Technotes

Observations, code, photos, blathering. Father in Atlanta to one daughter. Computers, computers, computers.

[joshsanders]

Porthos Buildsheet

Thursday, June 18, 2013: Porthos is getting rebuilt. The basic hardware that I purchased this time around is a SuperMicro X10SL7-F Board, 32GB of Kingston RAM, and a 1240v3 Xeon (due to a bundle, it was cheaper than the 1230v3). Add to that half a dozen surplus SAS disks (300GB each), a pair of old 500GB SATA disks, a 256GB SSD, and a 320GB 2.5" WD Black, and you've got a new case that is completely filled with SATA cables. I'll eventually be moving the current pair of 2TB disks over from the current build, but not yet - still want the old server running until I get this one up.

Step 0: Flash the LSI controller into IT mode

This isn't actually necessary at this point, but it may be marginally safer to do it before you start using the system at all.

LSI firmware downloads from supermicro

Instructions from HardOCP on how to perform the cross-flash

Step 1: Get the OS installer to actually complete

As of right now, the latest version of VMware ESXi (free) is 5.1.0 u1 1065491. This version (brilliantly) doesn't include support for the Intel I210 NIC that is on the board of this thing. To work around this, you need to build a custom ISO that includes the VMware driver for this NIC. This sounds a lot more daunting than it actually is. All you really do is download the master CD and the VIB from VMware, point the program at them, and then use the ISO it produces to install VMware. Works great, and fast.

HardOCP forum post about this

The ESXi Customizer tool

VMware: Intel I210 driver VIB

Reserve the LSI controller for PCI Passthrough

The LSI controller on this board provides eight 6Gb/s SAS ports. My intention is to pass through the entire controller to the storage VM so it can do as it pleases to the attached disks at the highest possible speeds. There's really only two steps to this:

Reserve the PCI device for passthrough, and then reboot the host

Choose the PCI device in the VM configuration dialog, and then reboot the VM.

NexentaStor Steps

The basic install for NexentaStor is simple; after the controller was passed-through (and the memory reservation set as per VMware's demands), it booted up and worked as expected. Installing VMware tools has a little hiccup in the middle of it - you've got to edit the config script (which is designed for Solaris, rather than Nexenta or its ilk) to allow the install to complete.

Basic VMware Tools install on NextentaStor 3.1.3.5

What needs to be removed from the config script

In case that blog goes down, all you've got to do is comment out the lines in /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl that refer the SUNWuiu8 package (which is apparently not necessary for NexentaStor).

Is NexentaStor going the way of OpenSolaris? Sure looks like it! All the repos are dead for it; can't get updates. I was able to get it loaded and working, but I'm not sure I want to run my storage on a solution that won't get any love. I'm looking back at FreeNAS 8.3; my previous build was on 8.0.

Here's two things that I've battled with so far, regarding FreeNAS:

getting vmxnet3 to function

getting vt-d passthrough to function

Remaining steps (roughly): add in the additional Intel desktop NIC, update the LSI controller to IT mode, pass-through the onboard LSI controller to the storage VM, and transport the ZFS filesystem from FreeNAS to NexentaStor (or whatever I end up picking).

[joshsanders]

New Server, 2013 version

My server downstairs is about to get replaced. The hardware was purchased in November 2008; it's running as a file/media server here and is pretty much stretched to the limits.

Asus P5Q Deluxe (P45/LGA775)

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz (65W)

4GB (4x 1GB) PC2 8500 DDR2-1066

It has a grand total of 2.5 TB of disk - a single 500GB 7200RPM drive as well as a pair of mirrored 2TB disks. The actual problem with the machine is in the disks and the memory - after doing the current server tasks, it doesn't have any more free memory or disk IOPS for any other purpose.

I had considered repurposing my current gaming machine as a server, but the hardware, while very good, is not well-suited to the server role. I would need to spend an additional $300 or so to get it to the point I'd want it, and then I'd have a spare video card sitting around. And the fact of the matter is that while I do not often use this desktop as a gaming platform, I do use it for photo editing, so until I get something that can perform that task I may as well hold on to it.

