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eames
May 9, 2009

Don Lapre posted:

Couldn't tell you about those offhand but i could certainly test them, well i cant test power consumption since i dont have a killawatt. Also 1080p transcoding appears to be working fine for me going to a roku box.

I did a bit of research and it looks like standby and even scheduled shutdown/boot works on the machine I’m looking at (HP N54L) using an "advanced power managment"-plugin.

https://github.com/andy928/xpenology/blob/master/Documentation/power/apm-acpi.txt

I’ll still wait until January to see what happens with the new DSM 5.0 and Xpenology.

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Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

eames posted:

I did a bit of research and it looks like standby and even scheduled shutdown/boot works on the machine I’m looking at (HP N54L) using an "advanced power managment"-plugin.

https://github.com/andy928/xpenology/blob/master/Documentation/power/apm-acpi.txt

I’ll still wait until January to see what happens with the new DSM 5.0 and Xpenology.

Yea, not something i ever looked into, i leave mine up all the time and just let it sleep the disks.

Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.
I'm now leaning towards going for FreeNAS on top of ESXi.

The Supermicro X10SL7-F has an Intel SATA controller onboard and an LSI SAS one. I can use the latter to connect a bunch of SATA disks and port forward this entire controller to the FreeNAS ESXi. Then the Intel controller can host an SSD with the ESXi datastore.

This should be pretty robust, but still give plenty of flexibility. The only thing I have to give up is the Mini-ITX form factor and I'll have to go with MicroATX instead.

Edit: With an Intel Xeon E3-1240v3, which supports VT-d.

Sagacity fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 19, 2013

Gozinbulx
Feb 19, 2004
How many watts do you have on the psu of your setup, larpe?

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
I wouldn't even try to do ZFS under an ESXi VM without using VT-d given that people have reported problems using RDMs in physical compatibility mode with their ZFS supporting OS and doing fine in virtual compatibility mode when this is the precise opposite of what should happen with ZFS (the consistent recommendation is usually to do physical compatibility mode with MS Clustering because it gets down to direct I/O management to be able to handle failover scenarios). And because of VT-d capture of the physical hardware, this would screw over whether I can freely VMotion the VM if I felt like it, which is one of the neato cool tricks of a vSphere environment.

Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.
I'm not too concerned about lack of vMotion, but I agree that the device passthrough is a necessity. I don't want to run ZFS without any SMART capability, for instance.

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

Gozinbulx posted:

How many watts do you have on the psu of your setup, larpe?

Im using the silverstone st55f-g. 550w gold fully modular. Its one of the only gold power supplies that fits the lian li q25b 140mm size requirement.

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

Sagacity posted:

I'm now leaning towards going for FreeNAS on top of ESXi.

The Supermicro X10SL7-F has an Intel SATA controller onboard and an LSI SAS one. I can use the latter to connect a bunch of SATA disks and port forward this entire controller to the FreeNAS ESXi. Then the Intel controller can host an SSD with the ESXi datastore.

This should be pretty robust, but still give plenty of flexibility. The only thing I have to give up is the Mini-ITX form factor and I'll have to go with MicroATX instead.

Edit: With an Intel Xeon E3-1240v3, which supports VT-d.

When you spec that out can you share it? It's a bit more than I was originally thinking but does seem to be a far nicer get-up.

Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.
Sure. The hardware I was thinking of:
  • Intel Xeon E3-1240 v3 Boxed
  • Supermicro X10SL7-F
  • 5 x WD Red SATA 6 Gb/s WD40EFRX 4TB (connected to the LSI, forwarded to FreeNAS VM, set up as RAIDZ2 to get approx. 12TB of redundant storage)
  • Crucial 2.5" M500 120GB (Datastore for ESXi)
  • Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB (Supermicro has an internal USB connector so I can boot ESXi from this)
  • 32GiB Kingston ValueRAM KVR16E11K4/32
  • Fractal Design Define Mini
  • Noctua NH-L9i
  • be quiet! Straight Power E9 400W
I'll also flash the LSI firmware to "IT" mode so it doesn't try to do any fancy RAID stuff. Makes sense?

