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Me too! I setup a couple of Linux LPAR on AS/400 - iSeries running OS/400. The distro was RedHat for PowerPC. One LPAR was for a Linux/Apache/PHP stack that

Me too! I setup a couple of Linux LPAR on AS/400 - iSeries running OS/400. The distro was RedHat for PowerPC. One LPAR was for a Linux/Apache/PHP stack that used the DB2/400 database on the iSeries, and the other was to host an Oracle 8i instance. DB2/400 was a great RDBMS but there was an application requirement for an Oracle database, so the director of IT at the time said that if a DB is required then it must go on the iSeries since it hosts the primary DB the company used. I didn't care for his rationale, I just thought it was fun to be working with LPAR on the iSeries.

nailer 8y ago
Hah I ran Fedora PPC on a Mac Mini around the same time. It was super cool because could could read all the firmware info - serial numbers, memory slots etc - as files in /proc rather than using 'dmidecode' like an Intel machine. Felt way more Unixy.
rbanffy 8y ago
> it must go on the iSeries since it hosts the primary DB the company used. Putting all the eggs in the same basket to justify the basket. That's classical pointy-haired thinking.
- southern_cross 8y ago
  Unlike so many "modern" systems, these systems are designed to let you to put all of your eggs in one basket if you want to, and never even break a sweat! Their built-in level of reliability (they're almost bullet-proof) generally allows this, too. You may very well have legitimate reasons for not doing it, though, including regulatory requirements and such.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    The AS/400 descendants are not as bullet proof as the zSeries. They are POWER servers similar to high-end Intel boxes, mostly the same hardware as their AIX machines - RAID, ECC memory, multiple PSUs but, IIRC, won't easily recover from failed CPUs or anything like that.
    - southern_cross 8y ago
      I'm not going to disagree with this, at least not concerning the typical POWER i box. But for the higher-end boxes at least (the ones that can handle 16 LPARS or more - or at least they could back in the day), I expect that there's considerable redundancy built-in. I doubt it's to the level of a higher-end zSeries, though. It's been a long time now since I've managed hardware so I don't really know what the current situation is. But I happen to have ready access to a hardware document from around 2008 (the last time that I worked with such large system), and it lists a whole slew of RAS features that were copied from the mainframe. I expect that if I tracked down the corresponding document for a current high-end system that it would list even more. That said, it was generally my experience that the whole platform family (low end to high end, new systems and old) was just rock-solid reliable - not at all like "The server crashed again - time to reboot it!" situation I usually found on the Wintel side of things. Plus stuff like malware was practically unheard of. And I've worked on systems that at any given moment might have thousands of users on them, and maybe tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of jobs. From an operational perspective this might not have necessarily been the best idea, for a variety of reasons, but at least the system could handle it easily. And much like mainframes, unexpected outages were basically unheard of - if they ever happened they were extraordinary, jaw-dropping events. I'm not claiming the platform was/is perfect, though.

nailer 8y ago

Hah I ran Fedora PPC on a Mac Mini around the same time. It was super cool because could could read all the firmware info - serial numbers, memory slots etc - as files in /proc rather than using 'dmidecode' like an Intel machine. Felt way more Unixy.

rbanffy 8y ago

> it must go on the iSeries since it hosts the primary DB the company used. Putting all the eggs in the same basket to justify the basket. That's classical pointy-haired thinking.

southern_cross 8y ago
Unlike so many "modern" systems, these systems are designed to let you to put all of your eggs in one basket if you want to, and never even break a sweat! Their built-in level of reliability (they're almost bullet-proof) generally allows this, too. You may very well have legitimate reasons for not doing it, though, including regulatory requirements and such.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  The AS/400 descendants are not as bullet proof as the zSeries. They are POWER servers similar to high-end Intel boxes, mostly the same hardware as their AIX machines - RAID, ECC memory, multiple PSUs but, IIRC, won't easily recover from failed CPUs or anything like that.
  - southern_cross 8y ago
    I'm not going to disagree with this, at least not concerning the typical POWER i box. But for the higher-end boxes at least (the ones that can handle 16 LPARS or more - or at least they could back in the day), I expect that there's considerable redundancy built-in. I doubt it's to the level of a higher-end zSeries, though. It's been a long time now since I've managed hardware so I don't really know what the current situation is. But I happen to have ready access to a hardware document from around 2008 (the last time that I worked with such large system), and it lists a whole slew of RAS features that were copied from the mainframe. I expect that if I tracked down the corresponding document for a current high-end system that it would list even more. That said, it was generally my experience that the whole platform family (low end to high end, new systems and old) was just rock-solid reliable - not at all like "The server crashed again - time to reboot it!" situation I usually found on the Wintel side of things. Plus stuff like malware was practically unheard of. And I've worked on systems that at any given moment might have thousands of users on them, and maybe tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of jobs. From an operational perspective this might not have necessarily been the best idea, for a variety of reasons, but at least the system could handle it easily. And much like mainframes, unexpected outages were basically unheard of - if they ever happened they were extraordinary, jaw-dropping events. I'm not claiming the platform was/is perfect, though.