Skip to main content

Exploring and Repairing an DS6800

By
This is an knowledge base of various information about the IBM DS6800 that I hope will be useful if you ever need to repair one of these disk arrays.

The intention is for this post to be updated as new information becomes apparent or outdated. Right now the post is very much in a pre-alpha state and I hope to have more of a narrative down the road, but I thought it would be fun to share the story as it develops.


The DS6800 controller, our patient

Note: The post has been moved to its own site to allow for other interested parties to contribute. Turns out there are quite a number of people that want to help :-).

Continue reading at https://ds6800.mainframe.dev.

Comments

  1. Shane HJuly 30, 2019 at 11:28 AM

    I need help with a DS6800 1750-511
    Anyone know about them?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Christian SvenssonJuly 30, 2019 at 12:30 PM

      Sure, what's the question? :-)

      Delete
    2. Shane HJuly 30, 2019 at 2:48 PM

      If you got my email address, let me know. Basically, I have two CF cards that are corrupted and manually done an fsck on them and the filesystems were dirty. Now there are missing or corrupted files on them. Is there a way to reflash those without having the SEA install file? Or if I even had a dd image would be fine.

      Delete
    3. Christian SvenssonJuly 30, 2019 at 10:56 PM

      I got it, email sent :-)

      Delete
    4. Shane HJuly 31, 2019 at 3:52 AM

      Thank You!

      Delete
  2. Shane HJuly 30, 2019 at 1:47 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Edadepiedrix79arDecember 5, 2019 at 11:05 AM

    Hi! very good page!!!
    I need help with DS Storage Manager.
    We lost the disk and now i cant manage the storage DS6800. You have one?
    Thanks in advance!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Christian SvenssonDecember 6, 2019 at 3:59 AM

      Do you have a support contract? If so IBM should be able to get you the software. It wouldn't be legal for me to provide you with software, so sadly I cannot help you :(

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buying an IBM Mainframe

By
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes into this process, I hope this post will interest you. I am not the first one by far to do something like this. There are some people on the internet that I know have their own personal mainframes, and I have drawn inspiration from each and every one of them. You should follow them if you are interested in these things: @connorkrukosky @sebastian_wind @faultywarrior @kevinbowling1 This post is about buying an IBM z114 mainframe (picture 1) but should translate well to any of the IBM mainframes from z9 to z14. Picture 1: An IBM z114 mainframe in all its glory Source: IBM What to expect of the process Buying a mainframe takes time. I never spent so much time on a purchase before. In fact - I purchased my first apartment with probably less planning and research. Compared to buying an apartment you have no guard rails. You are ...
14 comments
Read more

System z on contemporary zLinux

By
IBM System z supports a handful of operating systems; z/VM, z/VSE, z/OS, z/TPF, and finally zLinux. All the earlier mentioned OSes are proprietary except for zLinux which is simply Linux with a fancy z in the name. zLinux is the term used to describe a Linux distribution compiled for S390 (31 bit) or S390X (64 bit). As we are talking about modern mainframes I will not be discussing S390, only S390X. There is a comfortable amount of distributions that support S390X - more or less all of the popular distributions do. In this  list  we find distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, and RHEL. Noticeably Arch is missing but then again they only have an official port for x86-64. This is great - this means that we could download the latest Ubuntu, boot the DVD, and be up and running in no time, right? Well, sadly no. The devil is, as always, in the details. When compiling high level code like C/C++/Go the compiler needs to select an instruction set to use for the compi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Brocade Fabric OS downloads

By
Fabric OS is what runs on the SAN switches I will be using for the mainframe. It has a bit of annoying upgrade path as the guldmyr blog can attest to. TL;DR is that you need to do minor upgrades (6.3 -> 6.4 -> 7.0 -> ... > 7.4) which requires you to get all  Fabric OS images for those versions. Not always easy. So, let's make it a bit easier. Hopefully this will not end up with the links being taken down, but at least it helped somebody I hope. These downloads worked for me and are hash-verified when I could find a hash to verify against. Use at your own risk etc. The URLs are: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL59674/co-168954-1/v7.3.2a.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL59674/co-157071-1/v7.2.1g.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL59674/co-150357-1/v7.1.2b.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software12/COL38684/co-133135-1/v7.0.2e.zip ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software13/COL22074/co-155018-1/v6.4.3h.zip ftp://ftp.hp.c...
2 comments
Read more