www.xseries.org & www.ibmsystemx.org
News and updates
Aug 5, 2007
Some pretty significant updates this time around.
I added a LOT of PartnerWorld links. So many that I broke my own rule of trying to keep to a single page if possible. There is now a separate PartnerWorld page at www.xseries.org/partnerworld
This is a work I progress, so bear with me as I clean things up some over the next few days.
I’ve added some more BladeCenter power documents. One is specifically for 20amp solutions, per request from IBM. Another is for UPS connectivity to the IBM/APC 7500va & 10kva UPS.
I also added a document specific to that UPS to help electricians, as the docs that ship with the product are confusing at best.
July 11, 2007
A couple of minor updates.
Added some more PartnerWorld links for starters. Updated the BladeCenter E power planning document.
Cleaned up and added to the ungainly list of ServerGuide cds.
Dropped the eserverforum link since I can’t really tell what the heck it’s pointing at. Replaced it with IBM’s current attempt at maintaining a forum site (they’ve run and dropped one before, so let’s hope this one sticks).
Getting ready for the System x Technical
Conference in
March 2, 2007
I’ve added two new contributions to the BladeCenter section – quick cheat sheets on how to get the HS21 and JS21 firmware updates done. Thanks to Charlie McElvy and Jeff Dobbelaere for those.
After continued customer confusion on IEC-309 plugs, I cleaned up the power plug page, adding some verbage where I thought it made sense. Hopefully IEC-309 pieces will be a little easier to understand with the added text.
Also added a link for a pretty good primer document (way at the bottom by the size comparison pics). It’s a commercial catalogue document, but it’s covers the details of the IEC-309s pretty nicely.
December 22, 2006
As many of us have experienced, IBM is splitting their website away from the shared Lenovo site (what used to be the PC and laptop group stuff). The result is that several links broke and some stuff is nowhere to be found. I’ve updated all I can and will continue chasing down the remaining pieces.
Also, it appears that Martin’s site is no longer online. That leaves a gap for those of us who want to download old iso images of utilities included in the servers. I hope to have a new server online in the near future (as opposed to a 100% hosted site) with enough storage and bandwidth to handle those images. Martin had a better collection than I do, so I will be soliciting iso images for upload when that happens.
If anyone knows of an inexpensive, reliable collocation
facility in the
Happy holidays to all.
June 15, 2006
Added the counter to the main page. I’ll get to the other pages soon enough.
I found Martin’s xSeries Support Site, thanks to links on www.ibmdirector.com
Martin’s site has all of the cd downloads I was looking to do in the future. It seems silly to excessively duplicate efforts, so I’ll let Martin do it until he gets tired of it and simply tell all of you to go grab that material from his site.
Happy Anniversary xseries.org!!
May 24, 2006
First installment of the NEWS page (what you are looking at now).
As IBM tries to figure out where they are going to call the Intel based servers “System x” and where they will continue to call them “xSeries”, and when, this website is dealing with the same issue.
For starters, we now have an additional URL. You can now get to the same pages via www.xseries.org or via www.ibmsystemx.org
Both URLs point to the exact same top page, which resolves as www.xseries.org
To be honest, I’m lazy. It’s more letters to type ibmsystemx, so I’m going to continue coding all of the pages to resolve as xseries for the foreseeable future.
I’ve gone through and cleaned up all of the links today. To the best of my knowledge, everything is once again working. Most of the breaks were due to IBM renaming pages based on System x conventions. Some were simply because I didn’t realize they were broken.
If you find a broken link, please email the info to admin@xseries.org – even better if you include the correct link, if you’ve already found it.
If you have any suggestions for site content or want to donate material of your own, please read the “comments from the webmaster” link. We can all benefit from additional material here.
The most recent add is the IBM BladeCenter Cisco Switch Guidelines document. I hope this saves people some time and grief.
I am officially posting an open offer to the IBM CSRs to build a page specific for your use. It requires someone within your community to help maintain it, however, as I assume that many of the links would be internal to IBM and not verifiable by those of us who no longer have that sort of access. I would suggest key links, documents like the Cisco switch documents to help each other out, and misc tips for each other. I can id & password protect it, but that just makes it a bigger pain for everyone. So the best plan is to either make anonymous submissions (which I can do) or to keep things safe for public consumption.
Next month will be the 2 year anniversary of xseries.org, or at least the 2nd year of it being hosted by a real provider (since my billing anniversary is the only reference I can find, I’ll go with it). If you have any requests for things you’d like to see as a 2nd anniversary face lift, please let me know.
My own plans (time permitting) include adding counters to the web pages (mostly because I am curious) and cleaning up the appearance of the site in Firefox. This may require me using something more complex than Excel to build the pages :-\