The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Since all I'm lacking now is the heatsink/fans I ordered, I went ahead and test fitted and mounted everything. Thanks to KC8 for the heads-up on this PSU. It was in working order, but I recapped it anyway. I've serviced a lot of systems with these PSU's in them, having never seen a bad one....but I didn't want this one to be the first. The caps in this PSU were all UCC, a variety of series that are not known to be problematic....but better safe than sorry given its age.

Mock-up fitting:

I love matching Supermicro boards with Supermicro cases! Everything always lines up and fits the way it should. The Dynatron full copper heatsinks I ordered will work either way, board mount or chassis mount.....I'll always elect for chassis mount when available, that way the case is holding the weight of all that copper, not the board.

Lines up perfect!






Mock-up over, mounted for real now.

IO Shield in place and all standoffs fastened down:






Motherboard interfaces all connected....yes, that is an IDE cable for the optical. I'd have removed the optical all together, but I didn't get the blank with the case to close the hole....same with the floppy...and dummy drives annoy me, so I connect them.





PSU cables connected:


Once the heatsinks arrive, its time to light this candle. It already passed bench testing of course....and my Paxville build is almost complete... I truly miss the old school days of the real system builders....its becoming a lost art anymore.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Looks like I need to order parts and get you the sm breakout board I owe you.

edit- NM, this one has discreet wires for the front lights and switches... not a single block connector (or worse like mine, a ribbon cable)... so it won't be of use... but I'm sure you do with as many SM cases and boards you have...

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

...and the Paxville build is complete... Heatsinks came yesterday, and away it went. I ended up having to use their bottom plates, as the screws were not long enough to get to the chassis mount holes....it wasn't like that with their S771 versions, but ohh well...

Heavy hunks of copper...



Mounted.





Up and running. Building the RAID array. The ICH5 onboard RAID isn't the snappiest thing around, but for what this machine will do, it's fine.



Server 2008 Install...



...and to its new home...



Yes, that's a really nice Dell 3011 that if I told you what I paid for that, you'd be sick...



The desks from the cheap/free score thread...



I'll get back to the other builds soon.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

You got the onboard raid to work? nice!

BUT

you need one of these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Controller-C...item566c17d2e6

(And I thought the one for $25 with cables was a steal).

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

You got the onboard raid to work? nice!

It's an adaptec hostraid firmware, had no trouble making it work....it is slow as balls though...

you need one of these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Controller-C...item566c17d2e6

(And I thought the one for $25 with cables was a steal).

hmm, not had!!

[ratdude747]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

^I couldn't get it to work with any modern OS (it registers as an ICH5 RAID, which has no drivers past XP x32)... there is an adaptec card that can be plugged into the card slot for actual HW raid but they're impossible to source I've found. Besides, I kinda like 3ware/AMCC/LSI cards better.

PS- I grabbed one of the $10 cards (I'll toss it in my other main rig, the venerable 9500 has no SMART support but these 9550's do and are a lot faster)... there is one left, better get it while you can!

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Supermicro had a 64 bit driver for it on their site for this board.

I have a 9550 in my office machine, the 8-channel version, to make use of all 8 SAS trays in my case. That 4 porter for 10 bucks, thats a good buy. Says there's 5 left.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Supermicro had a 64 bit driver for it on their site for this board.

I have a 9550 in my office machine, the 8-channel version, to make use of all 8 SAS trays in my case. That 4 porter for 10 bucks, thats a good buy. Says there's 5 left.

5 sold of 6 available from what I saw. Rechecking.

edit- 4 sold and 6 available is 10 total, not 6... brain shart!

So yes, 5 and 5

edit2- I have a 9550 in my Operon rig and I saw a ~10MB/s transfer speed uograde over the 9500 (on SATA I drives no less), so yeah, for $10 if you only need 4 or less drives it's a steal. Hell the batteries are almost worth the price (as BBU's and the batteries are both not cheap new).

