The Question Nobody Asked (But I’m Answering Anyway) I have an IBM POWER8 server from 2014. It has 160 hardware threads. It draws 400W at idle. It sounds like a jet engine warming up. I compiled .NET 8 from source on it, then built Jellyfin 10.11 in nine increasingly desperate attempts, and now it’s streaming movies to my living room. My wife thinks I have a problem. She’s correct. But that’s not the point. ...
This is Part 2 of the POWER8 Saga. Part 1: What Microsoft Won’t Ship: .NET on POWER8 The Machine Before we begin — let me reintroduce the star of this show. The IBM S822 (8335-GCA) is a 2U rackmount server that IBM launched in 2014 for enterprise workloads. It was designed to run DB2, WebSphere, and SAP HANA. It cost somewhere north of $30,000 new. I bought it used for the price of a nice dinner. ...
You Need a .NET SDK to Build a .NET SDK That’s the first thing you learn when you try to compile .NET from source. It’s a beautifully circular problem — like needing a car to drive to the dealership where you’re buying your first car. Microsoft ships pre-built SDKs for x86_64, ARM64, and s390x. But POWER? IBM’s legendary architecture that runs half the world’s banking systems? Sorry — you’re on your own. ...
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. ...
A Tale of Two Philosophies: When 160 Threads Meet Modern Silicon I have a problem. I see weird computer hardware on eBay, and I buy it. Last year’s victim: an IBM POWER8 S822LC server from 2015. Cost: $50. Shipping: $200. The look on my partner’s face when it arrived: priceless. Everyone told me it was a relic, a curiosity, basically e-waste with RGB lights (okay, it doesn’t have RGB, but it should). But staring at those specs—160 hardware threads via SMT-8—I couldn’t help but wonder: could raw, embarrassing parallelism compete with modern single-thread supremacy? ...
For fifty bucks, I got myself a time machine. Ray — the older gentleman who sold it to me — was equal parts amused and confused that someone like me still existed. For the price of a dinner out, I walked away with a brushed-aluminum tower that once symbolized Apple’s peak desktop performance. Now it sits proudly next to my daily driver (“Study”), humming away like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. I hit the power button, braced for the famous chime… and there it was: Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, dual 1.8 GHz G5 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB Maxtor spinning drive that sounds like a diesel generator. Inside? Comcast invoices from 2012 and a still-configured iChat account. The ghost of broadband past. ...
The Dream Back in the early 2000s, teenage me was obsessed with the iBook G4. That sleek white clamshell with its PowerPC CPU and AltiVec engine felt like the future. I couldn’t afford one then — but now, two decades later, I finally scored one: a 1.33GHz model for $67 on eBay, original box and all. Reality hit hard. The 60GB hard drive was dying The RAM was maxed at 1.5GB (after some firmware trickery) I destroyed the power button during an SSD upgrade This is the story of how I brought it back to life — and turned it into a (surprisingly capable) development machine in 2025. ...
The Recipe for Modern Content Creation (Now with Extra Bytes!) In the world of food blogging, freshness isn’t just about ingredients — it’s about content too. What if you could automate your recipe blog to be as efficient as a well-oiled kitchen? That’s exactly what we’ve cooked up with ‘Los Platos de Sara.’ Join us as we dive into the technical ingredients that make this automated recipe blog pipeline a true chef-d’oeuvre of modern web development. ...
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! ...