Adventures in ancient tech - frustrations with the Gen 8 MicroServer

Xeon

Been flogging an HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen 8 for a while now. But I think its time may be coming to an end. It can’t boot the “optical drive” (slot 5) SATA device directly, need to have a USB stick or Micro SD card installed internally to do that. (Which failed last week. Replacing the old SanDisk Cruzer Fit  with a SAMSUNG FIT Plus. Second SanDisk I’ve had fail recently; the other was a 120GB 2.5" SATA SSD. Hrm.)

iLO sucks, the iPad app crashes constantly, it doesn’t send mouse activity to Linux, etc. I tried using the Comet remote KVM, but I couldn’t get an any active VGA to HDMI adapters to generate a signal the KVM would recognize. So I did most of this stuff using a wireless Logitech K400 keyboard with trackpad and a tiny Eyoyo monitor. Works, but awkward.

Can’t boot a GPT partition scheme (it’s got a BIOS and no UEFI), if you try you’ll get a red screen of death with an inscrutable “invalid op code” error. The most recent LTS version of Ubuntu server, 24.04, doesn’t seem to support doing a master boot record (MBR) install for post-install booting. (I hacked something together, but it wasn’t ideal.)

Trying to install any of the RHEL 10+ variants (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle) caused the machine to instantly reboot (like you hit the RESET switch on a PC/AT) as soon as it tried to boot ... I finally figured that out, when I noticed this text on the Rocky Linux 10.0 announcement page (which, I should have checked first, but I’m so used to downloading Linux and it “just works” on any kind of even semi-modern hardware, I didn’t think to do so): “The most significant change in Rocky Linux 10 is the removal of support for x86-64-v2 architectures. AMD and Intel 64-bit architectures for x86-64-v3 are now required.” (Emphasis added.) Huh. Which microarchitecture is the Intel® Xeon® CPU E3-1220L V2 @ 2.30GHz I have installed using? ... Well, it’s Ivy Bridge, so, yeah, it’s x86-64-v2. Sigh. Download Rocky Linux 9.7, it at least boots (though complains about the deprecated processor), but the installer crashes out as soon as it loads. Fuuuuuuhhhhh. 

Downloaded the 9.0 Minimal ISO from the Rocky vault and write it to a USB drive using Balena Etcher, and, finally, something works. Got everything installed with MBR on the Samsung USB disk and booted and everything’s fine, finally.

$ sudo yum upgrade

And now it’s running 9.7, at least, from late last year. Still, active support ends spring of next year; installing version 10 would have bought me until 2030.

Toying with the idea of a Mac mini 2018 (prices have cratered since they’re now officially not supported by Apple anymore), with an 8th generation (Coffee Lake) six-core i7, at least 16 GB RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), and USB 3 / Thunderbolt 3 (which, at a minimum of 10 Gb/s, has more than enough throughput to accommodate SATAIII spinning rust drives), running modern Linux, and connected to something like this  OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad RAID Ready (JBOD) 4-Bay Storage Enclosure ... but not today. Not in the budget. There is no budget for this. Sigh. (I did have to swap the 5-port GS105 that’s been serving me faithfully for I don’t even know how long, for a GS308E (only like $4 more than the $19 (!!) GS308 non-E, and the newer SKU has a 5, vs. 3, year warranty, and some nominal QoS / VLAN support that might be interesting to play with. I guess I knew, but had forgotten, that NetGear is the SOHO line from the old Bay Networks, which was such a part of my “shoestring IT budget” university experience in the '90s... Even if their mainstay FA310TX did switch from the desirable DEC Tulip chip, to something no-name, mid-run. But I digress.)