BlankSystemDaemon
Mar 13, 2009



Sagacity posted:

Sure. The hardware I was thinking of:
  • Intel Xeon E3-1240 v3 Boxed
  • Supermicro X10SL7-F
  • 5 x WD Red SATA 6 Gb/s WD40EFRX 4TB (connected to the LSI, forwarded to FreeNAS VM, set up as RAIDZ2 to get approx. 12TB of redundant storage)
  • Crucial 2.5" M500 120GB (Datastore for ESXi)
  • Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB (Supermicro has an internal USB connector so I can boot ESXi from this)
  • 32GiB Kingston ValueRAM KVR16E11K4/32
  • Fractal Design Define Mini
  • Noctua NH-L9i
  • be quiet! Straight Power E9 400W
I'll also flash the LSI firmware to "IT" mode so it doesn't try to do any fancy RAID stuff. Makes sense?
I'm not sure the LSI 2308 can be cross-flashed yet, so you'll want to check up on thatit works - and you cross-flash it to IT mode in order to enable SATA passthrough (SMART features and NCQ, among other things) whereas IR mode enables SATA passthrough and RAID0/1/10. Other than that, it looks cool.

EDIT: ↓ A precausion against dataloss, I suspect.

BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Dec 20, 2013

Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

D. Ebdrup posted:

you cross-flash it to IT mode in order to enable SATA passthrough
Yes exactly, that's why I want to flash it. Seems like a simple enough procedure, thankfully. Not sure why you'd need to physically disconnect the storage and boot devices, though.

Sagacity fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Dec 20, 2013

deimos
Nov 30, 2006

Forget it man this bat is whack, it's got poobrain!
Why the Noctua cooler?

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

Sagacity posted:

Yes exactly, that's why I want to flash it. Seems like a simple enough procedure, thankfully. Not sure why you'd need to physically disconnect the storage and boot devices, though.

The cpu you picked out comes with a heatsink/fan assembly so you dont need the Noctua.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
Just a nitpick, but ESXi installs really don't need an SSD given the way the OS is laid out to have as little to do with the disk itself normally (not too different for home installs from the USB stick option used by even enterprise installs). Most of the Supermicro boards have an onboard USB slot you can cheap out on for booting up ESXi or FreeNAS. The SSD should be for the datastore used to host VMs on that's it.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

necrobobsledder posted:

Just a nitpick, but ESXi installs really don't need an SSD given the way the OS is laid out to have as little to do with the disk itself normally (not too different for home installs from the USB stick option used by even enterprise installs). Most of the Supermicro boards have an onboard USB slot you can cheap out on for booting up ESXi or FreeNAS. The SSD should be for the datastore used to host VMs on that's it.

I think you missed it. The SSD is for the "local datastore". ESXi will be booted off his thumbdrive.

Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Don Lapre posted:

The cpu you picked out comes with a heatsink/fan assembly so you dont need the Noctua.
I was thinking the Noctua would be more quiet than the stock one, though? I'm not sure how loud that one is, TBH.

And Moey is indeed right, necrobobsledder. Thanks for the feedback, still!

Ziploc
Sep 19, 2006
MX-5
I exit my building out shipping and receiving, which has an 'e-waste' bin. Lo and behold this little guy was in there.



By some dumb luck I found the restore disks locally and it seems to work just fine. The onboard OS (WHS v1 I think) seems to not play well with my spare WD Red 3TB. (Formats to only 750gb) But seems to do fine a WD RED 2TB I picked up just now.

I think upgrading WHS, or rolling some other OS may allow me to use 3TB drives. But I think I'll just run it for a while with 2x2TB on stock OS and see how I like it. At worse it will be a good backup for irreplaceable poo poo from my Synology.

Not bad for almost free.

Raere
Dec 13, 2007

I have a RAID question. I built an ESXi home server recently to teach myself a boatload of stuff. I have 2 500GB WD Raptors in a RAID 1 array, driven by an LSI card.
It was working great until recently when I lost power (I do have a UPS but I haven't had a chance to set up a graceful shutdown of ESXi with it yet). I had write caching disabled so any data loss should have been minimized. When I turned the server back on, the array was degraded. I reseated the connectors on the drive that was showing up as disconnected and it came back up and rebuilt.

