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DrDork posted:Presumably this. The Supermicro IPMI works well, works every time, and is included on-board for a lot of their servers. I find it kinda wild that Dell sells an iDRAC controller for twice the price of a lot of motherboards. Then again, I've installed my fair share of >$50,000 1U Dell servers wondering how the hell they get away with charging what they do for the hardware involved and questionable software support. There is a reason we fight the dumb fight with the BMC cards and buy per outlet switching PDU's. Can't be crashed if you're off ![]() priznat posted:We use a simple network capable relay board to hit the power/reset pins on motherboards (just have to connect them together, ie grounding the signal input) and it works good for that. Having a vga and other ports relay would be useful too sometimes, but mostly the power cycling is all we need for doing power/reset testing. Truly this is all you need - something to jump/unjump the NMI button.
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We do the per port power control pdu too but try to usually power off gracefully. Digital logger is the brand.
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IOwnCalculus posted:I once sat down and started working out what it would take to use a Raspberry pi to control some relays to be able to remotely power on/off the box, and use it as a serial terminal. Yeah, I have been down the rabbit hole before as well. With the power behind those 3rd gen Ryzen chips, the ASRock Rack boards are probably the best option currently.
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IOwnCalculus posted:I once sat down and started working out what it would take to use a Raspberry pi to control some relays to be able to remotely power on/off the box, and use it as a serial terminal. FWIW, you could do this with an ESP8266 and a relay module for probably less than 20 bucks. You'd have to do a bit of Babby's First Coding, but it'd be pretty easy.
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The IPMI built into my ASRock Rack board is perfectly functional, if slightly clunky
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H110Hawk posted:There is a reason we fight the dumb fight with the BMC cards and buy per outlet switching PDU's. Can't be crashed if you're off I'd like to say we fight it, too, but the reality is we found ~$200,000 worth of R620 servers still sitting in their boxes when moving data centers recently (now basically useless), and had an entire pallet of Ixia taps show up that we have no idea we apparently owned. So, yeah, I don't think anyone is even looking at a $500 line item on the servers we order.
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DrDork posted:I'd like to say we fight it, too, but the reality is we found ~$200,000 worth of R620 servers still sitting in their boxes when moving data centers recently (now basically useless), and had an entire pallet of Ixia taps show up that we have no idea we apparently owned. So, yeah, I don't think anyone is even looking at a $500 line item on the servers we order. Hey buddy. Whatcha doin later and can I bring a home depot rental truck?
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Right? We're legitimately trying to find a purpose we could apply them to--even just like dev boxes for test environments, since it seems like such a monumental waste. Fun fact: a lot of datacenters will literally just shovel old hardware into garbage bins that end up in the local dump. We may or may not have "liberated" 100+ power cords from such a bin when we found out we'd accidentally ordered all our new servers with the wrong ones.
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Babies first kubernetes cluster and I mean ixia taps are fun to rent but they go in the trash. ![]()
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We have a lot of taps because...reasons...but what the fuck am I supposed to do with 1Gbps fiber taps? We don't have anything that slow anymore. Hell, I run 10Gig fiber at home now, because why not?
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Following my earlier post I started looking at Ivy Bridge Xeon E3s, and then saw that a Haswell system wouldn't be that much more for better idle power consumption. How is this deal for the following CPU/RAM/MB combo for $220 after shipping? CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1240 v3 CPU Cooler: Intel Stock Cooler Motherboard: Supermicro X10SLL-F Memory: 16GB DDR3 1333 ECC Unbuffered (2x8GB)
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It's about right. E3-1240v3 goes for about $75, the motherboard is about $100, and add another $60 or so for the RAM.
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Eh I won't fight it at home, the only thing that doesn't have IPMI [supermicro] is the xserve that I have sitting around for a very select few legacy things I do occasionally. At work every single slot is remote PDU'd, at least. (mac minis)
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Our version of remote PDU is calling up for Smart Hands to turn around and tell us to place an order against a non-existent draw-down account and have to call over to the Fed side to get funding for them to get off their butts and then a week later they tell us they turned off the wrong system but they can't remember and is that a problem? Also they'll need more money if we want them to figure it out.
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lol, guess which one is the EFAX![]() da0 SSD da1 SSD da2 WD40EFAX-68J da3 WD40EFRX-68N da4 WD40EFRX-68N da5 ST4000DM005-2DP1 da6 ST4000DM005-2DP1 da7 ST4000DM005-2DP1
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Godzilla07 posted:Following my earlier post I started looking at Ivy Bridge Xeon E3s, and then saw that a Haswell system wouldn't be that much more for better idle power consumption. How is this deal for the following CPU/RAM/MB combo for $220 after shipping? How much pain are you willing to endure? Check out an old dell workstation. I bought one with an e3 1270v3 and 8gb ecc ram for 170 cad shipped. Threw in a psu adaptor cable for 20 bucks and off to the races with some old hardware i had laying around.
