RS/6000

So that RS/6000 I mentioned had a significant price drop, so I ended up with it. It's old, but it does support AIX 5.3, which is what we use in work. Also, unlike most of the other machines I've seen for sale, it isn't a hulking great beast of a server and is about the size of a large tower PC. It has the following specs:

400mhz Power3-II processor
256mb RAM
2x 36gb SCSI hard drives
DDS3 tape drive (12gb per tape)

As you can see it's not the most powerful machine, but it should run AIX nicely enough and certainly will be good enough to play around with LVM and disk management. It has two free RAM slots so allows room for expansion and a third hard drive could be installed. Also it's capable of running AIX in 64-bit mode, which is nice. There is no graphics card though so it has to be accessed via a serial console. Annoyingly RS/232 ports are rapidly disappearing from modern machines so I had to use the Latitude D400 as a console.

The installation of AIX 5.3 went as expected, but when the machine tried to boot from the new install, it hung when it tried to start the kernel. Investigation showed it had a very old firmware version that didn't support AIX 5.3. I found the latest firmware for it, but it required installation from floppy disks. I had to go and dig out a USB floppy drive, and then find a disk, not that easy. Then I found that it wasn't able to update the firmware from the system management so I had to download a diagnostic CD from IBMs website, write that to a CD, boot from that, install the firmware, and then reboot and see if the OS would load. It finally booted and I was able to set the initial system settings, and then finally reboot again. I was slightly worried that I didn't get a login prompt on the serial console but I was able to telnet in over a network connection.

So hurrah, I tamed the beast. I found a quote that probabaly describes this quite well. "Unix IS user friendly. It's just selective who it's friends are."