Tophat

[wpirobotbuilder]

I usually go with mprime/Prime95. I haven't found a program that

reaches higher temps yet, and maybe more importantly it's also

multi-platform.

There's also a program called cpuburn, but I've never tried it

personally. According to google it's also available on BSD.

Have you been able to run it on FreeNAS? I got it, but it won't start. Something about "libc++.so.1" not found.

[alpenwasser]

Have you been able to run it on FreeNAS? I got it, but it won't start. Something about "libc++.so.1" not found.

Hm, sorry, only tried it on Linux, and I don't have a FreeNAS or other

BSD system available for testing. Maybe something went wrong with dependency

management and libc++ is not installed even though it should be? In my

package manager, libc++ is available as a separate package and is not

installed by default, so this could be the case on FreeNAS as well?

[wpirobotbuilder]

Hm, sorry, only tried it on Linux, and I don't have a FreeNAS or other

BSD system available for testing. Maybe something went wrong with dependency

management and libc++ is not installed even though it should be? In my

package manager, libc++ is available as a separate package and is not

installed by default, so this could be the case on FreeNAS as well?

Dunno. I solved the problem anyways, I wrote a python script that would load up a CPU core 100% with floating point math and ran it 23 times in different processes. Got a bit hotter. Thanks @MG2R.

[IdeaStormer]

You forgot the most important test:

 

In all seriousness though, just performing NOPs until the end of time won't

really make your CPU run hot, as the FPU isn't stressed. You should try

performing floating point calculations, it should make your CPU run hotter.

 

I was going to say something similar, running no-ops and keeping the CPU busy with nothing is not quite the same as real stress testing.

 

And that's where good old Linux stress function comes in. Should be a default package on all distros but if not you can compile your own version. You can stress CPU, I/O, Net, Disk, some of them or all of them by any number of core/threads that you want for any amount of time or forever (till you kill the process or control C out of it). Look into it @wpirobotbuilder

 

Well at least in Debian its one of the default or not default but packages you can install, same for Ubuntu family.

 

Here's their site: http://www.stresslinux.org/sl/

Edited June 24, 2014 by IdeaStormer

[Ahnzh]

I just want you to remember that you only have 48GB per CPU. When you get to a certain amount of used HDD storage, you will see your speed decreasing.

[wpirobotbuilder]

I just want you to remember that you only have 48GB per CPU. When you get to a certain amount of used HDD storage, you will see your speed decreasing.

I had about 2TB on the volume when I ran the file copies. I will definitely keep an eye on those numbers as I add more storage.

[NIC ROBERTOOO]

Great looking build!

However, your logo looks familiar...

[wpirobotbuilder]

Great looking build!

However, your logo looks familiar...

Thanks!

 

And my logo comes from an IEEE article from 2009 that partially inspired me to work in assistive robotics.

[NIC ROBERTOOO]

Thanks!

And my logo comes from an IEEE article from 2009 that partially inspired me to work in assistive robotics.

Haha sorry I meant the logo for the build, not your profile picture ;p

[wpirobotbuilder]

A (Hopefully) Useful Purchase

 

A while ago I was considering buying a PIKE card (a proprietary ASUS card that consists of an LSI controller on a custom PCB) for my system. The main advantage is that I can use SATA ports that are already on my motherboard (8 of them) and not have to mess around with SFF cables. In addition, it apparently has pass-through (IT) functionality, so I don't have to mess about with flashing the firmware.

 

Last time I looked, Newegg was selling them. Now they're out of stock and aren't restocking. I managed to find the last one on e-bay, and I jumped on it. Got it in a few days ago.

 

Installing it was easy, just like a PCI-E card. It was correctly detected by the motherboard, and I get the option to boot into the LSI setup menu. FreeNAS did crash at first, but after a reboot it booted into the OS just fine.

 

Right now my hard drives are all on the chipset SATA controller. The plan is to backup my data, then move one of my two drives to the PIKE controller and rebuild the mirror that I have on it.

 

Will update with pictures and the migration process.

[DildorTheDecent]

 - This is where that card goes? (The two separated white slots)

[wpirobotbuilder]

 - This is where that card goes? (The two separated white slots)

Yes.

[wpirobotbuilder]

PIKE Photos, More PCI Cards, and Repurposing

 

Got the pike in a few days ago, here is it installed in my machine!

 

 

I haven't hooked up any drives to it yet, but it's detected on bootup and FreeNAS boots just fine with it. It has enabled more ports on my motherboard for a total of 14 drives. That's quite a few.

 

I also have obtained a few more cards -- a 1x GbE Intel NIC and a 2x 10GbE SFP+ Intel NIC, show below.

 

 

My goal for these is to 1) Have a 10GbE backbone for my system because 2) I am going to be retiring my dedicated FreeNAS system. The reason being that I don't really need FreeNAS and I'd like to get more out of my hardware. I will be moving to an ESXi host, but will be virtualizing the FreeNAS operating system inside of ESXi. This is more risky as far as data integrity goes, however I don't really have a need for the data integrity provided by FreeNAS. All the data on it is just stuff like movies and TV shows, which is hardly worth it. Down the road this might change when I start acquiring valuable data that I want to store locally (say, a wedding video or videos of kids), but for now I don't need it all. 

 

My motherboard does have VT-d and I should be able to pass the PIKE card through to the FreeNAS VM. I'll reserve all the memory for the VM (I'll be going with 32GB of the 96 I have installed) and take other measures to minimize the risk. So I will still have an excellent storage setup, just a virtual one.

 

Other things I plan to do with this machine is to experiment with Ubuntu + ROS, and play around with other OSes and software like SQL server and PXE boot. I also will be setting up an LDAP/AD server, because then I can have one login across all my stuff, and an SVN server for my code projects and other stuff.

 

The 10GbE NIC comes into play because I will be using a lot of iSCSI for my main desktop (where low latency is a key factor), and the 1GbE will be there providing an extra GbE link. I will be directly passing the x520 to the FreeNAS system (if the VMXNet3 virtual adapter doesn't work), but will be using GbE for the moment until I can purchase a switch that supports 10GbE SFP+ backbones. The Zyxel XGS1910 looks like a good model.

 

I might pick up another 1GbE NIC that has a regular PCI form factor -- otherwise I don't know what I'll do with that PCI slot.

 

I also want to experiment with GPU passthrough to a VM, to see if I can virtualize an entire desktop by passing through a USB controller and GPU to a VM, then hooking it up to a monitor, mouse and keyboard. Googling around yields a lot of discussion on it, and it's been done successfully quite often. Will be looking into purchasing a HD6450, which has worked for others, and NVidia cards seem to not work almost universally (AMD supports it on most cards).

 

The final setup will be:

 

FreeNAS: Main storage, for iSCSI targets, Plex server, and less important data. 32GB memory and 8 vCPU.

LDAP/AD: Logins to my machines. 1GB memory and 1 vCPU.

SVN: Dedicated SVN server. 1GB memory and 1 vCPU.

Virtual Desktop: Experimental setup for shits & giggles. 8GB memory and 4 vCPU.

Ubuntu + ROS: For development and schoolwork. 8GB memory and 4 vCPU.

Windows Server: Experimentation, 4GB memory and 2 vCPU.

 

This is much better used than just as a FreeNAS box. I'll probably do some resizing of the VMs depending on what I need. 

 

The next post will be on the repurposing process.