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Wild EEPROM posted:How much pain are you willing to endure? The HP workstation series (Z440, etc) are also decent alternate options. They tend to sell for a bit less than the Dell or Lenovo options, probably due to being less popular on some of the DIY build sites, but they work just fine. Biggest downside to them is they tend not to have IPMI, so you'll need to manually set things up at least once. They also use a custom power cable like some of the Dell's, so same deal there ($20-$40 adapter) if you wanted to move the guts into your own case, but I've found mine to be reasonably quiet as-is.
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DrDork posted:The HP workstation series (Z440, etc) are also decent alternate options. They tend to sell for a bit less than the Dell or Lenovo options, probably due to being less popular on some of the DIY build sites, but they work just fine. Biggest downside to them is they tend not to have IPMI, so you'll need to manually set things up at least once. They also use a custom power cable like some of the Dell's, so same deal there ($20-$40 adapter) if you wanted to move the guts into your own case, but I've found mine to be reasonably quiet as-is. They also use really odd mounting screws with built-in shock absorbers, some of which are nearly impossible to find and are often discarded by resellers. You can buy them online or 3D print your own, but it's a word of warning to potential buyers. I've got several HP workstations, and I've had to 3D print spacers for the drive cages to work properly. There are even 2 different ones for 2.5" drives, depending on the model of computer... I'm happy with the computers, but the screws are a pain in the ass. My SSD in the Elitedesk 800 G2 SFF are just double-sided taped in place because I couldn't be bothered to dimension the second type of screw spacer. I've got an EliteDesk 800 G2 tower too, and it takes the same dumb system.
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Mine didn't come with cages at all, so I used a 5-in-3 I had laying around instead ![]() The level of effort that Dell/HP/etc go to to try to make reusing their stuff with anything even resembling normal industry-standard equipment is both wild and super obnoxious.
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IOwnCalculus posted:I once sat down and started working out what it would take to use a Raspberry pi to control some relays to be able to remotely power on/off the box, and use it as a serial terminal. I for one would love a general purpose "IPMI" adapter even if it was just that, video capture, power, and USB, because while it's usually easy enough to spec a proper server platform in new builds it would be really nice to be able to at least have some kind of remote diagnostic ability I could add to home machines built from spare parts or existing servers at customer sites that were not specced with remote management or aren't really actual server hardware. Doing a bit of poking around I've found someone selling an adapter that claims to convert 1080p HDMI to a signal a Pi can accept on its camera input for $20, so I think I might order one of those and see how it goes. It'd obviously be more useful for a lot of server hardware if I could get VGA input on it, but my own home hardware has a desktop GPU installed so this will work for my needs.
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With all this info coming out about the SMR drives, I've heard that the easystore drives (above 6GB) are still hopefully safe for the moment to use, correct? I've found that I'm needing a new external drive for the moment and if these are safe, I'll definitely grab one but wanted to make sure of that first.
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WD published a lovely PR blog post regarding SMR on their site. Oh boy. https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives
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wolrah posted:Doing a bit of poking around I've found someone selling an adapter that claims to convert 1080p HDMI to a signal a Pi can accept on its camera input for $20, so I think I might order one of those and see how it goes. It'd obviously be more useful for a lot of server hardware if I could get VGA input on it, but my own home hardware has a desktop GPU installed so this will work for my needs. That seems very cheap, I was looking into the same thing a year or two back and the best I could find (at the time) was https://auvidea.eu/product-category...ridge/hdmi2csi/ which interfaces with the pi camera input and wasn't that cheap.
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eames posted:WD published a lovely PR blog post regarding SMR on their site. Oh boy. Western Digital: "All you scrubs not willing to fork out for Red Pro/Gold drives can get fucked."
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DrDork posted:Western Digital: "All you scrubs not willing to fork out for Red Pro/Gold drives can get fucked." That's basically it. Nice.
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HalloKitty posted:That's basically it. Nice. Fucking hell. Way to ensure the regular Red line dies out.
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IOwnCalculus posted:Fucking hell. Way to ensure the regular Red line dies out. WD Red, the byword for NAS drives for years, has literally been burned by WD themselves in the span of a week after: 1. Not admitting (initially) that the reds had SMR. 2. Not correcting the issue (recalls, rebates, anything!) 3. Insisting that the issue is the buyers fault for not buying appropriate NAS drives for their NASes, while concurrently actually selling WD Reds as NAS drives.
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Rexxed posted:That seems very cheap, I was looking into the same thing a year or two back and the best I could find (at the time) was https://auvidea.eu/product-category...ridge/hdmi2csi/ which interfaces with the pi camera input and wasn't that cheap. Well, the source is some random guy on Youtube whose only contact information is a gmail address, but there are people on a few forums talking about having received parts from him so I figure I'll give it a shot as long as he takes paypal or something along those lines. Worst case I'm out $20. There's also a product on Alibaba for $36. It's the same chip as in the Auvidea design AFAIK. Apparently a normal Pi only has two lanes of CSI and thus can only capture 1080p at 25-30 FPS, but for purposes of a DIY external remote management box that's perfectly sufficient. A Compute Module has a full four lane interface.
