Setting up a Compaq ProLiant DL380 from 2000

[@neil2402]

Used to work on these professionally back in the day. Yes the G1 was a bit clunky and the LO card a bit primitive, but things improved quite a bit with later generations. The G1 had the styling of earlier proliant models (400,800,1600 etc) and the SCU looks very EISA like! The G2 and later had a new look and feel and were much easier to work on. Thanks for the memories!

[@clabretro]

Thanks for watching! I have to admit I love the aesthetic of the older proliant models that this g1 has.

[@johnpanzer2034]

My dad worked on these servers for HP and Compaq back in the day. He had one of these exact machines in his lab at his office so he could test software and SP bundles for customers. He had it running Windows Server 2003 when it first came out. Quite an impressive machine for its time. Yes, the Compaq BIOS utilities ran a very custom version of Windows 9x and before that, Windows 3.1 in older machines.

[@clabretro]

very cool!

[@WombleUK]

I used to really like the Compaq servers, lots of people didn't like the SmartStart stuff but once learned the Compaq system of doing things it was a really good system. The build quality of Compaq kit was outstanding. I had a half rack full of Compaq kit that I only scrapped about 5yrs ago.

[@smpstech]

I had one of these first generation DL380's and HP still sends me support alerts about them to this day. Pretty amazing.

[@markpriceful]

omg, so proud of that 40-bit SSL @21:19

[@clabretro]

Haha I know - I almost called that out in the video!

[@JMassengill]

I used to work for an authorized COMPAQ dealer in 2000/2001. Smart start was different. The worst part about running old java based hardware is finding the right version of java. (the ILO on the Dell R710 is also fun to get working for the same reason) I have a Cisco ASA 5510 in my home lab and it took forever to find the needed java files to run the ASDM.

[@clabretro]

Oh yeah... the idrac on my R510 is a real treat to get into these days.

[@hessex1899]

I found a gen 1 chassis with a live ILOM on my work's network last year. The system was off but the chassis was still racked, attached to network, and powered.

[@clabretro]

Haha that's amazing.

[@kbhasi]

Your comment reminded me of when I'd sometimes come across old and abandoned websites.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

It's so cool to see such retro hardware. I discovered your channel due to researching about some sun hardware. And subscribed!

[@clabretro]

Awesome, thank you! More Sun content on the way.

[@timcsmedic2162]

I worked with those and some older stand up Compaq models. They are a weird beast. Especially running Novell 4.11 and 5. Cool to see those again.😊

[@clabretro]

Those older stand up towers are very cool, I'll be hunting one of those down eventually. I've got a copy of Novell floating around somewhere too 😂

[@meatpockets]

I worked at a job that bought these second hand and would throw them in a colo to rent out. They were too cheap to buy proper rail kits and had like 5-6 of these resting on some kind of rack mounted L bracket. One day we got a swarm of Nagios alerts in and I rushed down to take a look. Turns out the bracket blew out and all the severs were falling out the rack. There was so much weight that it forced the locked cabinets front door wide open. Good times…

[@clabretro]

haha that's amazing.

[@Radioaktivitaet]

*tips server*

[@markpriceful]

That remote management / ILO card is pretty wild, glad to see you stuck with it and the old Java to make it work. Reminds me of that old meme "hey dog, we heard you like computers, so we got a computer for your computer"

[@clabretro]

It was worth it. I might even do another deep-dive just on that video, I've barely messed around with it so far.

[@thomassvedin8701]

Until a couple of years ago i ran a compaq Proliant 1850r as my mail server with Debian 4.0. The label on the outside of the machine was Josef. It was the predecessor to the DL380. It was a dual pentium II machine. It had two 9 GB SCSI drives in RAID1, two 18GB in RAID1 and a pair of mirrored 300GB Maxtor Diamondmax SATA drives connected to a cheap SATA card. It ran great great for more than 10 years. Then it didn't run any more. I found my second 1850R machine labeled Stalin in storage and used it to read the drives and to virtualize everything. Last spring i replaced the VM with a new VM where i run mailcow to self host my email.

[@mikkelcalum6589]

I just got a Compaq Proliant 1600, Dual Pentium 300 mhz with 5 SCSI drives i array. I had the same issues with Bios and stuff. I installed Windows 2000 and made an ISO image of the SmartStart CD. Installed all drivers and software in Windows 2000. Worked perfectly with the Disk Array SCSI management.

