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Project: Rackmount Overkill

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That's software, not firmware.

The performance restoration software includes a firmware update. When you launch the software, the first thing it does is update the firmware, then the system reboots and the performance restoration process starts. I ran it on my EVO and it really helped things.
 
The performance restoration software includes a firmware update. When you launch the software, the first thing it does is update the firmware, then the system reboots and the performance restoration process starts. I ran it on my EVO and it really helped things.

The latest firmware is available separate from the restoration software though.
I see no reason they would only include a new version of the firmware with the software, but not offer it without the software.
 
I can't really install their software, anyway.

Easiest thing for me to do is to pull the drives and temporarily put them in my desktop. Also known as, a big pain in the butt. Good information to have, though.
 
The latest firmware is available separate from the restoration software though.
I see no reason they would only include a new version of the firmware with the software, but not offer it without the software.
I was referring to your statement of "that's software, not firmware", when in fact firmware is included in that software, let me check the firmware revision my EVO shows now vs. what available separately.
 
Over the past few weeks, I decided to retire the R410 server due to noise and go with a low power build. I tried to find a pre-built unit that had dual NICs for cheap, and it didn't really exist. Since I work from home, the main concern I have about my router is reliability and how quick and I get a replacement running. Driving down to the office every day would greatly interfere with my college classes, which is the whole point I'm working from home. The R410 was great on that front due to high quality parts, redundant everything, and sharing parts with the other servers. While I could certainly sleep with the server whining away all night, it did get annoying. The extra 140w heat draw/dump also didn't make it attractive.

I talked to Austin and found out he had a low power ITX board he wanted to sell. Over the course of a few hours, he and I specced out a cheap low power system that has easily replaceable parts.

Biostar A68N-5000 motherboard ($50)
Silverstone Tek Mini-ITX SG05-LITE case ($40)
ADATA Premier Pro 32gb SSD ($42)
Silverstone Tek 300w SFX power supply ($55)
4gb G.Skill Ares (pulled from HTPC)
2 port Intel Gigabit PCIe card ($20)

When assembled, the system takes less than 15w to run pfSense, 2w of which is the fan. That is extremely low power for a beefy pfSense system. The lights on the front of the case are very bright, but a little electrical tape can fix that.

Here was the system before I put in the RAM and before the NIC arrived.
IMG_1593.jpg
IMG_1596.jpg

Once the NIC arrived, I assembled the system, installed pfSense and did system tests. The only issue I ran into was with the "power" setting, which tries to control the speed of the processor depending on system load. After the system was running, it would restart with no messages almost exactly at three minutes of uptime. Disabling the power management in pfSense resolved the issue and I'm sitting on 12 days of uptime.
IMG_1602.jpg
IMG_1604.jpg
IMG_1609.jpg


The box is sitting on a shelf in the rack. I'm keeping the old Dell Optiplex I was originally using as a backup system. For comparison, the Optiplex was a Core2Duo based system, and very quiet. It pulled 60w compared to this one's 15w.
 
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That is one lean mean pfsense machine! :D

What's the brain in this one?
That low power Kabini quad chip?
 
That is one lean mean pfsense machine! :D

What's the brain in this one?
That low power Kabini quad chip?
Chip is an AMD Fusion APU A4-5000 Quad-Core processor.

The light issue has been fixed with electrical tape. I didn't want to disconnect the lights in case I need to troubleshoot the system. The tape covered up where the buttons were unless you looked really close. I drew a crude power symbol with a silver Sharpie. Best of both worlds.

IMG_1615.jpg
(0.5 second free hand shot [no tripod], beat that!)
 
Chip is an AMD Fusion APU A4-5000 Quad-Core processor.

The light issue has been fixed with electrical tape. I didn't want to disconnect the lights in case I need to troubleshoot the system. The tape covered up where the buttons were unless you looked really close. I drew a crude power symbol with a silver Sharpie. Best of both worlds.

View attachment 159730
(0.5 second free hand shot [no tripod], beat that!)

Nice! I have to ask. Can i virtualize pfsense with esxi5.5 and also keep freenas running on The same machine?
 
Nice! I have to ask. Can i virtualize pfsense with esxi5.5 and also keep freenas running on The same machine?
You could, but you'd want to dedicate NICs to pass through, otherwise you run the risk of security problems.
 
Sooooooo now The hp has 2 gigabit NICs. Of i get another dual gigabit intel like yours i need to loop back from integrated hp to intel ?
 