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WD is correct that, as the end user, the underlying technology isn't what should be driving our purchase. If they use something they dug out of an Aztec temple it doesn't matter as long as it meets the performance specifications. They try to deftly overlook the fact that they changed the performance specifications without telling anyone. There's probably some data sheet or small print somewhere that, if you compare it to pre-SMR drives, will show the performance differences. However, that's effectively "not telling anyone".
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Steakandchips posted:WD Red, the byword for NAS drives for years, has literally been burned by WD themselves in the span of a week after: I pulled out the Red I had in my old tower in order to fill it up with the Easystore white labels, and while it's a CMR disk, the label says "NASware 3.0" on it. lmao Thermopyle posted:WD is correct that, as the end user, the underlying technology isn't what should be driving our purchase. If they use something they dug out of an Aztec temple it doesn't matter as long as it meets the performance specifications. Yeah, it should be opaque to the end user. But it wasn't because of the "extreme" use cases that they were being subjected to. Now WD is trying to CYA (CTA?) by saying that it doesn't matter because they only guaranteed the performance for "non-extreme" use cases. But the box and label literally says xXxTrEeMmMmMmMmMe on it. Hats off to whoever is handling the PR for WD, they're doing a great job. Phone fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Steakandchips posted:3. Insisting that the issue is the buyers fault for not buying appropriate NAS drives for their NASes, while concurrently actually selling WD Reds as NAS drives. Pretend I had any actual creative abilities and that there was a WD Red being carried like a casket right here.
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https://www.synology.com/en-global/...feature=SMR&p=1 If you guys are seeing, or have seen, the disks kicked out by rebuilds start RMA'ing them. Even if they haven't been kicked out yet. Do it for the spite. Keep going saying each new SMR one is being kicked out.
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IOwnCalculus posted:Pretend I had any actual creative abilities and that there was a WD Red being carried like a casket right here. It's really amazing that they're throwing away almost a decade of reputation by refusing to take the L on this. Imagine having a 3 letter word that's shorthand for your product, it's even a primary color, and sacrificing it at the altar of this quarter's profits. Three fucking keystrokes: R - E - D. You cannot have had a better marketing ploy.
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They just need to stop selling the drives full stop. Call them Greens, and scrap the entire Red lineup, and just move people to "Red Pro". I'd have never even expected SMR on a Blue drive, let alone Red. It's definitely something that seems like it should be in the Greens, the absolute lowest of the low, where you'd expect it.
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Thermopyle posted:WD is correct that, as the end user, the underlying technology isn't what should be driving our purchase. If they use something they dug out of an Aztec temple it doesn't matter as long as it meets the performance specifications. The problem, of course, is that more than simple performance metrics matter for NAS applications of any sort--from a simple home 2-bay Synology all the way up to some of the crazies in this thread running legit disk shelves. "SMR drives can support normal light NAS workloads but cannot be used for rebuilding an array with because they choke and drop out of the array" makes them entirely useless as actual NAS drives, to the point that it might actually make more sense to use a Black or other non-SMR-of-any-type drive for NAS applications. If I wanted to use your drives as single non-RAID members I'd have fucking left them in their external enclosures to begin with!
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Thermopyle posted:If they use something they dug out of an Aztec temple it doesn't matter as long as it meets the performance specifications. I would find WD looting UNESCO world heritage sites almost as disconcerting as this SMR shit
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wolrah posted:At this point really the hard part is the video input. If you have a host motherboard that supports serial in the BIOS then you really just need a couple bucks worth of level converters for that and relays or transistors for the power/reset signals. A Pi 4 already supports USB OTG peripheral mode and can act as a USB keyboard/mouse, flash drive, etc. while running off of PoE. I have actually ordered a couple of those HDMI to SCI2 bridge boards this last week from Aliexpress. I am attempting to build a zero-U ip-KVM device using an R PI. I actually didn't know that the Pi4 could present it self as a Keyboard and mouse. My plan was was going to up an Arduino Micro Pro on top to be the HID device for the managed PC and communicate to it from the Pi using serial.
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wolrah posted:I think I might order one of those and see how it goes. Keep us posted.
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Lowen SoDium posted:I have actually ordered a couple of those HDMI to SCI2 bridge boards this last week from Aliexpress. I am attempting to build a zero-U ip-KVM device using an R PI. IP KVM is basically my minimum goal, remote media should be an easy second milestone if I can get the KVM part to work, and then remote power/reset is icing on the cake. quote:I actually didn't know that the Pi4 could present it self as a Keyboard and mouse. My plan was was going to up an Arduino Micro Pro on top to be the HID device for the managed PC and communicate to it from the Pi using serial. The Pi 4 uses a completely different peripheral architecture and connects the gadget mode interface to the USB-C port so it's available at all times even with the USB hub and ethernet port. There's not much Pi 4 specific documentation at the moment but for the most part what you can find out there for Pi Zero as a USB gadget will work the same on the other compatible models. Moey posted:Keep us posted. wolrah fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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wolrah posted:That's pretty much exactly what I'm looking to accomplish too, so neat that we're both working on the same-ish project. Cool, I will share in this thread what I come up with, once I get the HDMI bridge.
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