Due to hardware issues, cfarm203
had to be decommisionned. This was the only big-endian POWER machine running Debian in the farm.
To replace it, cfarm121
has been installed with a big-endian Debian OS. While the old machine was a POWER8 (IBM 8284-22A), the new machine is a POWER10 (more precisely, a KVM-based virtual machine on a IBM 9105-42A).
Home directories from cfarm203
have been restored to cfarm121
, but unfortunately only a backup from 2023 could be used. This is a reminder to do your own backups if you have important data on farm machines; additionally, unused data should be removed to keep disk usage manageable (this is a shared resource).
Many thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz for driving this replacement and to OSUOSL for hosting the new machine.