My intention is to transplant the current disks (hopefully with the file systems intact, but I'll make backups just in case) from the operational server into the new server. The new server will have some other new disks as well, but 2TB for bulk storage is good for my current purposes. If the performance of this server is sufficient, I'll look into adding more disks for other uses. It can support another five disks (at 6 Gb/s) without adding any other controllers in this configuration.

This is my current hardware shopping list:

Asus P9D-C/4L ATX Motherboard

Asus PIKE 2008 Daughter card

Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 Processor

Kingston KVR16E11K4/32 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3 ECC RAM

ICY DOCK MB994SP-4S 4 x 2.5" SAS/SATA Drive Bay

Whenever I can find someplace selling one: Asus ASMB7-iKVM

An alternative: the Supermicro MBD-X10SL7-F Motherboard. This would replace both Asus motherboard from above, the PIKE daughter card, and the IPMI card. At around $250, the Supermicro board comes in at about $300 cheaper, which is plenty to replace the additional two NIC ports the Asus board provides.

I'll also be transplanting the following hardware from other devices:

ATX Case (mid-tower)

256GB 6Gb/s SATA SSD (Samsung something-or-other)

PSU (although this may need to be upgraded to support the additional disks)

2x 2TB WD20EARX 5400 RPM 6Gb/s SATA Mechanical disks

4x 300GB 10k RPM 6Gb/s SAS Mechanical disks

possibly a dual-port Intel Gigabit NIC

The current installation is using ESXi (free) 5.0.0, which is I believe the last version before they added support for Windows 8 to the client. I've resisted upgrading the OS on it simply because of the difficulty of getting the NICs (which are not directly supported by VMware; they're desktop NICs) online. This new board utilizes all server-class hardware that *should* be supported by VMware out-of-the-box. This will also max out the memory capabilities of the board as well as the VMware ESXi free license.

Backup power: CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD UPS, which isn't explicitly supported by PowerPanel Business Edition, but apparently works just fine.

[joshsanders]

iOS/iPhone calendar sync to google

This one is super non-obvious: google calendar only syncs your default calendar to your calDAV shares; you have to configure it to sync additional calendars using google's sites. Bonus: you need to configure this on a phone-by-phone basis FROM a mobile device: Using Google Sync with iOS Calendar

Other links that may be useful for this:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=151674

https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect

[joshsanders]

[joshsanders]

One Shot

A one-page website I can get behind: tenprinciplesofgooddesign.com, featuring Dieter Rams' Ten Principles, further documented on Wikipedia and on SFMOMA's website.

[joshsanders]

Embryo

1 /------+------\ 8 / | \ 2 / | \ | | | | | | 7 +--------+--------+ 3 | | | | | | \ | / 6 \ | / 4 \------+------/ 5

A character is in a zone of comfort

But they want something

They enter an unfamiliar situation

Adapt to it

Get what they wanted

Pay a heavy price for it

Then return to their familiar situation

Having changed

Dan Harmon: "I can't not see that circle," he says."It's tattooed on my brain."

[joshsanders]

"Prophecy is like a half-trained mule," he complained to Jorah Mormont. "It looks as though it might be useful, but the moment you trust in it, it kicks you in the head."

Tyrion Lannister, A Dance With Dragons, George R.R. Martin

[joshsanders]

Finally, Ultrabooks

Ultrabook: Intel's $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game

This article so closely mirrors my own experience in this arena that I just had to post it. In the end, I gave up and spent the money on a Dell 30" monitor instead.

[joshsanders]

Point Dynamic DNS

I created a simple script for using PointHQ as a dynamic DNS service. The script takes measures to be polite to PointHQ, as all dynamic dns scripts should: PointHQ's update process is only involved if the IP needs to be changed.

