2013

The recently acquired parts for the server were assembled two nights ago, and FreeBSD was installed last night. I’m thinking of crowd sourcing the tuning of the ZFS monster I’m creating. Interested in watching/helping? See the FreeBSD Forums for details. Here’s the dmesg output for future reference. You will notice that (see line 154-157) one of the drives is running at only 150.000MB/s, as opposed to the other drive (lines 143-146), which is

Assembly of the server and the gateway have started. Both are stalled right now. The gateway is waiting for proper RAM to arrive next week. The server is waiting for an OS install and then the installation of the 8x2TB disks for the ZFS array. Server assembly Last night, while assembling the server, as I went along, I posted photos to my Twitter feed. I later posted those photographs to a Google+ album.

I ordered the wrong RAM for the motherboard in my new gateway machine. When did I discover this? When I powered it up for the first time, I heard a series of 5 short beeps, 1 one beep. Looking that up in the manual and found: 5 short beeps + 1 long Memory error No memory detected in the beep system Oh. So I rechecked that the sticks were in the right slots,

All parts for the server and the gateway have been ordered. The first deliveries are expected today. Here is the list of what arrives when. Friday 11 Jan 2013 All the internal parts for the server, except those shown below, via UPS. (delivered) Case for Gateway, via UPS. (delivered) Saturday 12 Jan 2013 The 8x2TB HDD for the server ZFS array, via FedEx. (delivered) Tuesday 15 Jan 2013 The main shipment of the

This server describe herein is now known as knew. This is the fourth in a series of posts about building a new server. What’s happened since the last post? I’ve upgraded to an LSI SAS card. Why? Better throughput. And LSI is well supported on FreeBSD. This card is not used for RAID. It is used strictly as a disk controller and the disks will be presented to the OS as JBOD. Background:

After my first draft, I discovered a few things: The motherboard was socket type LGA 1156 The CPU was socket type LGA 1155 NewEgg doesn’t list any LGA 1156 CPUs The board has SATA 3 The drives were SATA 6 Using an Active PFC PSU with my plain 6+ year old UPS will cause the PSU to shutdown when the UPS switches to battery Here is the new list: case – Fractal Design

In an effort to ruthlessly eradicate legacy, I’ve decided to upgrade my gateway at the same time as I’m upgrading my development server. NOTE: the list of components, which appears below, has been updated in this post. The gateway box, which I think is about 10 years old, which contains these snippets from /var/run/dmesg.boot: CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.00GHz (1999.95-MHz 686-class CPU) real memory = 536870912 (512 MB) This box runs: OpenVPN as

This is the third in a series of posts about building a new server. What’s happened since? My main development server is acting up again. One of the two HDD in the gmirror has gone off line. Also, I recently read an article about an interesting scam which introduced me to the phrase ruthlessly eradicate legacy. That phrase and strategy lodged firmly in my brain. Those two triggers, along with the urge to