Setting up a Compaq ProLiant DL380 from 2000 

Used to work on these professionally back in the day. Yes the G1 was a bit clunky and the LO card a bit primitive, but things improved quite a bit with later generations. The G1 had the styling of earlier proliant models (400,800,1600 etc) and the SCU looks very EISA like! The G2 and later had a new look and feel and were much easier to work on. Thanks for the memories!

My dad worked on these servers for HP and Compaq back in the day. He had one of these exact machines in his lab at his office so he could test software and SP bundles for customers. He had it running Windows Server 2003 when it first came out. Quite an impressive machine for its time. Yes, the Compaq BIOS utilities ran a very custom version of Windows 9x and before that, Windows 3.1 in older machines.

omg, so proud of that 40-bit SSL @21:19

I used to work for an authorized COMPAQ dealer in 2000/2001. Smart start was different. The worst part about running old java based hardware is finding the right version of java. (the ILO on the Dell R710 is also fun to get working for the same reason) I have a Cisco ASA 5510 in my home lab and it took forever to find the needed java files to run the ASDM.

I had one of these first generation DL380's and HP still sends me support alerts about them to this day. Pretty amazing.

I found a gen 1 chassis with a live ILOM on my work's network last year. The system was off but the chassis was still racked, attached to network, and powered.

I worked at a job that bought these second hand and would throw them in a colo to rent out. They were too cheap to buy proper rail kits and had like 5-6 of these resting on some kind of rack mounted L bracket. One day we got a swarm of Nagios alerts in and I rushed down to take a look. Turns out the bracket blew out and all the severs were falling out the rack. There was so much weight that it forced the locked cabinets front door wide open. Good times…

I love the fact the CPU PSUs are on cards that look like they're removable. That's some impressive serviceability

That remote management / ILO card is pretty wild, glad to see you stuck with it and the old Java to make it work. Reminds me of that old meme "hey dog, we heard you like computers, so we got a computer for your computer"

I worked with those and some older stand up Compaq models. They are a weird beast. Especially running Novell 4.11 and 5. Cool to see those again.😊

Until a couple of years ago i ran a compaq Proliant 1850r as my mail server with Debian 4.0. The label on the outside of the machine was Josef. It was the predecessor to the DL380. It was a dual pentium II machine. It had two 9 GB SCSI drives in RAID1, two 18GB in RAID1 and a pair of mirrored 300GB Maxtor Diamondmax SATA drives connected to a cheap SATA card. It ran great great for more than 10 years. Then it didn't run any more. I found my second 1850R machine labeled Stalin in storage and used it to read the drives and to virtualize everything. Last spring i replaced the VM with a new VM where i run mailcow to self host my email.

Love to see more on this era of old servers ..even older. Especially DEC/Compaq/Fujitsu/SNI/HP/Amdahl.

It's so cool to see such retro hardware. I discovered your channel due to researching about some sun hardware. And subscribed!

Awesome! Brings back memories. Don't forget the HAL!

I assembled and configured a bucket load of those servers and tower aquivalent : the ML530. Usually they came partially mounted. We have to add the Smartarray controler, power supply and processors. Last year I found one of them burried inside a factory, covered with dust, dead insects and all kind of disgusting things. It was in charge of an automatic label printing for boxes with a very basic Windows 2000 and a simple program.

I remember these from my first co-op placement along with its 1U version, the DL360. I never had hands on at the configuration level, but would be tasked with sourcing parts and additional servers off ebay for them. To this day, I still refer to any server's remote management function as ilo.

So the reason the bios is so odd on the old Proliant systems is due to their evolution from Compaqs EISA systems. This system configuration menu is lifted right off of any of the early 90s Proliant servers or Compaq EISA workstations. It provides a facility for reading EISA configs off of the floppy drive. I have a DL360 G1 which is basically the same server with much less expansion room and only a single power supply. Still supports the lights out card. Also have a Proliant 1500 from around 1995-6. Still works great. These old servers are tanks.

Used to have 100s of these in the data center I worked in. Very solid machines, and I would run Linux on the retired ones and they ran linux like a champ. The BIOS was definitely weird, but once you got the OS installed it just ran for ever.

