Wednesday 27 June 2012

Shoehorning DualliesPart 1A - BOM

As people have asked - here is the Bill of Materials for the build in my previous post:

Case: CoolerMaster Elite 360
Motherboard; Asus K8N-DL
Processors: 2x AMD Opteron OSA275FAA6CB
Coolers: AMD Stock quad-heatpipe
RAM: 6x Micron 2GB PC3200 DDR ECC Reg
PSU: Meridien Xclio GreatPower 600W
Fans: 2x Akasa 120mm Blue (Top outlet and side inlet),
Fans: 3x 80mm Arctic Cooling TC (bottom inlet and rear outlet)
GPU: Asus Passive Radeon HD 4350
SATA backplane: StarTech SATSASBAY425 (Actually it's an older model)
Fan bus: 5-way ModMyToys 4-Pin Distribution PCB from KustomPC's
Card-Reader: Generic Acorp 3.5-bay reader

Sunday 24 June 2012

Shoehorning Duallies Part 1 - The Elite 360

I like compact systems, which is somewhat incompatible with my penchant for multiprocessor systems. Recently, I have got hold of a couple of Cooler-Master Elite 360 cases which are about as small ((W) 148 x (H) 360 x (D) 439 mm) as you can get and still fit a regular ATX PSU and motherboard. The K8N-DL here does, however, take liberties with the ATX specification (being slightly L-shaped  and 10.5 inches rather than 9.6 inches deep). Fortunately, the Elite 360 drive supports are placed to exactly fit this "L"!
While you can technically fit two 5.25-inch devices into this case, it makes things a *lot* neater if you only use one and route/stash cables in the other. Here I have a nice little 4x2.5-inch SATA backplane for SSD's/HDD's and a USB card reader that gives me another front port too. The top 3.5-inch hard drive bay is also used as a cable stash and just behind it there is a 5-way ModMyToys 4-Pin Distribution PCB from KustomPC's which runs the top, rear and bottom fans.

Since I now use my VE200 for most installs, the lack of an optical drive isn't really a problem - most of my stuff is downloaded anyway.

Also note that the PSU has to go in last as it sits over the motherboard (and you have to remove the graphics card, the bottom CPU cooler and any tall NB coolers to get it in! A modular PSU is a must!

So what goes into the HDD backplane? For booting, rather than use SSD's, I use a couple of CF/SATA adapters.
I have a couple of the Addonics ones in the link and a couple of cheap Chinese ones from eBay and, frankly, they are identical. I have some Transcend 4GB 266x and Lexar 8GB 200x cards which are as cheap as chips compared to SSD's - rather slower too but Linux still boots quite snappily with no seeking to worry about.

For main storage I have a mix but the Samsung M7 laptop drives are working well for me in RAID1 pairs.

P.S. I'm aware I've mixed units. Being a Physicist by training, I work in SI but IT is often still standardised in (US) Imperial - it makes sense to use native units. Who uses a 133.4mm drive?

Friday 15 June 2012

VMWare Workstation 8 and OpenSUSE 12.1 revisited

I'm not entirely happy with the configuration above - although everything installs and basically works there are enough little bits of misbehaviour that I am not entirely happy.
  • The fglrx drivers for the Radeon cards in my machines seems to generate odd screen corruptions, for example, when a menu pops up. These are overwritten fairly quickly by the proper content but there is a visual discontinuity.
  • Workstation 8 is not supported on OpenSUSE 12.1 not does it officially support it as a guest although both work more or less. This is irritating since 12.1 has been out for a bit.
  • Automatic input capture in VM's utterly fails for me until Workstation 8.04 (released yesterday as I write!) so I had to use Ctrl-G to do manual capture.
  • VM's seem to be able to bog down the entire machine when saturating only one core (and it's not an IO bottleneck). This is not something I have encountered previously. This is really noticeable when installing a VM where the host pretty much grinds to a halt and screen updates become glacial as files are uncompressed and copied. 
So, basically, I am going back to OpenSUSE 11.4 since that does seem to work properly.

Thursday 14 June 2012

Adventures with openSUSE 12.1 and a K8N-DL

Decided to upgrade on of my K8N-DL based Opteron boxes to OpenSUSE 12.1 from 11.3. This machine boots from a CF card and then mounts a pair of HDD's in RAID one on /srv and hosts a collection of VM's. The old config used VirtualBox and fitted everything on a 4GB CF card but I wanted to try out VMWare Workstation 8 on this one which is a fair bit bigger (since it effectively packages an instance of VMWare Server and a vSphere client now) so I needed to up this to 8GB.

All well and good - I slotted in the new card and fired up the OpenSUSE CD for installation, telling it to format the CF and then mount the existing RAID on /srv. One little oddity, I thought, is that it labelled the array as md127 rather than md1. So, the installation completes and I reboot...to be confronted by the emergency login in text mode. Not good, so take a look at dmesg and, sure enough, it can't mount /dev/md127 because it doesn't exist. A look in /proc/partitions tells me that now I have device called md1 so I edit /etc/fstab to mount this and reboot - all appears well.

A little down the line, after some patching/updating, I am installing VMWare when I notice that only one drive light is on. Strange. So I run up mdadm which informs me that I now have two arrays, md1 and md127 with one drive in each. Urgh! I delete md127 and add back the, now freed, drive to md1 and after a bit of resync, all seems sane.

However, VMware Workstation was refusing to start, filling the logs with Hostd: error: N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE messages and streams of hex that looked not entirely unlike a kernel panic...except it wasn't taking the system down. A bit of googling tells me I needed to enable IPv6 to fix this. This works fine but WTF?