clustermonkey

OKay, it was ages ago since I actually posted something here but I have had alot to do and all that random crap ;)

Well, I got the system to run! Firstly I could only get it to run with half of the RAM, 16 GB, and that was fine for the purpose I had started it that time.
I only started it and ran it from a USB stick with Tin Hat Gentoo because a friend of mine needed the computational power for a contest he was in (A biological genetik algorithm of some sort) and in the meanwhile I successfully located and bought 4-pin molex to SATA power converters and plugged in the harddisk into the system.

After som fiddling with the RAM, trying more or less every different seating combo..., I managed to get it to accept 32 GB but for some odd reason it can only use 28GB of that (which I found a vague explanation about the 4GB that is "gone" is for PCIe somehow)

But I am installing the server as I write this and man it is a monster. It recompiled the entire system, from a empty tree (emerge -e @world) in roughly 1h 23m, it is insane.

This thursday I went to the DHL Servicepoint and picked up the motherboard finally! The DHL crew ain't the smartest because they hadn't left it off at the servicepoint that is like 1 min away from me, walking distance.
I had to go to the one that was 20 mins away with bus... Oh well now I have the motherboard. (Pictures are coming soon)

I have looked at it and man it looks nice, such a difference from the Supermicro one, the power regulation is quite good, the layout makes sense and it just looks more clean, which is nice.

I will be moving this blog from blogg.se to my own domain whenever I get the time to set it up on my server that hosts my homepage.

And now that I got the mounting holes done correctly, just took me 5 damn tries lol :P, I will start to post alot more than before. Because now I will finally be able to start the system and build the chassi and everything :)

I just recieved the confirmation that they have sent my motherboard to me, so it'll be arriving in like a day or two \o/

I can't wait to test what this hardware is actually capable and seeing as I now have a bit more competent motherboard at my disposal I'll have to think up interesting ways of using it.

For example, I now have 4 Gbit LAN ports on the motherboard instead of 2 which means I can have 4 slave colonies attach to the motherboard without having to extend it with PCIe LAN cards and each slave colony will be able to have up to 23 slaves depending on what switch I decide to use.

The first colony will "only" be able to have 7 slaves because I only have a 8 port switch, but that can easily be changed :D

Plus that I now have a whole bunch of PCI/PCIe ports of different speeds to use, which gives me the oppertunity of extending the master with maybe some cheap graphic card to start fiddling with OpenCL or a SATA/SAS controller card for more disks :)

I'll keep you guys posted on the progress and soon there will be some more pictures again.

I have finally ordered my replacement motherboard. It should arrive within a week or two so I can finally continue with this dormant project lol :P

I'll probably just play around with the system for a week or 3, I have never had such a powerful machine before, but then I am going to get down to business and convert it into a VM host machine, convert my laptop to binpkgs and stuff like that.

Let the game begin soon!

Sidenote: The motherboard I am getting is a Tyan S8230GM4NR, which is a quite more potent motherboard than I had before :)

Well, after a veery long period of not having much time for stuff at all and alot of irl projects taking my time I have managed to get a part-time job while I study so I can soon replace my fried mobo!

The timeframe will probably be like within 2-3 months because I have to get it shipped and such and this also means that I should be more active on my blogg or what do you guys think? ;)

Well, I can hopefully post alot more now than I have done before and perhaps I soon can start to update with real project status, kindof sucks to have a 6 months dead period just because I chose a very bad period to start studying lol xD

After a rather long time of no update here is finally a positive one :D

I have managed to get ahold of a person that will help me get a motherboard from the states to me in Sweden and even with all shipping included I save about 200$, damn what a difference :P

I have been down for roughly a week because I decided to re arrange my partitions and start using LVM, but then I hit a rather strange bug, cryptsetup fails and bam I cannot use my computer without a liveCD lol.
Luckily thanks to blueness and Zorry of #gentoo-hardened @ Freenode I am now up and running in a native environment finally :)

And besides that, FOSDEM is coming up!

Until further updates I wish you all a happy new year and soon I might be able to start to tinker with the server for real :)

Well I have confirmed it now, the motherboard is entirely dead, caput, finito. Maybe I'll make an fancy ornament of it or something but I now have to get a new motherboard...

This means 1. I have to wait and see if I have sufficient funds to be able to get it at the end of this month or next and 2. The waiting for it to arrive to me after I order it.

