Second Attempt Success
Posted on August 3, 2008
4 Comments
Last night I headed downtown to one of my data centers to upgrade a server. The server, an HP DL380 G5 (I usually add some Tim Allen style grunts after saying that) has been running a single quad core CPU since I rolled it out last fall. I’ve had the second CPU “kit” sitting on a shelf at work for a few months, but am just now finally getting the chance to install it. Haven’t really needed it until now, but I’m ramping things up for some projected increases next month.
There’s not much to these kits. A big ol’ heatsink, the CPU itself and a power module. No printed texts… but it looked easy enough so I waded in. I also had found some videos that HP offers and glanced at a couple just to see if there were any surprises.
I powered down the server, unplugged the power cords and then slid it out of the rack to where I could pop the top cover. I, of course, also took 15 seconds to hold down the power switch just to discharge any residual capacitor thingies (I’m not an electrical engineer — does it show?). Removed some ducting and 2 minutes later I had my 3 new pieces in and ready to go.
Slid the server back in and lit it up.
Initially things looked good. The server saw both CPUs and listed them as identical. However, after going through the rest of the boot sequence, it stopped with the following message:
805-Unsupported Processor Installed
From there, it would only go to ROMPaq mode. No setups, nothing else allowed. Apparently hinting that I would need to do something there in “ROMPaq land.”
I pulled the new parts, buttoned it back up and drove home. If I’m going to do some research, I’ll do it from home where I’m comfortable and sitting. Not standing at a crash cart in a cold data center.
This morning I woke up and while drinking coffee I found that I was down a few revisions on the BIOS for that server. I downloaded the updates, grabbed my trusty USB floppy drive and headed back down to the data center (should I note that this is not quite a 60 mile round trip?).
Unpacked the update and attempted to run the utility that would build a boot floppy. However, either my trusty USB floppy drive or the only floppy i had with me is screwy (note to self: experiment with both at the office tomorrow). Fortunately, there’s also an option to build a boot USB drive and I just happened to have a janky old 1GB USB stick with me.
Booted to that and did the BIOS upgrade with no issues.
Powered back down, dumped in the 3 pieces to the CPU upgrade and…
Success!
Eight cores, baby. Just look at ‘em:
Yeah, 12 GB of Ram too. Not all in use though since it was just restarted this morning and not much has been going on yet. But tomorrow… oh tomorrow, we’ll see that “Available” number fall.
Tags: CPU, HP, operations, servers, upgrade
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4 Responses to “Second Attempt Success”
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I’m curious as to what computing you do that could possibly utilize 12GB of RAM? Are you doing protein folding or SETI exploration with 10GB?
Hmm, I should get SETI going on that box during off hours
But by day, it’s a pretty busy database server and tends to easily consume that RAM.
I recently turned on boinc again and was running seti for a while, but it’s a laptop that I’m using and I worry about heat and fans that never shut off so finally wound up only running it at night when I’m in bed and I set the computer in front of the fan I have blowing on me.
Anybody know how many computers have cooked themselves to death by running Seti? My theory is that the aliens put out Boinc to cause those interested in them to cook their computers so they can’t look for them. Just a theory though… I want to believe.
I cooked probably half a dozen older machines running SETI back in the day (late 90s). I know at one point I had just a shedload of ‘em all running out of my home office. Heck, I even had some 486’s cranking if I recall correctly (something like 1 week per work unit!)
My Tecra 8100 fell prey to SETI processing as well. Fan failed far sooner than it should’ve. Probably because it was always on!