[@jbgaud]

I assembled and configured a bucket load of those servers and tower aquivalent : the ML530. Usually they came partially mounted. We have to add the Smartarray controler, power supply and processors. Last year I found one of them burried inside a factory, covered with dust, dead insects and all kind of disgusting things. It was in charge of an automatic label printing for boxes with a very basic Windows 2000 and a simple program.

[@clabretro]

Amazing! I unfortunately didn't mention it in the video because I was too busy complaining about SmartStart, but these things were built with incredibly high quality. Wouldn't be surprised if that thing was still runnable!

[@jbgaud]

@@clabretro Usually they run for one or two days, after the power supply or the voltage reglators of the CPU quit. But, if they are constantly running, they can stay up for years. I also found a Fujitsu TX300 first generation running in another factory with a storage expension. Sadly it died few days after my visit. It was the last Windows NT I saw up and running. For the smartarray, my heart sank when I saw the 4 mini SCSI ports on the back. So mush bad memories. the worst was the firmware upgrade. I was like the Russian Roulette. you applied it and pray.

[@rysliv]

I inherited a older G2 DL380 from an old architecture firm where I live. Was fun to play around with and ran Linux pretty well up until about 2019 when I gave it away. Had 6x 146 SCSI drives and 2 Xeons. A quirky thing I found is if it got too hot in the room, the fans would spin up but they would never spin back down when it cooled down, it would just be stuck at full fan speed until it was rebooted.

[@VK2FVAX]

Love to see more on this era of old servers ..even older. Especially DEC/Compaq/Fujitsu/SNI/HP/Amdahl.

[@alvaroamestegui5836]

Awesome! Brings back memories. Don't forget the HAL!

[@RetroTechIIfx]

So the reason the bios is so odd on the old Proliant systems is due to their evolution from Compaqs EISA systems. This system configuration menu is lifted right off of any of the early 90s Proliant servers or Compaq EISA workstations. It provides a facility for reading EISA configs off of the floppy drive. I have a DL360 G1 which is basically the same server with much less expansion room and only a single power supply. Still supports the lights out card. Also have a Proliant 1500 from around 1995-6. Still works great. These old servers are tanks.

[@clabretro]

Ahh that makes sense! They're definitely built like tanks, build quality is excellent. I should've mentioned that face plate is a solid 1/8 inch piece of metal too. Now you're making me want to hunt down the earlier 90s machines.

[@RetroTechIIfx]

@@clabretro the earlier ones before 1998 have way more custom silicon from Compaq itself - Triflex Architecture they called it. The CPU bus was decoupled from the rest of the system making it possible to upgrade CPU generations in a server I.E 486 to P1, or P1 to PPro. It also enabled Compaq to make dual or quad CPU options. The Pentium II era and beyond shifted away from Compaq custom ASICS to off the shelf chipsets, but still good stuff

[@tobitweaks]

My G made a video on this just when I threw a pair out of a system that was built around a mixing desk for television and radio haha…excited to see how you managed the bios and their special setup software :) All the best, Tobi

[@jessestrobel2]

I did that whole StarTech 5.25-to-3.5 in drive bay CF card reader deal, and love it for Linux Mandrake 8 and Windows 9X. Did have issues with Windows 2000 - very VERY slow, so I just use an IDE-to-SATA (or vice versa) adaptor to use SSDs for that and subsequent Windows.

[@mlprd]

Used to have 100s of these in the data center I worked in. Very solid machines, and I would run Linux on the retired ones and they ran linux like a champ. The BIOS was definitely weird, but once you got the OS installed it just ran for ever.

[@arjovenzia]

I love the fact the CPU PSUs are on cards that look like they're removable. That's some impressive serviceability

[@clabretro]

agreed!

[@StuStones]

They were removable, the VRM's were purchased separately to the processors, sometimes had the unfortunate event of upgrading a G1 server to dual CPU but no VRM installed... Fun times back then!

[@marksterling8286]

I used to work on the proliant 1500 and 2500 when they were new. The smart start came with install disks for windows, netware os2 and sco. They were hyper odd but once you got used to them, they were great.