The script is designed to be installed on a PHP and cURL capable webserver on the internet - I personally set up an extra vhost on my webserver to handle my own. You can then configure the machine that you want to have the dynamic DNS (such as your server at your house) to periodically request a specially-formatted URL and the script handles the rest.

Available at github.

Note: There are currently a few nits I have to pick with this script, such as the fact that it only queries Point's first DNS server and none of the others as alternatives, but this script has been operational for my own use for almost two years without that being a real problem. It might be a bigger issue if your home internet connection gets a new IP more often than every six months, as tends to be my own experience.

[joshsanders]

Bench from the new drive

Crucial M4 128GB SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (running at 3Gb/s)

M4-CT128M4SSD2, 0009

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 * MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s] Sequential Read : 276.523 MB/s Sequential Write : 174.124 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 255.158 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 175.778 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 27.402 MB/s [ 6689.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 73.690 MB/s [ 17990.7 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 192.996 MB/s [ 47118.2 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 158.547 MB/s [ 38707.7 IOPS] Test : 1000 MB [C: 50.7% (60.4/119.1 GB)] (x5) Date : 2011/08/30 22:58:27 OS : Windows 7 [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

This speaks for itself, I think. Compare to the results from the mechanical drive this replaced. More detailed impressions forthcoming.

[joshsanders]

Benchmarks

In preparation for installing a new hard drive in my machine, some quick tests and notes about what is currently installed. For a temporary comparison, here's some random internet person's bench of my new drive on a SATA II controller (3Gb/s) (which I will be using), and the same tests using a SATA III (6Gb/s) controller.

Western Digital 74GB Raptor, 10k RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s

WDC WD740GD-00FLA1, 27.08D27

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 * MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s] Sequential Read : 43.479 MB/s Sequential Write : 49.056 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 13.827 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 31.330 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.519 MB/s [ 126.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.039 MB/s [ 253.6 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.592 MB/s [ 144.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.067 MB/s [ 260.4 IOPS] Test : 1000 MB [C: 84.0% (58.1/69.1 GB)] (x5) Date : 2011/08/29 19:45:32 OS : Windows 7 SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

Unless you've ever worked with a machine with an old Raptor in it, you probably don't have a good reference point for how loud these drives are. Even when they were new, they were among the loudest consumer drives you could buy; now, the drive sounds like it's trying to climb out of a steel drawer filled with galvanized bolts. My storage drive (below) was completely inaudible over the quiet hum of the PC. This drive's clatter causes my wife to raise her voice when she talks to me, and we're three feet apart in an otherwise silent room.

I purchased this drive in September 2004, and it has been the primary boot drive for four different builds of my PC now. Obviously it's had a useful lifespan, but at this point the drive is just aged beyond any expectation of performance.

Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB 7200.11, 7200 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s

ST31500341AS, SD17

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 * MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s] Sequential Read : 74.068 MB/s Sequential Write : 72.206 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 26.097 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 41.426 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.331 MB/s [ 80.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.779 MB/s [ 190.2 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.721 MB/s [ 176.1 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.780 MB/s [ 190.3 IOPS] Test : 1000 MB [E: 75.1% (976.1/1299.6 GB)] (x4) Date : 2011/08/29 20:14:35 OS : Windows 7 SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

Clearly, this should have been my primary drive.

This is one of the infamous 1.5TB drives from Seagate that was among the first giant disks to have a pervasive problem. I purchased this drive in September 2008 and have had precisely zero problems with it.

Prior to this drive (June 2006), I had purchased four Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM drives for use in a storage array on a server. They'd probably still be in use today if that server hadn't eaten itself alive (which was due to a deduplication bug in an Opensolaris beta ZFS release).

[joshsanders]

Restore View Source

In Firefox 6, Mozilla decided to remove the View Source menu option from the View menu. If you search around on the internet, the general consensus appears to be that this is no big deal, as it still exists under Tools -> Web Developer -> Page Source, and also has a keyboard shortcut (CTRL-U).