Ain't life a bitch sometimes? :P

So today I got and fetched the motherboard from the postoffice, it had arrived there during my stay in Germany.
Still a little baffled at the very short description from the support personnel I opened up the motherboard and ye and behold, there were a load of bent CPU pins :/

Well well, CPU pins aren't that hard to put back to where they belong, it only requires a rather good lighting of the work area and something pointy and thin, for me this was a model knife :P

After scanning the sockets and repositioning the pins to where they are supposed to be I decided to do an trial run of the motherboard. I plugged in the PSU, without anything in the board at all, and plugged it into the wall.
The DP2 led never lit up at all, I figured that maybe these server PSUs don't emit power while being in standby so I started it with the help of the motherboard and still no dice, the DP2 refuses to lit :(

Something tells me that I will have to buy a new motherboard :(

I have now gotten the answer from Dustin, apparently in one of the sockets there was bent CPU pins so they are returning the motherboard to me.

Hopefully it isn't broken off so that you could fix the pin and use the motherboard, otherwise I'll just have to buy a new one. They have gone down a bit in price so it is not that big of a hit even tho it means more waiting game :(

Well I have now gotten a confirmal from Dustin that I am allowed to send the motherboard in for RMA so I spent yesterday of demontage and stuff.

Hopefully I'll get the answer rather quick so I know what to do. But I'll probably not see another motherboard this year :/

Plugging in the server PSU yesterday unfortunatly confirmed my fears, the motherboard is dead. The power LED light that is supposed to light up when you connect a powersupply never lit up and I am afraid that the motherboard might be short circuitet.

If it was my EPS12v connector or not I'll leave to the dustin support to judge, I have filed an RMA and see what I get for responce from that.
If it was my connector I will ofc just by a new motherboard, sure it will hurt my wallet but I haven't come this far to just give up lol

And I would also have noticed, because it makes a distinctive sound and smell when burnt electronics are being made :P

I have now after waiting over the weekend for my new PSU to arrive and I just got a text saying it is lying at my local postoffice ready for me to pick it up wuhu!!

Hopefully I'll atleast get a chance to turn it on before I go to bed because today I am going to spend coding at Proxxi.

Oh yeah, if you didn't know, the war of the internet has just begun. Look at this awesome blag post from my friend Etu about it: http://elis.nu/index.php/2010/12/my-day-with-internet-war-part-1/

Well it seems like the motherboard really did not like my own made EPS12v, and I had actually planned that this might happen.
It is after all an very different type of system if you compare what system the PSU usually runs, an single 95-125W CPU, 1-2 HDDs and a 150-225W Graphics card. It was a bit mean trying to run an dual socket system of it and my connector converting skills probably have to be upgraded before I could successfully do such conversion.

So with all that said and done I have now ordered an real 350W server PSU, with 80+ Gold certification and 2 4-pins EPS12v that can be combined into an SSI12v (which seems to be what the server world calls EPS12v 8-pin connectors) and 1 SSI12v 8-pin connector.
So back to the waiting game... atleast they had them in stock so I should have it at the latest by next tuesday

So yesterday just before going to bed I was fiddling with the server and I was going to give it the first go and check if everything was okay.
Well, they aren't... When I managed to get the motherboard started it started to complain with 5 short beeps and 1 long to divide them which according to the information I could find on the net means that the CPU doesn't like life, oh crap I thought.

I swapped the CPUs to see if that could be the error, and of course I double check that everything was fastened as it should be, seated as it should be and not strained in anyway.
Now the motherboard doesn't do anything and I was getting more nervous, I'd hate to brick an motherboard that costs roughly 420€ but then when inspecting the EPS12v connector that I had made I noticed that it was not fastened as it should be so it is is probably that it is not getting power from where it assumes it will and then refuses to start.
I will be repairing the EPS12v connector today and hope for the best, otherwise I'll have to send the motherboard in for repair which would suck because that'd probably take a few weeks.

Atleast here are some pictures of the fully assembled system:

I am now going to switch over to english so that the Gentoo Hardened folks can understand what I am writing :)

I haven't had the time to work any more on the cluster since monday but I have the pictures from monday when I did the secondary EPS12v contact.
I first tried to solder the cables to the pin to make 6-pins into 8-pins but that wasn't such a good idea.
The added thickness that the soldering added to the pin so that the pin didn't even go all the way in so it would not work.

So I took a new pair of cables and stripped them rather far, about 2cm instead of 0.5cm and just used heatshrink to wrap them together with the existing cables. Seeing as I do not have access to an hairdryer or other hot-air blowing source I had to improvise, I set the soldering iron to 350 C and put the heatshrink a few millimeters above the hottest part of the soldering iron and it worked surprisingly well :)



First attempt with soldering the cables together, not that successfull :(



Heatshrink to the rescue! It worked surprisingly well with the heatshrink and the results are heck alot cleaner looking than the soldering ones.



Hopefully I'll be able to test the server today seeing as I haven't had the time to do that right, let's hope that I do not get to smell the awful smell of burnt electronics from my makeshift EPS12v connector frying the PSU :P