[@clabretro]

nice! yeah once I figured out I needed the disk it wasn't all that bad.

[@tims001]

Great work mate, I have one of these at work that has been end of life for a long time... Actually the whole floor is being E-wasted so I need to get in there and salvage what I can.

[@clabretro]

Thanks!

[@craigmurray4746]

We used to have an HP ML350 Gen 5 server at my work, which is a school. For a dual processor Xeon (Core 2 era Xeon) system, it always ran pretty nicely. Later developed a power backplane issue with only 1 PSU installed, so had to run 2 PSU's to solve that problem. Thankfully it did have a normal BIOS you could just access and it was actually a pretty straight forward machine. It got annoying once HP moved the SmartStart packs behind a pay wall, so no more firmware updates for that poor server.

[@clabretro]

Very cool. So I guess the SmartStart disks weren't behind paywalls under Compaq? Hard to find info on that stuff.

[@craigmurray4746]

@clabretro I think HP also had them in the open for a long time, but at some point they decided they needed to monetize things, so updated SmartStart disks were hidden behind active support contracts if I understood correctly. Was a big reason why when the gen 5 server needed to be replaced, I didn't go with another HP server. Enterprise companies love doing moves like that with firmware sigh...

[@clabretro]

Oh interesting. Yeah if they're not hiding it behind paywalls they're deprecating it, right? Ha.

[@albinmartinsson5174]

This reminds me of my messing around with a DL380 G2 found in a dumpster-dive. Absolutely gorgeous interior, and the only tool required to disassemble it is an included torx key. Then when I tried to get it running it took me ages of poking around old FTP servers to find the firmware to change the iLO card to 128-bit SSL and the program to create compatible virtual floppies, because I have neither a CD burner nor anything with a real floppy drive, except it.

[@clabretro]

Ha that's awesome. I hadn't thought about dealing with the firmware.

[@albinmartinsson5174]

@@clabretro Yeah. I tried to install an old version of Slackware on it too, but failed for driver reasons. The iLO 2 web interface is actually quite similar to the interface shown in the video, by the way. Had to use it for everything I was doing, because I don't have any VGA monitor. I should fire it up again some time soon.

[@clabretro]

Interesting. Yeah give it a shot, it's always fun to mess around with these things.

[@andrewnoonan4044]

I was on an ERP Project in 2000 that deployed these and DL320's with an Alphaserver ES40 cluster running Tru64.

[@clabretro]

Awesome! Those ES40s are so cool looking.

[@andrewnoonan4044]

I own an ES45 but it is halfway around the world from me right now. ;-(@@clabretro I paid $1000 for it about a decade ago and it arrived on a pallet!

[@Dark_Horse_Productions23]

That's a cool video about the smartstart crap..Had the same problem for my Proliant 800 tower.It didn't boot up of course..Thanks!!

[@fordonmekochgalenskaper5665]

When I use IDE controllers with old windows NT/95/98/2000 sometimes even XP I have to install drivers from disc in the beginning of the installation to find the disc/card

[@MDBenson]

Seconded. There's a 'press F6 to load drivers' prompt in the installer screen for Windows, you need a Windows 2000 driver (must have a .inf file and the driver files) for the IDE card you are using, on floppy, and load it via the F6 utility otherwise the card won't be recognised by Windows.

[@max_uaminecraft1827]

You might be able to get booting from the ide controller working by using some kind of bootloader on a floppy disk. The idea is to boot from a bootable device like a floppy disk, and have the bootloader on that boot ftom the ide controller. Plop comes to mind as a good bootloader to try!. Hope this helps 😊

[@clabretro]

Thanks! I think you're right, other folks pointed that out too. I'll have to try that out.

[@jono80]

Happy memories installing Callmanager on these when Cisco were re-branding them MCS servers

[@nathan9510]

If you need some more SCSI drives, I can ship 4-6 to you if you pay for the shipping. I have a bunch in HP/Compaq sleds of various sizes and speeds. All are 80 pin SCA SCSI.

[@clabretro]

I'd be interested in that, you can reach me at the email in the channel's about section!

[@MinifigNewsguy]

Ooo it had a laptop optical drive! The 380s or 385 (the AMD version) are downright awesome… (Of course when totally maxed out with virtualization!)