Ever since then the drives have been unbelievably slow. The read and write latencies as reported by ESXi are around 300-400ms. I ran a consistently check on the array, which took 6 whole days (LSI documentation says it should take about 2 days for 500GB). It doesn't look like any errors were reported. I've tried unplugging one drive and running the server with the other in a degraded state. The same crazy high latency is present with either drive disconnected.

Is it possible for RAID controllers to go bad in this manner? I suppose the true test would be to bypass the array and plug a drive into a motherboard SATA slot. If I do that, will it still boot? In other words, if you take one drive from a RAID 1 array, will it act like a regular hard drive with the data all still accessible?

Here's the controller I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118114

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

For any Canadians, the Newegg.ca shell shocker at 1:00pm EST is the 4TB WD Red drives.

http://www.newegg.ca/Special/ShellShocker.aspx?cm_sp=ShellShocker-_-22-236-599-_-12232013_2

edit: $184.99, meh.

kiwid fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Dec 23, 2013

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

kiwid posted:

For any Canadians, the Newegg.ca shell shocker at 1:00pm EST is the 4TB WD Red drives.

http://www.newegg.ca/Special/ShellShocker.aspx?cm_sp=ShellShocker-_-22-236-599-_-12232013_2

edit: $184.99, meh.

3tb reds are the US daily. $124.99 With Promo Code: EMCYTZT5279

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Regarding Bitlocker, if I have just a password on it, can I move the drive into another computer, or just upgrade and reinstall everything, and it'll unlock fine? Or does other stuff influence access to it?

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE
What's the cheapest way to get a server rack? I've got a servers that I picked up cheap, but no rack. I've got a total of 5u of servers, 1x1u and 2x2u, so I probably want like 7u for a bit of airflow and expandability. Can I buy the rails and make one myself, or is there something cheap enough to make it not worth it? Craigslist maybe?

alo
May 1, 2005


Paul MaudDib posted:

What's the cheapest way to get a server rack? I've got a servers that I picked up cheap, but no rack. I've got a total of 5u of servers, 1x1u and 2x2u, so I probably want like 7u for a bit of airflow and expandability. Can I buy the rails and make one myself, or is there something cheap enough to make it not worth it? Craigslist maybe?

Option 1, the ubiquitous "lack rack" (not very sturdy though). It's really just like stacking your servers in a pile and putting a table over it...
Option 2, there are some decent* half-racks out there for 300ish.
Option 3, surplus/craigslist 42U rack (luck dependent, hope you've got room for it)
Option 4, terrible two post "audio" racks. There's usually a whole lot of these in the right sizes (5U to 20U), but they'll be two post, round hole aka poo poo

It's much more palatable to go for option 2 or 3 if you have a whole bunch of extra space. Also, if you've already got 5U of stuff, think about a 1u switch, plus maybe a 2U UPS?

* decent meaning four post, square holes.

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.
The servers actually mount to the lack rack.

Daylen Drazzi
Mar 10, 2007

Why do I root for Notre Dame? Because I like pain, and disappointment, and anguish. Notre Dame Football has destroyed more dreams than the Irish Potato Famine, and that is the kind of suffering I can get behind.
I finally got my Linux file server up and running to my satisfaction. It was writing files to my RAID10 partition at about 75MB/sec, so I'm somewhat satisfied with the performance. One of these days I may actually go back and build a proper huge NAS, but I think for at least a year or two my current setup will serve me just fine. I'm curious to see how fast the RAID10 reads now. Time to go do some tests.

bizwank
Oct 4, 2002

Santa (aka my wife and brothers) brought me a Synology DS412+ and 4x3TB WD Reds. I know what I'm doing for the next couple days...

Mr. Apollo
Nov 8, 2000

bizwank posted:

Santa (aka my wife and brothers) brought me a Synology DS412+ and 4x3TB WD Reds. I know what I'm doing for the next couple days...
Do you have anything specific in mind for it? A friend of mine is looking at a Synology DS214play or DS412+ for serving movies and backing up computers at his house. He's not sure if he needs the transcoding abilities of the DS214play or if the increased processing power of the DS412+ will be of any benefit.

His house is wired for gigabit ethernet and it's him, his wife, and two kids that'll be access movies on the device and using it for backups.

bizwank
Oct 4, 2002

Mr. Apollo posted:

Do you have anything specific in mind for it? A friend of mine is looking at a Synology DS214play or DS412+ for serving movies and backing up computers at his house. He's not sure if he needs the transcoding abilities of the DS214play or if the increased processing power of the DS412+ will be of any benefit.

