But it was interesting to me since it's the same CPU used in the Power Mac G5.

With the SCSI adapter board shouldn't you also power the drive with the molex connector?

From my understanding the blank dim slot covers are just to keep dust out not improve air flow.

Every time I have re-oiled bearings, they haven’t worked in the long term. The best solution seems always to be to replace the bearings - they are very often standard parts, cheap and easy to source.

I want to know how much time you spend reading documentation, and making it from shipping, to running great? I was planning doing something similar, but have no experience with racks, or server hardware... Would be great if you make video, that walk us through configuring basic setup - what do we need to even consider doing such step - what kind of connection(cable), and what programs you use to communicate via ( for example ) serial port etc. ;-) What to look for when considering buying such equipment? (I heard of some licencing that can prevent you from doing something with the server - can you somehow buy that licence, or do something else to make things work?)

If you struggle to find a working harddrive I think you may be able to use iSCSI from a Linux or Windows server or NAS just to get further?

Now you need ether an IBM or SUN Rack :)

Based on the ASMI this IBM server was actually being used by IBM before you purchased it. The IP in the ASMI was 9.5.32.198/24 (subnet is owned by IBM), and for some odd reason, I guess they have never heard of NAT seeing as how the IP address is publically routable and statically set.

....given a hardware serial connection, is that Linux box an AOpen Digital Engine box of some flavor meant for digital signage?

Nice old IBM logo with a very sweet case. Externally, i love this style. Do you think it's possible to convert this system to a modern NAS? Keeping the HDDs bays for real use, same for the DVD drive, maybe having the front display working with luck, but mostly, rearrange the internal to fit modern motherboard/psu etc?

Me and my son has two system X servers. can't remember what model number. Decked out with 128gb of ram and dual xeon procs. You know they are old due to them only have a total of 12 cores. well mixture of cores and Hyper-Threads. One I use for virtual machines and my son uses his for Minecraft servers and stuff.

its not a SUNnyday, but this is fine too

Dumb question, but did you power the hard drives? That SCSI cable does not carry power, right?

I am curious if it could run a regular Linux distro? I think Debian and OpenSuse have Power Based images.

Pretty cool stuff! I wonder if FreeBSD is available on that platform....