Status of Fly

Done with the hardware part!

February 17, 2009
by Wm. Josiah Erikson (wjens)

Here’s the post with all the pics. For the two people who are going to read it. But hey, I took all the pictures, so I might as well put them somewhere.

: All the old nodes removed

: All the 2GB nodes in a stack, labels on the front indicating what’s wrong with them

: All the 2GB nodes gone, rails too

: I kindof wish I had counted how many screws I removed and screwed in again during the course of this project

: Installing the special plug for the blades… the electricians were really good about doing it very fast.

: I had thought these existing 30A twist-lock plugs were 240V, but they were not.

: Blades and Power Distribution Unit sitting on the table

: The blade chassis, empty of blades

: The Opterons. Top five are dual 2Ghz with 4GB of RAM. That 4U monstrosity is a quad-2.5Ghz with 8GB of RAM, but only four drive bays… and the memory seems to be going bad. It is also louder than a jet engine. All that space that you would think would be used for drive bays is in fact just fans, fans, and more fans, and not quiet ones.

: Everything comes out of the chassis. It is still fairly heavy even with everything removed. I had a bit of a struggle lifting it up to where I ended up putting it.

: This is the shelf I rigged up to hold the blade chassis: a half-depth drawer and a half-depth shelf at the back. This ended up working out very well.

: The shelf, originally from Ryan, I stored it in my back room in NS until well after Jeff had the job, and then I ended up getting it back from him. Thanks Jeff! 🙂

: The blade chassis from the front, in the rack, without blades. It was past 7PM at this point, but I had gotten this far… it turns out the front of the chassis has holes that line up perfectly with my round-hole rack! I screwed it in.

: The mostly empty back of the chassis

: Full of blades, installing ROCKS on the head node (the 4U machine just above the screen)

: Full rear of the blade chassis. The PDU didn’t have anywhere to go because of the no-square-hole problem… zip-ties to the rescue!

: What a mess!

: I decided to clean it up a bit.

: The almost finished product, with the Opterons as well, except the 4U one.

: This motherboard, from a dual 3.0-Ghz Xeon node, was dead. Luckily the mobos in the nodes I removed were the same… so I swapped the motherboard out.

: Ready for the new motherboard

: Xeon processors

: All the old fans that died… this is just in the newer nodes. I replaced them all with brand-new ones. There are twice this many dead ones in the 2.4Ghz/2Gb nodes that are now in a stack on the floor