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

edit2- I have a 9550 in my Operon rig and I saw a ~10MB/s transfer speed uograde over the 9500 (on SATA I drives no less), so yeah, for $10 if you only need 4 or less drives it's a steal. Hell the batteries are almost worth the price (as BBU's and the batteries are both not cheap new).

I know, I've gad to buy replacement batteries before. The chinese knockoffs are cheap, but you get what you pay for. I got the new LSI replacements....their price made my pooper pucker. I hope the batteries are actually good. I grabbed all 5 remaining at that price. What I don't use, my server guys will.

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Yet another bumping of an old thread. I've been using the paxville build in this thread as my service bench machine since its creation. I've always dual booted it with S2K3 and S2K8, as S2K3 (fancy XP) comes in very handy for some older utilities that I still regularly use that won't run on anything newer.

Long story short, this machine was in need of some HDD & HDD controller updating. The ICH5 RAID was slower than steam off cold shit, and one of the 200GB WD200JD HDD's were amassing bad sectors like a teenager's face amassing zits after a chocolate binge. I had a pair of 150GB 15K SAS drives, and recently acquired a pair of 73GB 15K SAS drives (thanks Larry)...and throw an Adaptec 2405 in the mix (supports SAS), and thats a recipe for a major performance upgrade to this machine!

Ok, the 2405 isn't the most feature-packed controller....but being 4 channels, it was ideal....and for the duties this machine performs, I needed only basic RAID configurations anyway.

SAS Drives installed, using HP SAS to SATA adapters. MiniSAS cable takes it from there to the controller.



Old HDD's removed.



S2K8 R2 was installed on the 150GB mirror.



S2K3 R2 was installed on the 73GB mirror.



After all my magic tricks & hokus pokus....it works!



Yessir!!XP (and its derivatives) will live on with practical uses forever!!



Crammed back in the corner and S2K8 chugging along....so very much faster! Yes, that is the goodwill store Dell U3011 30" monitor!



This is one of my favorite systems....I couldn't explain why, its just been a freight train and 100% rock solid for service bench duties. That's all.

[ratdude747]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

^ Those playing at home: that LCD doesn't seem big until you actually are using it...

The 73GB drives I had no use for at the time... since then I could have used them but I ended up nabbing 4 147GB 15K's for <$40 shipped, so yeah, not needed.

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Just a final footnote to the Paxville system for this round of upgrades.... I made a very lowball offer on a Quadro NVS 450 before buying the NVS 510 for the other system. After I bought the 510, the seller accepted my lowball offer on the 450... I put the 450 in this system, was a mild upgrade from the 7600GT 256mb, as it has 512mb RAM and 4x DisplayPort connectors.

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Thread awakened yet again, as the tale of the second (incomplete) tower is about to unfold. The board I originally planned to use in this (X8DTI-F) ended up going in my NAS (Ultimate file Server thread), as Ratdude wound up with the workstation-oriented X7DWA-N that was in it......which left this tower boardless. Well a basically free score of a Supermicro X8DAI last week brought this one out of the mothballs.

The board:



I scored a cheap 5-bay SAS cage...used. There was a bonus drive in it that wasn't mentioned. 73gb WD Raptor. Don't know if its good or not...but it was there.



Mounted with an optical.


More whenever I round up more stuff.....

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

This series of builds is finally complete. The X8DAI mentioned above was used for another build, for a thread later on....but the "Supermicro Tree" gave me a X7DAL a while back, and this is where it ended up... This has been a lab rat for a few things up till today (Linux Live tests and other stuff using a couple junk HDD's). I used 2 of the 12 Velociraptors from a goodie box in this system. I set them up in a RAID0 on a3ware 9550.

Anyway....
2 generations of "DAL's" side by side...an X5 and the X7. I have an X8 here somewhere as well....but didn't think to add it to the photo, which was not planned, the X5 just happened to be laying there...



I reinstalled the drilled-out 3.5" bay cage, as this board is not eATX, and didn't interfere with anything. To remove it, I drilled out the pop rivets, but I kept the cage, just incase. I simply pop riveted it back in. I needed it back in place for the card reader and floppy.