[@sprint955st]

I can’t count how many of these I unboxed, racked and built back in early 2000s and big brother ML750 Press F6 during Windows installation and you can the. Inject the SCSI controller driver and the RAID disk will be visible for you to install your OS on to.

[@clabretro]

Ha that's awesome. Yeah I'll need to experiment with some SCSI controller drivers.

[@dustinsmous5413]

I'm fairly certain I have the tower variant of this system or something *very* similar... Accessing BIOS on the older ProLiant machines is *always* a challenge! Without the setup disk, it's indescribably difficult. That being said, these systems can handle almost *any* hardware failure while running.

[@dustinsmous5413]

I've managed a cluster with ~1,300 HP DL-360 Gen 8 systems... Today's HP Enterprise systems, as quirky as the old ProLiant systems, are so much easier to manage...

[@punchar4161]

Have worked on 380 and 385s. HP variants. Was not aware that the name came through Compaq

[@alexscarbro796]

Perhaps you need to load the IDE driver from floppy during the installer.

[@KDural]

So many memories. Thanks..

[@sasha-fe2bl]

you can run 16-bit stuff in 64-bit windows with winevdm

[@ianmathews2995]

The IDE card is probably fine, but Windows 2000 most likely does not have drivers for it. During the setup loading look at the bottom of screen there should be a prompt to hit F6 briefly, this will give you the option to load a floppy with the IDE card drivers so that setup can know how to read from the device.

[@H3adcrash]

As for the IDE controller working; As long as the controller has its own boot ROM, it's almost always going to work. It does of course need support for older systems, but if it has its own BIOS ROM it should work fine. I've tried several cards without ROMs, and have never got any of those to work.

[@uiopuiop3472]

i do be using a fiber nic my highst school nickname was 1 ggigabit fibernic in high scholl

[@retro_hoarder]

Some pci ide cards don't work properly, you can try sas3080x pcix, in my ml330 works perfectly sata and sas drives!

[@clabretro]

Ah thanks!

[@milanvidakovic9715]

Nice vid. I have heard ages ago that if you manage to copy IDE.SYS to SCSI.SYS within the Win2K installation, then it might recognize IDE HDD and install Win on it. Not even sure that those files exist, but you could give it a try... The explanation was that on Proliant servers you could install Win only on SCSI HDDs.

[@clabretro]

Oh that's really interesting... I'll have to give that a shot the next time I'm messing around with this machine.

[@milanvidakovic9715]

@@clabretroI think it could be ATAPI.SYS to be copied over SCSI.SYS.

[@ikweetvannixx]

I decomissioned so many servers of this generation, Compaq and HP (Netserver) alike... good times :)

[@leoroberts2708]

Got one of these a while back, upgraded it to 2 pIII 750mhz. I was wondering if anyones looked at modifing the smartstart to allow for more configuration controll and OS support with linux or solaris

[@clabretro]

nice! yeah I didn't look at linux support there

[@leoroberts2708]

woumd up trying to give solaris 8 x86 platform edition but unfortunately the onboard scsi raid controller wasn't able to present the drives to the setup. may look at trying this again in the future ​@@clabretro

[@Jim-ku6ry]

Not sure why you are against just using the scsi drives as they were designed. I deployed tons of those back in the day and the standard config was raid 5 with hot spare. Also that 5300 controller is much better than embedded controller and it looks like it has a 128 Mb cache chip.

[@jani140]

Pretty common that theese serves are vendor locked to the oe raid/hba. Especially when You want to boot from it. Most servers won't even post, when You dare to plug-in some unauthorized storage controllers.

[@kyleleroux110]

I'd love to see what Windows Server 2003 would do on here or possibly Windows Server 2008 and get a true file server experience. I'd imagine you could put a recent 32 bit version of Ubuntu server on here and make a Linux file server out of this too.

[@uiopuiop3472]

me when compaq remote insight is: out now me: finaly the light out edition...!!! compaq: it is computer in pci slot but with more ps2 port madness me: finaly... lthe light out edition!!