Oh. Hello eight 256GB Samsung Pro solid state drives. How are you today? What's that, you want to go in a R710 server? Sure!

IMG_1616.jpg
 
I'd connect the output to a switch, instead.
I mean, in order to also get NAS functionality. i use pfS to filter traffic and forward access to output. and the output also serves as the nas output and internet to the switch.
Did i get it right?
 
I mean, in order to also get NAS functionality. i use pfS to filter traffic and forward access to output. and the output also serves as the nas output and internet to the switch.
Did i get it right?
You could probably do something like that, but if I'm routing and filtering on a network level, I'd rather give the pfSense box its own dedicated NIC. Doing anything else is just asking to have your network exploited.
 
I'm off to a great start tonight. All the virtual machines were migrated over to the server with spinning rust a few days ago, and I've been running the bare minimum since then. The drives arrived today, I swapped them in, installed Xen 6.5 and we're off. Except I can't join them to the same pool because they are different versions.

Ok, simple. Upgrade the server to 6.5, everything comes up fine. Try to join it to the new server's pool and it complains about the bond network. Ok, let it delete that and it joins. Now my network is missing on lucid, what the heck? It keeps saying its devices are in the bond configuration it just removed! Restart a few times, same thing. Do an "emergency network reset", now all the network devices are missing on lucid (what??). Drop to a command line, look at the configuration, they are all listed (????), look over and it is connected in XenCenter somehow. I'm completely lost at this point. The virtual machines won't start up because they try to use awk's network bond, with lucid's storage, which makes absolutely zero sense.

I've had network issues with Xen in the past, and after a few times you delete the bond and restart the server, all is good and it starts behaving. Except it doesn't. I figured the pool was getting confused and mixing the network interfaces, so I unjoin lucid from the pool and it restarts. Now the virtual machines are showing in the pool, but not assigned a server, which makes no sense (they can't be assigned no server). I see no way to put them on lucid, so I join the pool again, and it lets me move them back over, ok phew. Try to start the virtual machine, fails because the virtual disk is missing. Ok, so it probably just removed it from the virtual machine, easy enough. I go to local storage and it is empty. Uh...what? Local storage says it has no virtual devices. That is...really really bad, this has to be a mistake. I pull up a console and look at what is actually stored: nothing. In the new version, when you unjoin a pool, it now deletes and reinitializes all local storage with a tiny popup window that looks exactly like the old one. Are you friggin serious? Why does an operation that deletes literally everything on the server have a single yes/no prompt?


I'm installing VMware now.

Also visbits is a super cool dude for helping me through everything tonight.
 
After reading all that I am glad I have stayed with VMware rather than switching over and trying out Xen, I've never had problems like that with the networking for VMware, especially after they implemented Virtual Distributed Switching. I have had issues in the past where a datastore started showing no space, or unformatted, but I was able to recover that from the VMware console.
 
You could probably do something like that, but if I'm routing and filtering on a network level, I'd rather give the pfSense box its own dedicated NIC. Doing anything else is just asking to have your network exploited.

Are you suggesting with PFSense to have both it's internal and external nics as dedicated, or just have the external nic dedicated, and have the internal on a VDS, or vSwitch?

My current setup has my PFSense firewall with a dedicated nic connected to my cable modem, and the internal nic is a virtual nic connected to my VDS for the rest of my network.
 
After reading all that I am glad I have stayed with VMware rather than switching over and trying out Xen, I've never had problems like that with the networking for VMware, especially after they implemented Virtual Distributed Switching. I have had issues in the past where a datastore started showing no space, or unformatted, but I was able to recover that from the VMware console.
Funny you mention VMware, because that is exactly what awk is running right now. I'm going to swap over to this for both servers once I get home. It is way easier to manage, I don't have to do, what are effectively, hacks to complete common commands, and it just seems to work.

Are you suggesting with PFSense to have both it's internal and external nics as dedicated, or just have the external nic dedicated, and have the internal on a VDS, or vSwitch?

My current setup has my PFSense firewall with a dedicated nic connected to my cable modem, and the internal nic is a virtual nic connected to my VDS for the rest of my network.
You can probably setup the routing in VMWare, now that I'm actually using it. However, I'd still put it on its own network devices that are passed through unless I found a definitive way to configure routing. I will probably look into this, now that I'm on VMWare. I had assumed their networking was similar to Xen but wow holy crap was I wrong.
 
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