Here’s an easy one

Closing out another week with what I think is a pretty simple picture puzzle. Chances are that most people have interacted with one of these, or at least something very closely related. Do you recognize it? The bigger picture is below.

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This is one outlet on a standard PDU for an HP cabinet. This is what you would use for all of your basic C13-C14 power cables for servers, arrays, etc. This one has the bonus of allowing for one C19-C20 cable as well. I’ve lost count of how many of these I have installed and wired up at this point.

Have a great weekend!

It just keeps going, and going

The old gear is on my mind today. We just sent out a couple 4 GB disks to a customer still running one of the classic HP servers. I’m not quite sure if that server can drink, but it certainly can vote. And with the new disks it marches on.

That called to mind my trusty old AE1. This thing is from 1981! It’s almost 40! And, I shot some photos with a local singer/songwriter on it over the weekend. It should be noted that these photos were taken outside, masked up, and at a proper distance. Because that’s where we are right now.

Point being, new technology is great, but old technology doesn’t stop when the new technology comes out. And if your classic server, or your beat up old film camera get the job done, there you go.

Fun fact about the photo. That blue glow? It is there because the light is bouncing off the back wall, into the viewfinder, off the mirror, and out through the lens. It was distracting, so I put a piece of blue tape over the eyepiece, expecting to block it. But it created that blue glow, which I actually like better.

The magic of lighting

A late start to the week after a very brief, not entirely successful, vacation.

I’m not saying this is a great photo or anything. It has an arty vibe going for it, but it does get to an interesting point. Essentially, I wanted to know what it would take to kill all natural light inside the warehouse. This shot (at ISO 100, 1/200, f11) did that. If you were to walk in the warehouse right now, you would get around fine. However, to the camera, it is completely dark. Only that which the flash hits will show up. We will experiment more with this in the future.

Batteries… always a thing

I have some photos to shoot this weekend, which means the charging of the batteries has begun. There are just so many batteries. Those in the picture are for the eVOLV 200 lights, but they are just the tip of the batteryburg. 8 more for the speedlights. 2 for the radio controller. 3 for the camera. Then the big backup battery to charge the phone or start charging the others if needed.

It’s a whole thing, and it has an analogue with what we do in computing. UPS batteries are the first thing that come to mind. We’ve been contacted more than once because there was a power outage and the UPS failed. Usually that is because that UPS was still on its original batteries that are of some age that is years beyond what is recommended.

You see a similar thing with battery backed cache in RAID systems. The added issue there is that for some of those older systems, the replacement batteries are no longer being made. We have had to get old battery modules back from customers so they can be rebuilt with new cells installed. There isn’t a lot of use for a soldering iron on modern equipment, but I keep one around just for the BBU on the Model 20 arrays.

There is some good news on that front. The switch from batteries to capacitors in some of the newer cache systems has been a welcome change. But the moral of the story is to check your batteries. Be they cache, or UPS, or anything else.

Have a great weekend!

Lock It Down

Here’s a fun one. This is a pretty generous photo to guess from. If you have had any run-ins with this tool, you will recognize it right away. If you have not used it, it will be both oddly mysterious, and super interesting in all its details. Scroll to see just what this is.

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This is our well used banding tool. For those that are unaware, this is the tool that you use to tighten and secure the banding when you are preparing a pallet to ship. This predates my time at the company, so I am guessing it is something on the order of 20 years old.

Keys as far as the eye can see

A quick one today as time is running short. Here’s an interesting perspective on a random keyboard kicking around the shop. I like that this is a full color image, although it looks like it has been edited to black and white.

Not as likable, but interesting, is that if you look closely, you will see where the stacking program struggled to put things back together. In an ideal world, I would go back to the beginning and get a better result. But sometimes, time is a thing and you get what you get. I’ll put this on the list of things to revisit at some point.

Getting back to macro

It’s been a bit since we had a macro picture puzzle on the blog, so here is one to ponder. Do you recognize this? It’s an uncommon item, so even getting in the ballpark is notable. If you do recognize the specific version of this, then we know something about you. The answer, and a couple wider shots, are below.

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The top photo is looking down the business end of the bare bulb flash tube for a Flashpoint eVOLV 200, also known as the Godox AD200. This is a battery powered flash that is particularly useful for location shooting. It is just a bit bigger than a speedlight, but has about three times the power. And the whole thing runs off of a rechargable battery. It’s tiny, powerful, and portable. Above you see a more recognizable shot of the bulb from the side. And below, the full unit.

All the IO

This is the back of a server we are putting together for a customer. This is a fully populated RP8420 with four cells carrying 32 cores and a fibre channel card for every slot. The 8420 is very versatile. All of those resources can be configured as a single 32 core server, or the cells can be divided up with hardware partitions into individual systems. You can take that division further with virtual partitioning.

It does carry a large footprint when compared to some of the blade options available, but we still see a lot of the RP and RX 84/86XX hardware in use. If you have any needs for your own cell based systems, we have a number of upgrades in stock.

That’s MEGA bytes

We are working out way through a big bunch of HP Classic K-Class hardware that just arrived. What you see above is about 30 kits of memory for the Ks that we just tested and started adding to inventory. This is another instance where the progression of computing really shows. These are 128MB DIMMs that make up 256MB kits.

Those numbers seem almost quaint as I import the image off of a tiny little 128GB SD Card while checking my email on my phone with 3GB of RAM. If you load up a carrier with 16 of these, you’ll have 2GB of RAM, and the boot time to prove it. It is always interesting to see where we have been.

Should you be in the market for any K-Class parts or upgrades, give us a call. We have a bunch of things that are being added to our inventory.

Money Money Money Money

As mentioned in the last post, here is a close-up shot of the eye and pyramid from the one dollar bill. This thing is fascinating, and the jumping off point for all sorts of conspiracies.

Conventional wisdom says that this is the ‘eye of providence’, and it has been part of the Great Seal of The United States since the 1780s. Additionally, the pyramid is to suggest hope that the nation stands as long as the pyramids have.

Beyond that, once you enter the realm of conspiracy theories, anything goes. Is it a reference to masons? Does the text Novus Ordo Seclorum signify the beginning of the new American era? Or is it a signal that the government has been taken over by an evil plot? It is an internet rabbit hole with no end of possibilities.

Here is a wider shot of that side of the bill for a little more perspective.