[@kmickCSX]

I’m about to make some people feel old- I forgot that compaq used to be a company- I have a new proLiant and I had no idea compaq made these

[@casperghst42]

Had a couple of customers running Netware 5.x w/Groupwise on these boxes. That was before I joined Novell Inc. and lost all interest in hardware. I still think it was a shame that HP bought Compaq. Your own shrinkwraped SmartCD would propbably not work, you always had to use the SmartCD which was released with the server or one which was released later. And yes SmartStart was a bit of a pain, but you got used to it. In the mid 90s I installed a "few" ProSignia 300's, from taking it out of the box until it was running NetWare 3.12 took 20-30 minutes - Compaq was just working.

[@clabretro]

I could definitely see how you could get used to SmartStart

[@casperghst42]

@@clabretro not used to in a "nice" way, it was how it was, but more than once I had similar problems as you. The one you have in the bag is too old, and getting a new downloaded a burned to a CD was not possible as you're onsite. It was just a general pain, but that was how it was. Then the option was to download the floppies and make them.... right. Then there was the whole SmartCD license thing, customers could get licenses for Netware, Windows, and a few other things via the SmartStart as Compaq was a reseller, then you also needed to get the license key for the OS you were installing ... more headaches. As I mainly was doing Netware, if there was a problem with a license obtained from Novell, then I just called Novell, but with the SmartStart stuff; to say the least it was not always easy.

[@lukedavis436]

My personal favourite is the Gen 3 DL380....i hope to one day buy one...but everyone's telling me not to... Damn them...i wanna play with servers!

[@6Diego1Diego9]

The engines are the most powerful in the world. You can design based on simulation but it will never catch all anomaly. The thrust links will be beefed up and enjoy 120k lbf.

[@valeranordstrom7198]

you could have got the ide flash card to work what u needed to probaly try was open smart storage admin to make a raid 0 on the flash card becuase i think the ide controller was a raid card

[@clabretro]

ah good idea

[@threequeersinabasement7994]

The IDE to compact flash card adapter probably works fine. The issue is most likely with the actually compact flash card. You need to set a flag on the actual Compact Flash card to make it a permanent storage device.

[@clabretro]

thanks, I'll take a look at that!

[@threequeersinabasement7994]

@@clabretro I believe sandisk used to make a utility to do it on their older cards.

[@michaelmasone43]

what did they run the os off of orginally, one of the scsi drives?

[@clabretro]

yeah I bet they probably had all the bays setup in some sort of raid configuration.

[@CyclingSteve]

@@clabretro depending on the use-case, 4 drives is pretty low performance so it was probably all 4 drives in a RAID5 array, then two logical drives created on the SmartArray controller for OS and files.

[@H3adcrash]

Me being the retro Compaq ProLiant fetishist that I am, I've tinkered enough with these to figure out you can USB boot and install operating systems if you plug a generic USB PCI card into the system, boot the Plop boot manager from floppy, and then select USB as boot device. It will then boot either Windows or Linux normally. If you're going to venture into Linux, these old systems have a fairly retarted BIOS, and will not find the boot partition if you install with automatic settings. So you have to manually set up the partition table, making sure to put the boot partition at the beginning of the drive.

[@clabretro]

Oh very interesting! Now I have a reason to find a USB PCI card haha.

[@H3adcrash]

@@clabretro Haha indeed! And I came to think about the cf cards not booting.. I've never had that working either. They will work inside the os as storage devices, but it can't boot from them. I think it's a mix between the BIOS being grumpy, and regular cf cards showing up as removable storage devices. Apparently the industrial vf cards show up as hard drives. So maybe that could be an option. In my ProLiant 5500 I've got a Zheino IDE SSD as a Bootable system drive, and two SATA hard drives as mass storage devices. (SATA controller cards work fine as well, but not for booting)

[@Lethaltail]

Huh, I think they removed that 5.5 image from the HPE support page, the oldest i can find now is 7.0.

[@clabretro]

Looks like the archive has it: archive.org/details/compaq-smart-start-5.50 (wonder why I didn't notice that at the time, ha).

[@muchosa1]

That unit has an updated drive bay with lvd drives.

[@basroos_snafu]

Nice video, thanks for sharing these practically useless and time consuming experiments, just for the fun of it... So why haven't you tried connecting a regular IDE disk to the Promise controller? I have either used a Promise Ultra133 TX2 or an Abit HotRod 66 back in the day, just to have some cheap storage option in my ProLiant ML350 G3.

