Broadcom

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For my last job at Broadcom, I was asked to build over 100 compute servers over a weekend. <grin> Really. And I got to do it in a warehouse. Fun, eh?

These first two shots are of the workspace that I had. In the first shot you can see the pallets of Ultra 2's. The far pallet is of finished servers, the near pallets have yet to be done.

What I had to do to these boxes:

Unpack the server, place on workbench, remove cover.
Remove four sticks of 32 MB RAM.
Install 16 sticks of 128 MB RAM.
Install second 400 Mhz CPU.
Install gigabit ethernet card.
Boot system to OpenBoot prompt, verifying memory and devices.
Boot from network to single user mode.
- Partition disk.
- Newfs root partition
- ufsrestore drive image from network servers.
- Customize server id, network parameters.
Power down server, pack up for shipment.

I found that I could maintain the pace for about three servers at a time. This would give me time to install hardware in three boxes while three others were receiving their images. Once image dump was complete, start image on three new and box up completed servers.

Installing over 1600 DIMMS will shred your fingers...

Here you can see the finished product. Broadcom installed racks of Ultra 2's into compute pools. These systems loaded all the applications from the Network Appliance servers, and shell scripts submitted EDI jobs to open servers.

It was a busy time...

Last modified: Sun Oct 21 12:24:42 2001