Hardware on Shane Cunningham

IPMI & iKVM issues with Java 7

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:40:38 +0000

Recently I made the mistake of turning off my 1U SuperMicro router running pfSense because we were going on a short vacation. Of course, when I came back and turned it back on I came across some nasty DMA disk errors and a read-only filesystem. No matter what I tried with fsck and remounting could fix these errors. I had my configs saved so I decided to just try a reinstall of pfSense 2.03. One cool thing about my SuperMicro board is the IPMI that’s built in. On my Mac I use IPMIview and the web interface IPMI provides to connect. Connecting with both worked fine, checking system status, all the power functions and iKVM worked for console redirection.

Whitebox VM Lab & OpenSolaris with napp-it All-in-One

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 02:23:23 +0000

My first white box specifically for VMs was solid, but I wanted more flexibility with storage configurations. The passthrough on my ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 would not work even when IOMMU was enabled. This seems to be quite common for AMD boards, some have the option in BIOS, but it doesn’t work. The plan was to boot ESXi off USB and use the other two controllers (on-board and LSI RAID card) for my storage configuration. So, after some research I found an AMD motherboard that had working IOMMU. The board I found was an ASRock 970 Extreme4 which works with ESXi and IOMMU for passing through devices to VMs. When I bought the ASRock motherboard I overlooked the fact it did not have onboard graphics, so make sure you have an extra GPU you can throw in for installing the hypervisor. I went with a really cheap PowerColor Green Radeon AX5450 1GB. My current build is below.

pfSense box update #3

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 01:13:44 +0000

I had a feeling using a cheap $7 flash drive as the boot OS might be a bad idea. Turns out it was. The drive started throwing errors after about a month and a half of running pfSense for my network. I didn’t want to go mechanical HDD for a 24x7 low power box so I decided on a OCZ Onyx 32 GB SSD. More than enough size and speed for how I am using it. Hopefully this is the last hiccup with this machine and I can now get into some more advanced features of pfSense.

pfSense firewall/router update

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:52:21 +0000

I had some issues with accessing IPMI in my pfSense build. It seemed like if I let pfSense boot up and I was not accessing IPMI at the same time, pfSense would take over the whole NIC and not let me access IPMI. I read here that this is normal to not be able to access IPMI once pfSense boots but that defeats the whole purpose of IPMI so I don’t think the system should behave in that way. After messing with it for a few days all I can say is IPMI seems really finicky when sharing a NIC, or maybe I’m doing something goofy.

My pfSense firewall/router build

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 02:43:03 +0000

I stuck with a D-Link DIR-625 wireless router doing all my routing for entirely too long. I had an old P4 2.66 GHz PC laying around with a 40GB hard drive so I decided to try out pfSense. I was hooked, the overall performance and features of this open source FreeBSD firewall/router were impressive. My old P4 machine was using too much electricity for something that was on 24 x 7, though. I decided to custom build something that was 1. powerful enough for my home network and virtual environment lab 2. low power draw 3. quite.

ESXi 5 Whitebox

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:59:00 +0000

If you need a whitebox build for ESXi then I have some information that might help. I got ESXi 5 up and running on the following hardware.

Motherboard: ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 620
RAM: G.Skill Value 16GB DDR3 1333
NICs: 2 x Intel 1 x Realtek

With version 5 VMWare added compatibility with a few more network cards. The on-board Realtek 8111E on my ASUS was detected properly and worked fine without having to use special drivers or hacks. Another thing to note with the free ESXi version is VMWare upped the RAM limit to 32GB. They had initially limited it to 8GB but after an outcry from users they raised it, thankfully.

SSD

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:58:00 +0000

I finally took the plunge and bought my first SSD. Newegg had a sale on the Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB and I decided to get it. After installing Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 and a few drivers, I still have 91GB left. Not too bad and now all I need to do is figure out how to carve out some space to dual boot Linux. Below is my first benchmark, no tweaking but from what I have read with Windows 7 and TRIM enabled, you don’t need any.

Intel HD graphics driver causing reboots

Sun, 29 May 2011 08:10:51 +0000

I haven’t purchaed a dedicated graphics card yet for my new build so I’m using the Core i5’s built-in GPU. This updated GPU is a major improvement over past integrated GPU attempts. After installing the latest Intel HD graphics driver I found my system in a reboot loop every time it went to load Windows. Weird since this was a new Windows install with Intel drivers that had been out since December. After some Googling I found Windows 7 needs to be updated to Service Pack 1 for these graphics drivers to work properly. I guess I should have done that first anyways, but oh well. So if your having issues with the Intel HD graphics driver rebooting your system after installing, update Windows 7 to Service Pack 1 first.

Sandy

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:26:46 +0000

For the past few months I have been without a typical desktop computer at home. All of my computing has been on my laptops and iPad, along with some virtualization stuff on my headless ‘server’ in the closet. I thought I would really miss my Core 2 Duo and Radeon 4850 but it hasn’t been as difficult as I first thought. My main laptop I have used as a replacement is a Core i5 430M so the performance has actually been pretty good. The most annoying thing I found working exclusively on portable devices has been resolution. Laptops just don’t have the real estate I prefer when multitasking.

ESXi build

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:43:03 +0000

I ordered new RAM and motherboard for my ‘server’. Everything should be here by Thursday and I hope to load ESXi 4.1 on it to test.

CPU - Athlon II X4
RAM - 16GB DDR3 1333
MB - ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 AM3
NICS - 2 x Intel Gigabit

Storage
1 x 640GB
2 x 1TB
2 x 2TB