Old old SP nodes and 100 mbps NICs 3

[reclspeak]

I have a customer with some very old SP frames housing a mixture of mainly very old nodes.

I think these predate the terms "Winterhawk" and "Silverhawk".

They are MCA based and report as such;

spgetdesc: Node 1 (spnode1en0) is a 200_MHz_SMP_High.

spgetdesc: Node 5 (spnode5en0) is a 135_MHz_P2SC_Wide.

spgetdesc: Node 9 (spnode9en0) is a 200_MHz_SMP_High.

spgetdesc: Node 13 (spnode13en0) is a 375/450_MHz_POWER3_SMP_Wide.

Obviously node 13 is the star amongst these.

Their primary interface is FDDI (equiv to 100 mpbs) but the site is phasing-out FDDI. I know I can't go 1Gbit, but will these MCA nodes support 100 mpbs Ethernet?

I can see that 100 mbps NICS on MCA were (and still are) available, such as the model 07L6600 but is this or any other part number compatible with SP nodes of this age. They are, by the way, running 4.3.3.

Thanks in anticipation,


recl

 

[Breslau]

yes, the MCA bus will support 100 Mbs. i think we had those high nodes at one time and they had such cards in them.

i don't have the exact feature codes tho.

 

[Breslau]

9-K is the designation on the cards.

MCA bused hosts can have up to AIX 5.1 on them, btw.

 

[p5wizard]

Going from AIX433 to AIX51 on SP nodes is quite a challenge. You need to update the control workstation to AIX51 and a PSSP level 3.5? which would need to coexist with AIX433 on the nodes, and would allow a node-upgrade to AIX51 and the same PSSP level.

I attempted this some years back, but after starting to read the documentation I gave it a miss, and end-of-lifed the nodes at 433...



HTH,

p5wizard

 

[DukeSSD]

Node 13 is a winterhawk II and should support AIX5.3 with updated firmware but, as above, I think the rest are a lost cause.
Consider a little p5, HMC and a 3 yr warranty, it will probably save them loads in power and maintenence costs alone, let alone the space and aircon.

 

[reclspeak]

Great replies folks!

The environment is a legacy setup and no longer attracting new customer accounts. I'd love to simply replace it with a few second-hand P4 6C1's, and I suspect even a few B50's would do the trick. However, even though the nodes (other than node 13) should be in a museum, they will stagger on from crisis to crisis until a final outage nails them.

I am stuck with 4.3.3 though as some of the applications vendors are gone and any incompatability issue if we did upgrade to 5.1 could not be addressed.

Any ideas of what driver file set is required for 100 mbps on MCA?

 

[Breslau]

this came from my old CWS, which is being used as a throw away desktop system. it's MCA bus :

ent0 Available 00-01 IBM 10/100 Mbps Ethernet TX MCA Adapter (8f62)

devices.mca.8f62.diag 4.3.2.0 COMMITTED IBM MCA 10/100 Mb Ethernet
Adapter (8f62) Diagnostics
devices.mca.8f62.rte 4.3.2.0 COMMITTED IBM MCA 10/100 Mb Ethernet
Adapter Software (8f62)
devices.mca.8f62.rte 4.3.2.0 COMMITTED IBM MCA 10/100 Mb Ethernet
Adapter Software (8f62)