IBM xSeries eServer 346 #1 – First Look

Hey! Krafting here. Today I’ll write about another really old server that I got for free. It’s a IBM eServer 346. This server is heavy, loud old and dirty.

I’ll make a few blog posts about this guy, as it caused me a lot of trouble, but when it finally worked, this was really satisfying. However, today I will focus on the hardware itself and the features of this 2004’s server.

Table of Contents

The Outside

On the outside, this server just looks like any other server. But, once you take a closer look, you start noticing how old this thing is.

The front of the server.
The front of the server.

On the front of the server, we have something standard with 6 x 3.5″ drive bays, a DVD drive, the Light Path Diagnostics panel and a floppy drive. Yes, a floppy drive, on a server. I just find this awesome! I’m pretty young, so I never used floppy before, this server will allow me to have a full floppy-enhanced experience!

The Light Path Diagnostics (or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, the LDP) panel takes its name from old hardware, where some LEDs would shine in some transparent tubes around the server (like fiber optics) to show the user some informations about the status of the server. The name is still there, but in a more modern way! There is a REMIND button on there, from the documentation, it is more of an “acknowledge” button, which you can press when there is a system error, this will put the LED into a blinking state, meaning that you are aware of the issue and will not take immediate action.

The front of the server, with the LPD open. Alongside a floppy and cd drive.
The front of the server, with the LPD open. Alongside a floppy and cd drive.

The power button is also situated in the LPD. And you cannot push it by error, I mean, you cannot even push it if you wanted without some kind of pin or tool. The button is the small round part in the middle of the LDP, and you can’t reach it with your fingers. Good for security I guess, but awful when you want to turn the server on and off all of the time!

The front of the server, with the LPD closed.
The front of the server, with the LPD closed.

As for the hard-drives, they are some old 73.4GB ULTRA320 SCSI, sadly this server doesn’t support SAS drives, so I will not be able to upgrade the storage. But I’m still glad I have 3 of them. They all have an original IBM eServer sticker on them and that’s pretty cool too! The drive caddies are pretty solid, being all metal for the inside part, the plastic part however, feels a bit crunchy, and not as good as what you can find nowadays. Also, they have a blue colored part on them, which, in the IBM world, means that you should only unplug them when the server is powered down. (coldswap) This is actually kind of weird, with modern server you can actually unplug drives when the server is powered on, to allow replacing drives without interrupring the service.

3 ULTRA 320 SCSI hard drives with the IBM caddy on them.
3 ULTRA 320 SCSI hard drives with the IBM caddy on them.

Going to the back of the server now, we have some standard ports, some USB, VGA, Serial, PS/2, 2 ethernet ports, 2 ASM ethernet ports and lastly, a LOM (Lights-Out Management) port. What stands out more however is the weird port at the left of the two PSUs, this is a SCSI interface to plug other storage bays or devices right on the server. It has a label “SCSI / LVD/SE

The back of the server.
The back of the server.

The PSU are hot-swappable, you can see the orange color accent, which in contrast to the blue color on the drive, you can actually pull them out while the server is running! You can also see, on the right PSU, the server might have taken a hit at some point, and I could not pull this PSU out, but thanks to some hammering and a plier, I could get the metal to get out of the way and I’m able to take the PSU out now! Those PSU are 625 watts.

The right PSU with a bent metal piece blocking the removal of the PSU.
The right PSU with a bent metal piece blocking the removal of the PSU.

And to finish the outside of the server, here is the top panel (well, it’s technically the inside of the panel). As it as always been with servers, you can find instruction to replace parts and some informations about your server right on the server, which is nice! You do have a diagram of the whole server motherboard too.

The top cover of the server, upside down, to show the System Service Information sticker.
The top cover of the server, upside down, to show the System Service Information sticker.

The Inside

Now, let’s take a look at the pièce de resistance. I’ll take a look at most of the hardware this server has inside and will disassemble a lot of thing!

When I first opened the server, I did not expect that many fans in it, 12 fans to be precise. That’s seems really overkill! We can also see that this is a 2 CPU server, but I only have one CPU populated (indicated with a blank instead of a CPU cooler in slot CPU 2)

The server with the top cover removed.
The server with the top cover removed.

I started by removing the whole fan assembly, which is pretty annoying to deal with, it is kinda hard to get it out (even worse to get it back in), it feels like something was bent so I had to force it out. For the PCI riser, it was really easy, no screw, you just have to follow the instruction on the strickers to remove them.

The server with the fans and PCI risers removed.
The server with the fans and PCI risers removed.
A close-up of the whole fan tray with all the fans in it.
A close-up of the whole fan tray with all the fans in it.