Happy memories installing Callmanager on these when Cisco were re-branding them MCS servers

Great work mate, I have one of these at work that has been end of life for a long time... Actually the whole floor is being E-wasted so I need to get in there and salvage what I can.

If you need some more SCSI drives, I can ship 4-6 to you if you pay for the shipping. I have a bunch in HP/Compaq sleds of various sizes and speeds. All are 80 pin SCA SCSI.

I did that whole StarTech 5.25-to-3.5 in drive bay CF card reader deal, and love it for Linux Mandrake 8 and Windows 9X. Did have issues with Windows 2000 - very VERY slow, so I just use an IDE-to-SATA (or vice versa) adaptor to use SSDs for that and subsequent Windows.

That's a cool video about the smartstart crap..Had the same problem for my Proliant 800 tower.It didn't boot up of course..Thanks!!

Have worked on 380 and 385s. HP variants. Was not aware that the name came through Compaq

I decomissioned so many servers of this generation, Compaq and HP (Netserver) alike... good times :)

Ooo it had a laptop optical drive! The 380s or 385 (the AMD version) are downright awesome… (Of course when totally maxed out with virtualization!)

I used to work on the proliant 1500 and 2500 when they were new. The smart start came with install disks for windows, netware os2 and sco. They were hyper odd but once you got used to them, they were great.

You might be able to get booting from the ide controller working by using some kind of bootloader on a floppy disk. The idea is to boot from a bootable device like a floppy disk, and have the bootloader on that boot ftom the ide controller. Plop comes to mind as a good bootloader to try!. Hope this helps 😊

We used to have an HP ML350 Gen 5 server at my work, which is a school. For a dual processor Xeon (Core 2 era Xeon) system, it always ran pretty nicely. Later developed a power backplane issue with only 1 PSU installed, so had to run 2 PSU's to solve that problem. Thankfully it did have a normal BIOS you could just access and it was actually a pretty straight forward machine. It got annoying once HP moved the SmartStart packs behind a pay wall, so no more firmware updates for that poor server.

I'm fairly certain I have the tower variant of this system or something *very* similar... Accessing BIOS on the older ProLiant machines is *always* a challenge! Without the setup disk, it's indescribably difficult. That being said, these systems can handle almost *any* hardware failure while running.

I can’t count how many of these I unboxed, racked and built back in early 2000s and big brother ML750 Press F6 during Windows installation and you can the. Inject the SCSI controller driver and the RAID disk will be visible for you to install your OS on to.

me when compaq remote insight is: out now me: finaly the light out edition...!!! compaq: it is computer in pci slot but with more ps2 port madness me: finaly... lthe light out edition!!

Me being the retro Compaq ProLiant fetishist that I am, I've tinkered enough with these to figure out you can USB boot and install operating systems if you plug a generic USB PCI card into the system, boot the Plop boot manager from floppy, and then select USB as boot device. It will then boot either Windows or Linux normally. If you're going to venture into Linux, these old systems have a fairly retarted BIOS, and will not find the boot partition if you install with automatic settings. So you have to manually set up the partition table, making sure to put the boot partition at the beginning of the drive.

I was on an ERP Project in 2000 that deployed these and DL320's with an Alphaserver ES40 cluster running Tru64.

Patience of a saint! 😂😂😂

When I use IDE controllers with old windows NT/95/98/2000 sometimes even XP I have to install drivers from disc in the beginning of the installation to find the disc/card

This reminds me of my messing around with a DL380 G2 found in a dumpster-dive. Absolutely gorgeous interior, and the only tool required to disassemble it is an included torx key. Then when I tried to get it running it took me ages of poking around old FTP servers to find the firmware to change the iLO card to 128-bit SSL and the program to create compatible virtual floppies, because I have neither a CD burner nor anything with a real floppy drive, except it.

My personal favourite is the Gen 3 DL380....i hope to one day buy one...but everyone's telling me not to... Damn them...i wanna play with servers!

you can run 16-bit stuff in 64-bit windows with winevdm

As for the IDE controller working; As long as the controller has its own boot ROM, it's almost always going to work. It does of course need support for older systems, but if it has its own BIOS ROM it should work fine. I've tried several cards without ROMs, and have never got any of those to work.

