The collected works of morpheus256

Although ram is definitely a key ingredient to ZFS, it's not the most important one. 64 bit arch is (IMO). When I put my opensolaris file server together at home I used what I readily had available, 32 bit was painfully slow. I replaced the Intel Pentium setup with a old Opteron 144? (1.8ghz) 939, and only 2gb of ddr. the performance gain was amazing, I'm still running it that way now, but I'm able to easily saturate a 1gige link both up and down.

The other thing that's really hard on processors with zfs is your raid level, raidz1, raidz2, raidz3 are killer, I was hitting 40-60% cpu with 8 spindles in raidz2 on the Opteron, switched it to mirror sets, and my cpu runs at maybe 5% copying files at 130mb/s

On a PIII system if you're trying to run zfs, RAM is the least of your problems

Well I've gone and done it, I spent 4hrs in the car to go pickup a Baby S/36 system, with host PC, monitor, keyboard, 8 Binders of manuals, 2 boxes of disks, and spares.

So far I've powered on the 5170 to be greeted with a 161 error, Going to need to find a battery and reconfigure that before going any futher.

The 5170 is loaded with:

• 1x 5.25, 1x3.5 Floppy
• 1x ST238R HDD
• 2x Serial cards
• 1x MDA/Parallel
• 1x Memory card
• 1x S/36 "Driver Board"
• 1x FDD/RLL controller

The 5364 is loaded with:

• 1x 5.25 Floppy
• 2x 40MB ESDI?

I also got some spare cards for the 5364, Looks like a processor card, Memory card, and RTC card?

I'll take some pictures later if there's interest.

Pictures as requested!
Documentation and Disks:


Driver and Receiver cards:




5170 System:


5364 System:


There are a lot more detailed photos of a 5364 located here:
http://www.supervinx.com/Retrocomputer/IBM/5364/01/

hamei wrote: Just in case you were wondering, photobucket sucks dead donkey balls ... bloated, rotting, hairy, stinking maggot-laden dead donkey balls.

Hahaha! I was going to use my Google drive but didn't wan't to chew up space.

Found my DIN->PS2 keyboard adapter, hopefully tomorrow I'll have a battery pack put together so I can get the cmos settings configured and then see what happens.

Just a quick update:

After rebuilding the battery, entering the cmos settings in basic and booting the 5170 it became very apparent the ST-238R was dying, I created copied everything (S36, PCS36,VDISK) from the drive minus dos onto 2x 1.44mb floppies and have everything backed up needed to restore onto a new drive, I have a ST-4038 drive at work I'm planning on using.

Questions:
Once the ST-4038 is installed, and the type (20) is configured, do I need to do a LLF or change the interleave? I don't know what the status is of the drive as it was pulled from a system many years ago.

Once I have the 5170 straightened out, what are the correct procedures for powering on and off of the 5364? I can't imagine that at the end of the day you could just flip them both off and expect the file-system to be too happy.

I fully plan on taking images of all the Disks for the 5170 and the 5364, the only problem I see and correct me if I'm wrong, which I likely am is the 5364 was the only S36 to use a 5-1/4 drive, and the format of the disks was not PC compatible. I'm not even sure the drive in the 5364 is a standard PC drive?

Thanks!

Update,

I located an MFM controller for the ST4038 for the 5170, Installed, configured the drive type, LLF, HLF, installed dos and restored my backup. Back in business.

Turned on the 5364 for the first time..... Let it boot? (floppy light was on for a long time), and could see communication of some sort by selecting option 2.
Alt+ESC, and select station 1, Blinking terminal cursor in the top right, and the terminal info along the bottom. That's it nothing more. I never see the user login screen. select option 1 from the service screen I can change my service level from Normal to service, Password=password but not much more I can see or do. selecting options 3,4,5 result in: "reload the s/36 attachment program"

At this point, Either I'm doing something wrong (which is likely) or it's a big paperweight...

The 5170 just has a standard 5170 badge, nothing special there unfortunately.