Infrastructure

I needed 40 Gbps between two machines: intel9: Ubuntu 24.04, running K8s + misc services xeon2zfs: TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.3, serving storage via NFS The plan: Deploy InfiniBand FDR (40 Gbps), run IPoIB for network services, eventually layer NFS over RDMA if I felt fancy. The hardware: Two Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro cards from eBay ($20 each), one unmanaged QDR/FDR switch ($35), some cheap QSFP cables. Should be plug-and-play, right? VPI cards, support both Ethernet and InfiniBand, auto-negotiate, just works™. ...

There’s a moment in every homelab evolution where you stop and ask: what am I actually buying when I buy infrastructure? For me that moment came two weeks ago, staring at a renewal email from a SaaS I won’t name, doing back-of-the-envelope math on a Synology I almost ordered, and pricing out an EKS cluster for a side project that — let’s be honest — was never going to leave my apartment. ...

Previously, on “Man Yells at POWER8” In Part 1, I told you about the time I decided to run AIX 7.2 inside a KVM VM on a Gentoo ppc64le host, on actual IBM POWER8 hardware, in my basement in Chicago. I monkey-patched Python 2.7’s sqlitecachec.py to make yum work. I nuked my entire system by installing OpenSSL 3.5 instead of 3.0. I got WebSphere Liberty running and deployed IBM’s DayTrader 7 — a Java EE benchmark app from 2005 that speaks EJBs, JPA, JMS, and looks like it was designed by someone who thought JSP framesets were the pinnacle of web technology. ...

Why Would Anyone Run AIX in 2026? It’s February 2026. I’m staring at an IBM S822 (8335-GCA) in my basement rack — a dual POWER8 server with 128GB of RAM and 20 cores that can do 160 threads with SMT8. This machine used to live in a datacenter running enterprise workloads. Now it runs Gentoo Linux. Yes, Gentoo. On ppc64le. Compiled from source. All of it. But Gentoo wasn’t enough. I wanted to run the OS that this hardware was designed for — AIX. IBM’s proprietary UNIX that still powers banks, airlines, and telecom companies around the world. The OS that most people have only seen in architecture diagrams. The OS that costs more to license than my car payment. ...

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are my own, fueled by late-night coding sessions and an unreasonable amount of coffee. DevOps is all about turning chaos into order and making complex systems look like child’s play. My journey started with the lofty goal of becoming a Kubernetes Certified Administrator (CKA), but what started as a study exercise turned into an adventure with two amazing tools: Harvester and Salt. This post is part tutorial, part story, and entirely fueled by enthusiasm. Let’s dive in! ...