[@clabretro]

Because I don't have any regular IDE disks, unfortunately 😆

[@AdrianuX1985]

Try Debian 12 on this hardware.

[@clabretro]

Gonna need more RAM 😂

[@AdrianuX1985]

@@clabretro 512 megabytes of RAM is enough for Debian (i386 architecture) for several daemons (NGINX, MariaDB, Samba,AD, NFS, etc.). For more stability, it is worth making a SWAP partition: 1024 megabytes or more. (YT bot removes links.)

[@AdrianuX1985]

@@clabretro I'm just curious if the almost latest Linux kernel can handle this hardware. And aren't you?

[@clabretro]

I'll bet it does - I'll throw it on there eventually and keep you updated!

[@AdrianuX1985]

@@clabretro Everyone installs old and unsafe software on old hardware. But no one is experimenting with newer and safer software on old hardware, and that's also an interesting direction.

[@punchar4161]

Hi, Get some HPUX machines., would be frun to watch. Cheers.

[@punchar4161]

PA RISC ones.

[@GalileudoLinux]

That's excellent !😃

[@911delorean]

Do you need more SCSI drives? I have a bunch of them I'll sell some to you.

[@clabretro]

Since this video I have actually acquired a lot of them, but thank you for the offer!

[@memadmax69]

Ahh yes, the good old days when computing was still the wild west.

[@kenmurphy4259]

Patience of a saint! 😂😂😂

[@rdmclark]

Try a BlueSCSI

[@clabretro]

I actually bought a BlueSCSI after I filmed this video, planning on trying it out.

[@MarkGladson]

I have Compaq Prosignia 500 (much older) with a BlueSCSI in it running Netware 3.2 :) I actually had the proper Smart Start CDs still in my collection from back in the day!

[@huseyinfahriuzun2216]

at least now HP is smarter and using linux kernel for their bios and utilities

[@AMKGL]

Can it run modern linux?

[@clabretro]

I imagine any distro that can still run on Pentium IIIs would work.

[@AMKGL]

@@clabretro but would be interesting how Linux behave on 2 CPU's in compered to just one. What would be the performance gains.

[@HyenaEmpyema]

I was hoping this would be an Alpha CPU

[@clabretro]

I wish!

[@Pingviinitube]

Can it play CS 1.6? :D

[@clabretro]

oh ya

[@naikrovek]

USB floppy drives are not true floppy drives as far as those older computers are concerned. with USB floppy drives there is no real floppy controller, and they only handle 1.44MB or 720kB disk images, and they simply will not do non-standard things to a floppy disk, which is why there is a tool to create the floppies for you, instead of downloads of floppy images. The disk image creator from Compaq did some slightly special things to make one or more of those disks bootable which is not something that all USB floppies can do, if the computer you want to boot from the floppy is very old, such as the Compaq you're using here. You will almost certainly need to make those floppy disks with a real computer with a real, old floppy drive connected to either an integrated floppy controller, or a floppy controller on an ISA/PCI card.

[@clabretro]

oh thanks! that's useful info. so it probably would've been futile with that USB drive regardless.

[@WizardNumberNext]

ITE IT8212F is by default in RAID mode this chip may not support Compact Flash. It is NOT exactly ATA. It is very very close, but chips like IT8212F are made as basic as it could be, therefore it may not be able to cooperate with CF Your choice of ATA controller was very bad for your purpose P.S. they are quite flaky anyway. I have had one and didn't like their overall performance

[@clabretro]

Yeah I'll have to play around some more. I also just picked up a BlueSCSI so that might be an interesting route.

[@WizardNumberNext]

@@clabretro BlueSCSI is quite slow for such computer

[@clabretro]

Yeah, more just to see if it works. Won't be doing a whole lotta work on this thing haha.

[@CammyFi]

The way your microphone picks the keyboard up louder than your voice is uncomfortable.

[@georgen.8027]

Is left earring the gay side?

[@clabretro]

nope.

[@georgen.8027]

Don't reply to that troll! @@clabretro

[@JasonsLabVideos]

DAMN this is so bringing back memories ATA 133 promise cards !! Win2k. RM288 key ? lol !

[@clabretro]

😂 I know