EvaMar 24, 2025

πŸ’» Hello Old Friend, Talos II πŸ’»

This was my first IBM POWER9 system, acquired in 2020 and built for home/desk use. Dual socket SMT4 Sforza, 144 threads, 256-512GB RAM, various storage/net/accelerators over the years. [1]

As expected, I fell in love and acquired four IBM Power System L922-2U [2], which are presently in the colo awaiting network rebuild (remote hands this time).

The Talos II has served a variety of purposes, with most of its time running FreeBSD PPC64le (&a bit of PPC64be for fun). Sometimes also Linux, back when I was tearing into qemu code for compiler optimization hypothesis testing, RTX GPU passthrough, +validating assumptions about qemu on P9/le handling amd64 & arm64 emulation.

So, out of storage! Into the rack! New user accounts! But first it needs updated OS drives (the 3x 64GB SATADOM in Raid-Z1 need to be repurposed), and a NIC (25G-DP CX-5 or X710-DA4).

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#Raptor_Computing_Systems_/_Raptor_Engineering
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#IBM

@dexter electricity comes next 🧠

#FreeBSD #Linux #POWER9 #PPC64le #IBM #RaptorTalos #FMT2 #colo #datacenter #onprem #homelab #hardware #engineering #goodtimes #sunday #meditation #whiteNoiseGeneratorsLulMeToSleep #WomenInTech #WomenInSTEM

POWER9 - Wikipedia

Ryan HamelMay 8, 2024
Fremont / #FMT2 Colo Update:

- #RPi has gone read-only (bad MicroSD card), and need to swap it and redeploy #OpenWRT, or swap that setup out entirely for a #Cisco ISR4431 with an async card. The issue with putting the latter in, is that I don't have access to a Cisco account to get IOS-XE updates, and I need to crimp custom cables for the #APC PDUs, why they use RJ-14 for console right next to an Ethernet RJ-45 connector is beyond me.

- The #Juniper EX4200 #copper switch is dead (bad flash), will be swapped with an EX4300 (mgmt) switch when I bring it up there, and will go alongside a QFX5100-48S (core) #fiber switch + and MX80 router. The router won't be taking in full tables as it simply cannot handle today's large table size.

- The #Mikrotik router after upgrading to 7.15(anything) has had serious BGP instability, and had to downgrade to 7.14. I'll more than likely pull it out after the full Juniper stack is installed.

- I'll eventually get #storage and #compute up there eventually, certainly glad that I do not depend on anything there, to having experienced all this in the last few months.