Now for the PSU. This is the 865W Supermicro PSU from THIS THREAD. I couldn't think of a better place to use such a hefty unit.



Beginning to assemble everything.




Fast forward to today, I installed 2x 160gb velociraptors in the external SAS cage, and installed S2K12 R2. I likely will add 2 more and dual boot this machine with S2K3 R2, as I'm kind of grooming this system to replace the older Paxville bench system....as I can not install S2K12 R2 on processors that old....which is retarded, but I digress....

Yes, that is a floppy drive....I use it frequently with the bench system, usually for moving BIOS image files to my dedicated old ass 6.4gb HDD which contains a DOS install and a mass hoard of BIOS's.....for retro builds


Added a fan over that miserably hot running fully buffered memory...


...and done...


The system specs are:
2x quad-core Xeon 5470's @ 3.33/1333 (greencreek chipset, doesn't support 1600), this is the fastest I could go.
12gb FB memory, all I had on hand, and plenty.
Quadro FX4800 1.5gb GPU
3ware 9550 RAID controller with BBU
2x 160gb velociraptors in a 320gb RAID0

A couple benchmarks...

Novabench


CrystalDisk on the velociraptor RAID0


....and after all these years, this one is finally done...I guess the humorous footnote would be that the original boards intended to be used in these cases never came to fruition. The X7DWA was given to Ratdude, and the X8DTI was used in the giant server from THIS THREAD....but in the end, the builds were completed!

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Just a couple finishing touches....

Velociraptor goodness!




Dual booting Bliss!

[goontron]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

A Chieftec Dragon case. Nice. No RGB eye stain here! Though, i wouldn't call that dual booting...

[Topcat]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

Though, i wouldn't call that dual booting...

If more than one OS is accessible, its dual booting...if you don't like the OS's chosen, that's for another thread. As much as I like Linux, outside the server realm, its still just a novelty.

[goontron]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

^ Linux? feh. BSD Unix man.

[Curious.George]

Re: The Tale of Two Towers - TC's Supermicro Shenanigans

If more than one OS is accessible, its dual booting...if you don't like the OS's chosen, that's for another thread. As much as I like Linux, outside the server realm, its still just a novelty.

For most Linux-weenies, that's probably the case. (I won't run Linux cuz it is too "unstable" -- if these folks were designing cars, each one off the assembly line would have the steering wheel in a different location... and have a list of reasons why THAT is the BEST location!)

I run Windows to support tools that I simply can't get under *BSD (e.g., FrameMaker, PhotoShop, SolidWorks, Altium, etc.) -- because the "similar" FOSS tools (I don't dare say "equivalent") are simply inadequate/toys.

OTOH, I do all of my software development and system administration work under *BSD cuz I can fix any problems that I encounter -- or, tailor any tool to my specific needs -- simply by patching the sources (not possible for the Windows tools). I don't have to HOPE that the vendor (or MS) will decide that my problem is "worthy of their attention" AND fix it NOW (without also introducing other problems -- something that I can avoid when I make patches!)

[Decades ago, I reported a bug in MS's C++ compiler. I provided a simple test case that allowed me to concisely illustrate the nature of the bug -- passing pointers to member functions. The tech support guy could clearly see the problem from my example: "Yup, that's a bug! But, unfortunately, we no longer support version X of that product. Instead, we can offer you a free upgrade to version Y of a new product (complete with a new set of bugs that you'll have to waste time chasing down)" No thanks, I'll just move over to using free tools that I can maintain myself!]

It's refreshing to be able to leave a machine running for many months at a time without worrying about some silly memory leak taking it down ("Gee, why is Firefox now using 2GB of memory for the three tabs I have open?"). E.g., my "services server" (name, font, print, time, file, web, mail etc.) has been running for over a year without any downtime or patches

[Why does any sort of maintenance work under windows require a reboot?]