There is one thing missing in this picture. When I got this server, I couldn’t wait and I opened it up immediately. And something was bugging me, the small card you can see (on the pictures above) just between the PSU and the big blue plastic is actually a RAID cache, and a battery was attached to it. the battery was really bad and bulging. I immediately removed it to avoid any bad thing happening. It did not leak at all but I did not really trust it anymore. I did keep it, just in case the server would not boot without a battery in it.

And actually, after I was done fiddling with the server, I actually put it back in, just to not lose it. When I came back to the server few months after (yes, this article should have been done months ago, but you know, life gets in the way) I found this :

The battery popped out of the RAID cache and is sitting on a heat-sink.
The battery popped out of the RAID cache and is sitting on a heat-sink.

The battery bulged even more and actually got off of its stands-off and just popped-out of its place. the stands off are just some plastic bits behind the RAID cache, so it is not that unbelievable, but still pretty impressing that it was able to do that. Anyway, now let’s go take a look at the fans and the… dirtyness of this server.

Yes, this server was (and still is…) dirty, it might not be obvious in all the pictures, but the whole inside is covered in a really thin coat of weird black powder, and everytime I touch something, I’ll need to go wash my hands afterwards. It was espacially bad in the fan holder and on the fans themselves too.

You can actually see some black spot in the fan holder on the picture below. I tried my best to wash and cleanup everything but it was clearly not enough and it is still dirty. I want to mention the weird black rubber thing on the fan holder. My best guess is that it’s something to isolate the two rows of fan so air can’t pass below, but as you can see, it is pretty damaged, it did not pass the test of time that well. But I guess it got hot on this part of the motherboard too and this did not help to keep the rubber in shape!

Now let’s talk CPU and memory. As I said before, I only got a single CPU on this server. And this CPU is really old.

Close-up of the two CPUs slots with the heat-sink removed.
Close-up of the two CPUs slots with the heat-sink removed.

The CPU is an Intel Xeon from 2004 (yes, old Intel Xeons do not have model number, they are differentiated by the GHz number and the number of core). If I remember correctly, it is the 3.00GHz dual-core version. It is actually one of the first 64bit CPU from Intel!

For the memory setup, the server came with 4 GB of DDR2 400 ECC, with 4 x 512MB sticks and 2 x 1GB sticks. Aferwards, I also populated the two empty slots with two more 512 MB sticks, for a total of 5GB of memory.

Remember the PCI riser I talked about earlier ? Well, here they are. And they both have 2 x 64bits PCI-X slots. The connector on the motherboard for the longer riser looks like a PCI Express connector, I’m wondering if some PCIe riser were available at some point for this server. The small blue brackets at the end of the riser are used to slide cards inside, to prevent them from sliding out and getting bent. And again, the blue color indicate that you should not remove any PCI device while the server is powered-on!

Close-up of the two PCI riser.
Close-up of the two PCI riser.

On the PCI riser, there is a sticker with the PCI information about the bus speed and number of the slot. And also here is a closer look at the smaller PCI riser sticker with the instructions to remove it.

To finish this blog post, I’ll just post some random image of the different parts of the motherboard that some people might find interesting.

Here is a closer look at the RAID cache and its slot. you can also see the “PCIe” looking slot in the back for the riser.

Here you can see some other parts of the motherboard, the front with the floppy drive and the backplane connector for the drive cage.

There is also two weird parts in the back of the server with the two ASM ports, a weird yellow lithium battery and an black heat-sink with a card behind it. The card seems to be soldered on the motherboard directly and I cannot remove it. The number on the sticker: 24R2638 just refer to the whole motherboard. Maybe this part is some kind of VRMs for the management interfaces?

The yellow lithium battery and a black heat-sink, on a PCB perpendicular of the motherboard.
The yellow lithium battery and a black heat-sink, on a PCB perpendicular of the motherboard.

On the side of the server there is a sticker with the part number and also a date! This server seems to have been built around february 2006.

Side of the server with a sticker with the serial number and a date. 

FRU PN : 26K4759
PN SN 25R5217
2006-02-12
Side of the server with a sticker with the serial number and a date.

Conclusion

Old hardware should not be run 24 / 7, they are inefficient, not powerful enough for modern task and a lot more. But I’ll always love taking a look at old hardware. Especially enterprise-grade stuff. This server is no exception, I’m glad I can add it to my collection, I have actually no idea what I’ll end up installing on it. Maybe some people on Lemmy will have answer ? We’ll see!

But anyway, thank you for taking the time to read all of this and if you have any question about this server, feel free to ask them here or on my Mastodon account: @krafting@mamot.fr

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