The IDE card is probably fine, but Windows 2000 most likely does not have drivers for it. During the setup loading look at the bottom of screen there should be a prompt to hit F6 briefly, this will give you the option to load a floppy with the IDE card drivers so that setup can know how to read from the device.

Had a couple of customers running Netware 5.x w/Groupwise on these boxes. That was before I joined Novell Inc. and lost all interest in hardware. I still think it was a shame that HP bought Compaq. Your own shrinkwraped SmartCD would propbably not work, you always had to use the SmartCD which was released with the server or one which was released later. And yes SmartStart was a bit of a pain, but you got used to it. In the mid 90s I installed a "few" ProSignia 300's, from taking it out of the box until it was running NetWare 3.12 took 20-30 minutes - Compaq was just working.

I'd love to see what Windows Server 2003 would do on here or possibly Windows Server 2008 and get a true file server experience. I'd imagine you could put a recent 32 bit version of Ubuntu server on here and make a Linux file server out of this too.

Perhaps you need to load the IDE driver from floppy during the installer.

Got one of these a while back, upgraded it to 2 pIII 750mhz. I was wondering if anyones looked at modifing the smartstart to allow for more configuration controll and OS support with linux or solaris

Nice vid. I have heard ages ago that if you manage to copy IDE.SYS to SCSI.SYS within the Win2K installation, then it might recognize IDE HDD and install Win on it. Not even sure that those files exist, but you could give it a try... The explanation was that on Proliant servers you could install Win only on SCSI HDDs.

I’m about to make some people feel old- I forgot that compaq used to be a company- I have a new proLiant and I had no idea compaq made these

The IDE to compact flash card adapter probably works fine. The issue is most likely with the actually compact flash card. You need to set a flag on the actual Compact Flash card to make it a permanent storage device.

at least now HP is smarter and using linux kernel for their bios and utilities

That unit has an updated drive bay with lvd drives.

Some pci ide cards don't work properly, you can try sas3080x pcix, in my ml330 works perfectly sata and sas drives!

what did they run the os off of orginally, one of the scsi drives?

Nice video, thanks for sharing these practically useless and time consuming experiments, just for the fun of it... So why haven't you tried connecting a regular IDE disk to the Promise controller? I have either used a Promise Ultra133 TX2 or an Abit HotRod 66 back in the day, just to have some cheap storage option in my ProLiant ML350 G3.

Hi, Get some HPUX machines., would be frun to watch. Cheers.

you could have got the ide flash card to work what u needed to probaly try was open smart storage admin to make a raid 0 on the flash card becuase i think the ide controller was a raid card

Huh, I think they removed that 5.5 image from the HPE support page, the oldest i can find now is 7.0.

Do you need more SCSI drives? I have a bunch of them I'll sell some to you.

Try Debian 12 on this hardware.

Try a BlueSCSI

USB floppy drives are not true floppy drives as far as those older computers are concerned. with USB floppy drives there is no real floppy controller, and they only handle 1.44MB or 720kB disk images, and they simply will not do non-standard things to a floppy disk, which is why there is a tool to create the floppies for you, instead of downloads of floppy images. The disk image creator from Compaq did some slightly special things to make one or more of those disks bootable which is not something that all USB floppies can do, if the computer you want to boot from the floppy is very old, such as the Compaq you're using here. You will almost certainly need to make those floppy disks with a real computer with a real, old floppy drive connected to either an integrated floppy controller, or a floppy controller on an ISA/PCI card.

Can it run modern linux?

I was hoping this would be an Alpha CPU

Can it play CS 1.6? :D

ITE IT8212F is by default in RAID mode this chip may not support Compact Flash. It is NOT exactly ATA. It is very very close, but chips like IT8212F are made as basic as it could be, therefore it may not be able to cooperate with CF Your choice of ATA controller was very bad for your purpose P.S. they are quite flaky anyway. I have had one and didn't like their overall performance

The way your microphone picks the keyboard up louder than your voice is uncomfortable.

Is left earring the gay side?

DAMN this is so bringing back memories ATA 133 promise cards !! Win2k. RM288 key ? lol !