International Business Machines Corporation

IBM BoMC on the Fritz

Sunday, September 19, 2010 

I was updating the firmware of our servers with IBM’s Bootable Media Creator – it is usually a great tool: it builds a bootable linux disk with all the latest firmware patches for your system – or all IBM systems if you want with a small utility that fetches all the latest updates for you and assembles them into an .iso.

Attached Message Part

The current version is ibm_utl_bomc_2.10_windows_i386.exe, but when you run it, it fails when it gets to uncompressing ibm_utl_boot_tools-130_anyos_x86-64-mid.zip (probably ibm_utl_boot_tools-130_anyos_x86-64-full.zip too, if you need that for your system instead). I finally noticed v130 was only 4mb and my old V110 was 65MB.

The util only downloads about 500k of each binary patch each time it is run. Fortunately, the efforts are cumulative. Unfortunately any driver bigger than about 1MB is effected and will not download completely the first time. Or the first 2x(size in mb) times. If you run ibm_utl_bomc_2.10_windows_i386.exe -m 8863 -l C:\temp from the command line (as an example, assuming your machine type is 8863) TWICE and the second time you don’t see something like:
(1 of 8) Acquiring ibm_fw_diag_zuyt38a_linux_i386...
Already downloaded.

for any driver, then it isn’t fully downloaded. Keep repeating. I wrote a script to automate the process and put about 100 repetitions of the command in the batch and went out to dinner. When I got back, all the drivers were reporting “already downloaded.”

@echo off
SET LOOP=0
ibm_utl_bomc_2.10_windows_i386.exe -m 8863 -l C:\temp
[copy and paste this or use a do loop to repeat 100x]
:END

Posted at 21:23:22 GMT-0700

Category: LinuxTechnology

Linux 342

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 

An IBM 342 with a ServeRAID 4lx is a fine machine, but getting Linux to install is less the effortless. Emacs!

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I’m trying to get zoneminder to work on this very nice IBM 342 with a serve raid card and some good drives and 3 video capture cards. The thing should be able to capture 12 streams of video simultaneously, or 6 at full 30FPS. But getting Linux variants to properly recognize the serveraid card is a challenge.

The Mandrake LiveCD install works great on IDE systems, no problem at all. But it doesn’t see the serveraid, so that one was out. Gentoo saw the serveraid card, and since video capture and real time analysis is one of those things that would be good to do fast, the gentoo optimization scheme seemed promising, but it wasn’t. Just a miserable series of failed compiles and fixes that went on endlessly.

So from there to Debian, which is very nice and since it is the parent of Ubuntu and there’s an Ubuntu package and Carolyn loves Ubuntu, that seemed worth a shot. It does see the Serveraid, but there seems to be a bug in the IPS.o driver which reared it’s irritating head during package installs causing hangs, even after I updated the firmware to 7.12.12.

So that was out. On to a distro officially supported by IBM: Suse. That installed great, easy no problem, detected all the ADCs on the capture cards and everything. Very easy to install, but there are some weird bugs with ffmpeg that hung the compile of Zoneminder. It descended into another endless series of patch and edit and retry effort to get through the compile….

Then I saw that Fedora 7 has an RPM in the main distro for ZoneMinder. It is officially supported by IBM and seems rock solid. So far the network install has gone well – the install CD is only 7.71 MB (!) and it seems tentatively promising… it’s on the “Starting install process” screen, which is supposed to take several minutes. As it may need a few GB of data, I’ll give it some time. Unfortunately Fedora doesn’t support CD installs and the 342 has a laptop style CD-ROM drive, so doing a DVD install is out of the question. Network installs are efficient if you only have to do them once, but the retry is all penalty download.

Posted at 15:05:15 GMT-0700

Category: Linux