I agree that it's not really a big deal, but I've got a habit built up through years of hitting ALT-V-O, and removing that menu item really put a bump in my road. This habit, it is practically muscle memory.

So I added it back.

Restore View Source at Mozilla's Add-ons site.

[joshsanders]

"Not pointless," I protested. "It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers."

Kvothe, The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss

[joshsanders]

Mother's Day 2011.

[joshsanders]

Porthos

My last server, Porthos, was an Intel Pentium D 915 with 4GB of RAM. It had six 3.5" disks - two 200GB drives mirrored for the operating system (OpenSolaris) and four 300GB drives in a RAIDZ1 giving a little less than 1TB of usable primary storage.

I say "was," but it's still sitting here beside my hulking desktop machine. They're both in Lian-Li PC-61 cases (18" tall x 19" deep x 8" wide) with 400w Enermax Liberty PSUs. The reason it's not my server now is because the RAIDZ filesystem got punk'd by a software bug and is no longer able to mount. All four of the drives were almost five years old at the time that the filesystem went down; it was overdue.

I learned a lesson when it went down, one that I really already knew but hadn't yet taken to heart: RAID is not backup. This is not the sort of lesson one wants to learn the hard way.

My current server, Law, is a Seagate Dockstar that has been modded to boot Arch Linux from a 2.5" 160GB laptop disk attached via USB. The whole setup uses 7W under load and is completely silent. The old server used 120w at idle and was kept in the garage because it was loud enough to wake the dead.

I've got a plan now to build a new server using some lower-power Mini-ITX components. Average wattage for the machine below should be 20w or so, with peaks up to 80w. The machine will be almost entirely silent (barring disk noise, which from 5400RPM disks should be minimal) and will have no active cooling. Primary storage will be on an external USB disk, which is currently a miserly 160GB drive but will eventually be replaced with a 1-2TB drive in a Samsung Story Station enclosure.

M350 Enclosure

Intel D525MWV Motherboard

pico-PSU-120WI-25V Wide Input 120 watt PSU

Crucial 2x 2GB DDR3 SO-DIMM kit

19v power brick (watts = amps * volts) with as close to 6.3 amps as possible

two 40GB 2.5" 5400RPM SATA drives

Some tests of power usage of devices:

Linksys router 6 - 10w

Ooma 6 - 10w

Panasonic phone 1w

Sony Reciever (off) 0w

Sony Reciever (on, idle) 46w

Powered Speakers (off) 3 - 4w

Powered Speakers (on, idle) 6w

Desktop PC (off) 4 - 5w

Desktop PC (on, idle) 117 - 128w

Server PC (off) 4 - 5w

Server PC (on, idle) 110w

Monitors (on, no signal) 2 - 3w (each)

Monitors (on, active) 65w (each)

USB external HDD (on, idle) 7w

Dockstar + 160GB HDD 7w

Some info about an alternative project: attaching a bare LCD from a laptop to a MINI-ITX board, when is then attached to a balanced-arm lamp stand.

The connector type between the board and the LCD is LVDS. The LCD itself is a donor from a Gateway MT6711 laptop with a dead systemboard/CPU. The display itself is a CHI MEI N154I2-L02:

N154I2-L02 is a 15.4" TFT Liquid Crystal Display module with single CCFL Backlight unit and 30 pins LVDS interface. This module supports 1280 x 800 Wide-XGA mode and can display 262,144 colors. The optimum viewing angle is at 6 o'clock direction. The inverter module for Backlight is not built in.

The connector on the LCD is JAE FI-XB30SL-HF10; one possible LVDS cable to connect from this display is available from ebay for $6.

some links

LVDS laptop LCD

a little more info from the same source

a guy from belarus that pulled this off

large image of the D525MWV board (JPG)s

information from Intel regarding onboard LVDS

mated connector type for the board: SHDR-30V-S-B (PDF)