[plug] AS/400 and Linux

[Craig Ringer]

Peter Tran wrote:
> Bret Busby wrote:
> 
> "We don't know, since Peter said nothing about it beyond asking for help
> with getting Linux on it."
> 
> Funny how people just assume that you're stupid for trying something
> different, Bret I thank you for looking outside the square.

I find this amusing, since I said that in response to Bret. Not to worry.

> A friend and I were donated two rather large AS/400's (and boy are those
> things are heavy! 300kg of computing gear sure is hard to move on a 38
> degree day!), we figured that if we could run an instance of Linux on one of
> the partitions, we might be able to roll in a few more instances (on
> different partitions) and have all our Linux machines running concurrently
> at a co-located site.

You might also find the Xen hypervisor (http://www.xensource.com) an 
attractive option for this. I'm using Xen 2.0 in production (Xen 3.0 is 
still WAAAAAAY too buggy) and it works extremely well. You may be 
interested to know that IBM are behind it and are clearly eyeing it as 
an option to enable their xSeries boxes for OS partitioning.

If you check out Xen and find it attractive, don't buy hardware for it 
until the new VT-x enabled Intel CPUs are out (or the Pacifica-enabled 
AMD ones if you can wait that long). These CPUs should make Xen faster, 
and make it able to run unmodified operating systems.

Another option if you have the cash is VMWare GSX server or VMWare ESX 
server. The former, a "headless VMWare application for servers", is 
affordable. The latter is in operation more like Xen (it sits under all 
OSes rather than running on one of them) and is very, very expensive.

> Having that been said, it's really just a learning experience. I don't see
 > why it should be treated any different (the idea) to someone wanting 
to run
 > Linux on an Xbox. :)

I tend to agree. It's a fun geek project. Alas, some here will see the 
two as day-and-night different, since one of them misuses cheap 
Microsoft hardware (cue zealot booing and hissing), while the other 
soils a beautiful and perfect DB server.

Personally, I don't care. If you don't need the DB server abilities an 
AS/400 probably isn't that useful to you with its stock OS, much the 
same way as an Xbox isn't much use to you if you don't want it for gaming.

Me - Bitter? Not even slightly.

> It seems to be a very specialist computing field. 

It does indeed. As far as I can tell an AS/400 is a "mini mainframe" in 
many ways, and along with that comes the IBM mainframe language and 
tools ... a whole different world.

--
Craig Ringer