[GRLUG] IBM NetVista not booting graphical environment - UPDATE

[Greg Folkert]

On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 15:36 -0500, Raymond McLaughlin wrote:
> john-thomas richards wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 03:18:01PM -0500, john-thomas richards wrote:
> >> I am helping a friend with his non-profit's computer (he runs an inner-city
> > [snip]
> > 
> > After pouring much time into this, it has been determined that this
> > (and the other two) motherboard has a very special and very specific
> > failure that keeps it from booting a GUI.  (Mad props to Greg F. for
> > all his help.  He is a Very. Smart. Guy.  Thank you!)  So my friend
> > with the non-profit ministry has some nice hardware but no
> > motherboards.  He was recently offered some more computers by another
> > donor so I thought, hey, why not make a nice server out of the
> > hardware?  To cut this short, dual-Pentium III motherboards are a rare
> > find these days (nada on eBay).  Any of you guys have one (I have the
> > processors :-) for sale?
> 
> Please forgive me if you've already "been there and done that", but have
> you tried installing Linux on these things? I know you need Windows
> eventually, but if you can get a light enough weight Linux up and into
> graphical mode, a VMWare Player session could provide you with the
> Windows functionality you need. Pentium IIIs are kind of at the low end
> of what will run XP in a VM. But, as I said, a light weight (i.e. low
> resource demanding) Linux should be able to leave plenty for office work
>  in an XP VM. In this case more RAM is really better than a second CPU.
> Pentium IIIs start at (I think) 500MHz. I hope you  have at least 750's.

Just to let everyone know... I have a beaten these machines from nearly
every way possible.

The only thing that works is a Linux Distro that DOES NOT change the
Video Mode... and then only until a reboot and only until it sets
"console fonts". Only the older installs got to a point of login. but
eventually DPMS blanking would lock it up.

For the record, here are the things I did:
      * updated the BIOS, which brought back most functionality for a
        while, until a hard lock froze everything up... which turned out
        to be DPMS screen blanking
      * Tried an 800MHz PentiumIII Coppermine processor, a 1GHz
        PentiumIII processor, a 1.13GHz PentiumIII processor
      * Completely different RAM, motherboard capable of 2 sticks,
        everywhere from 32MB to 1GB, different speeds
      * Hard Drives in sizes from 2GB through 120GB, ATA-3 through ATA-6
      * 4 CD-Drives, 2 DVD drives
      * Video cards: Matrox AGP and PCI cards, ATI Rage 128 through
        Radeon 7500, nVidia nv8 through nv27 chipsets, S3 cards, Diamond
        PCI and others
      * New NICs: about 15 different 3Com cards, 10 different Intel E100
        cards, numerous D-Link, many different other chipsets as well.
      * three different power supplies.

And here are the things I ran to see what I could find:

      * KNOPPIX in text mode
      * LIVE-CDs out the wazoo
      * 5 different rescue CDs and the myriad of diags they had, any
        that change the Video mode locked hard.
      * 7 different Distros of Linux and BSDs and a myrid of versions:
              * Debian v2.0 through current SID
              * Redhat V4.0 through v9.0
              * CentOS v2.1 through v5.1
              * Turbolinux Only one version...
              * Slackware Pro(1996) through 11
              * FreeBSD 3.5, 4.11, 5.5, 6.3 but not 7.
              * NetBSD 1.4.3, 1.5.3, 1.6.2, 2.1, 3.1


Now, my feeling here is that these machine when running Windows came
across a site that was probably compromised and the compromiser had it
in for any IBM hardware. Created a BIOS hack and got it to load via
Active-Hex via Infernal Exploiter or Lookout... voila, unfixable
machine.

Since these machine were probably in used one after another as the
failed... all going to the same place, well they all broke the same way.

Side story:
I had an experience one time with some serious IBM Servers with a 5
channel IBM-ServeRAID card in it. IBM replaced the drives, the DASD, the
cage backplanes the processors the memory, pretty much everything except
the RAID Controller.

IBM eventually replaced the whole machine with a newer faster machine.
Five weeks later they finally got back to me, stating that they finally
changed out the $7K RAID controller, there was a Firmware Virus in it.
It was very specific. And the way the thing got on there was when the
original image of Windows on the machine hadn't been updated and when to
some type of a spoof "IBM" site (of which there were many at the time)
and it installed an update using IE v4. something.

Summary:
So... I do know that many people have a serious attitude towards IBM. so
it is possible these Netvistas fall into that category, they were
work-horses for MANY companies, which ticked many people off. And
there-in I believe is what happened.

Now these machine are well made, look decent, are quiet enough and
easily dealt with. except the motherboard is very specifically borkened.

Sooo... there you go.
-- 
greg at gregfolkert.net
PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
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