His house is wired for gigabit ethernet and it's him, his wife, and two kids that'll be access movies on the device and using it for backups.
I've got 3TB of media that has slowly collected on what used to be my workstation, with no disk redundency or backups, so I needed 4 disks minimum. The DS412+ is going to solve that problem as well as take over serving that media to various devices in the house. I'm probably going to offload torrenting, sabnzbd and plex server to it as well, and I might play with the security system stuff too. As far as transcoding goes, the DS412+ can handle 720p and that's good enough for me (and all my current screens/projector can handle anyway). Won't be an issue at all once I convert the bedroom back to xbmc from plex, though streaming video from home to a plane in flight was pretty cool.

So yeah, it will def do what your friend needs unless he needs to transcode 1080p content. If not there's probably a cheaper 2-disk model that would work as well, though I didn't research those much.

Mr. Apollo
Nov 8, 2000

Thanks. He isn't going to be transcoding a ton of 1080p stuff. Most of the stuff is 720p or just "HD". He's not really on a budget so it sounds like the DS412+ is better for him.

Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



I'm gonna throw out a warning here for those who have one of the more basic Diskstations:

For the last few weeks mine wouldn't go to sleep anymore and felt very sluggish and it took me some time to figure out this was because I enabled face recognition in Photo Station. It's a separate process that keeps running in the background.

The thing is, I couldn't access the settings page anymore to disable it, because the diskstation was so busy the page kept timing out, if I could get logged in at all. Other functions kept working, although a bit slower than usual.

There are probably ways to kill the process without bringing down the whole photo station (preventing you from changing the setting), but there wasn't an obvious way on the process tab in the resource viewer. I was just lucky to find out it finally finished on its own today.

So if you have like the slowest single disk one, don't enable that function, because it's simply not up to the task in a meaningful sense.

Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.
ASRock has a new board that seems very suitable for an ESXi based NAS. However, what kind of form factor is Extended Mini-ITX? Will that fit in a Lian-Li Q25, for instance?

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


I think it's a form factor they've made up:

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E3C224D4I-14S

It's a fair bit wider than Mini ITX

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.

Caged posted:

I think it's a form factor they've made up:

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E3C224D4I-14S

It's a fair bit wider than Mini ITX

Its longer than ITX, doesnt seem wider

I think it would fit in ITX cases that allow for dual slot video cards.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





It looks like a really small microATX or possibly more of a FlexATX board to me. And yeah, the width is spot-on for an ITX board, but it's long enough that it could have a second expansion slot.

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.
Would need to measure but i bet it fits in the q25b

Sagacity
May 2, 2003
Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Don Lapre posted:

Would need to measure but i bet it fits in the q25b


Feel free to do so :)

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Don Lapre posted:

Its longer than ITX, doesnt seem wider

Well, that depends what way up it is. I think it's at least a 'slot' bigger than the space a dual slot ITX board would use up if such a thing existed. It would probably fit in that case though.

SamDabbers
May 26, 2003



It's 10mm longer (213mm) than Mini-DTX (203mm), which is essentially ITX with a 2nd slot, so it should fit fine in the Q25B unless ASRock went with a non-standard screw hole placement.

stray
Jun 28, 2005

"It's a jet pack, Michael. What could possibly go wrong?"

necrobobsledder posted:

The good news is that FreeNAS 9.2 is bringing forth Linux jails and I should be able to run Plex off of that instead of dealing with the FreeBSD port's bugs from lack of certain libraries.
Am I right in assuming that this will allow me to run a Linux distro (e.g., Debian/Ubuntu Server) inside FreeNAS? Because that sounds friggin' sweet.

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SamDabbers
May 26, 2003



stray posted:

Am I right in assuming that this will allow me to run a Linux distro (e.g., Debian/Ubuntu Server) inside FreeNAS? Because that sounds friggin' sweet.

Vanilla FreeBSD has the ability to emulate (most of) the Linux kernel API, which enables (most) 32-bit Linux binaries to run directly. You can use this to run a Linux userland in a jail, so yes, your assumption is correct :)

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