[geeks] [rescue] Hardware Recommendations for upgrading sunhelp.org?

[Andrew Luke Nesbit]

On 01/10/2018 22:49, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 10:07:03PM +0100, Andrew Luke Nesbit wrote:
>> Intel Xeon E3-1200v1 or v2 CPU with an X9 series Supermicro motherboard
>> is a great combination when you've got DDR3 RAM.B  My "go to" X9 boards
>> for E3 CPU's max out at 32 GB.
>
> But do any of them work with non-registered/non-ecc RAM?B  All of my DDR3
> that I have sitting spare is regular desktop DDR3 RAM.

Yes, I believe it does.  Generally a board that takes unbuffered ECC RAM
also accepts non-ECC RAM.  It depends on the chipset.

>>> Case is a Fractal Design R5 so anything needs to fit into that.
>>>
https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-series/define-r5-bla
ck
>>>
>> These are great cases, especially for the price.B 
>
> I wouldn't have this one, except for a consulting client who needed
> something done ASAP a couple of weeks ago and bought me the case as
> payment.

What don't you like about it?

> Power supply is going to be one of the ones I picked up as a refurb
> sale unit from EVGA about six months ago.
Now you've jogged my memory and I'm wondering whether the PSU will be
compatible.  This would need further investigation.  What is the model
of PSU?

My experience has been that 90% of problems are due to power, for all
sorts of devices.

>> There are X9 board
>> options with micro-ATX form factor that can be had for very cheap.
>
> Suggestions?

I'm a huge fan of the X9SCM-F.  Sometimes you can even find one that
comes with a 1U chassis, PSU, and fans for not much more than the cost
of the bare board itself.

This is the board I am referring to:
https://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C202_C204/X9SCM-F.cfm

I am compiling inventory of my hardware.  This will take several
additional weeks.

Where are you located?  If it's not more trouble than it's worth (due to
packaging and shipping) I would be happy to donate equipment if this is
useful to you or the community.  Contact me privately if you would like
to discuss this further.  I am in the UK.

However it sounds like you've already got everything you need to
implement a fine solution based on the AMD FX-8320E.  Plus you get 8
real cores, and a configuration that is a little more modern.

>> You'd have 4c/8t (as well as the aforementioned 32 GB RAM).B  In another
>> message you mentioned using this server as a virt host as well.B  I'm
>> still learning the intricate relationships between cores and memory.
>> (If anybody has particularly useful resources on the latter point,
>> please let me know.)
>
> "as many cores and as much RAM as possible" :D

This is usually the correct answer.

On the other hand I have encountered situations where increasing RAM can
actually decrease performance, for example :D

>> Finally, I can't help but ask.B  Why are you not looking at a Sun stack
>> as your preferred option?
>
> Same reason I moved off of the T1000 when I moved everything out of colo
> and to a business connection at home with static IPs - what Oracle wanted
> for a support contract, just to get patches, was more than sunhelp.org has
> brought in, in income, total, in the past twenty-one years that I've run
> the site.B  Plus, I refuse to give them business due to moral reasons.

I have a similar issue at the moment.  I recently bought an HPE ProLiant
Gen8 MicroServer but I was not expecting to be fleeced like this.  It's
a development server for a personal project.  All of this has been a
major blocker for provisioning the server for what I intend to use it
for (testing Infiniband hardware).

> (Had a long discussion about this when I moved to the current system back
> in 09-10ish)

Is this discussion in the list archives?

> In honesty I can say that the site and everything related to it, never even
> covered the costs of running it.B  I was lucky if I made enough to take the
> wife out to dinner once a month to make up for all the time I spent on it.

I can relate to this, with regards to time spent online and money spent.
 As such, I've become very particular about how and where I spend my
time online, and ensuring that hardware I spend money on is actually
working for me in a productive way, rather than merely being an
interesting thing to experiment with.  I already have a a room full of
interesting hardware to experiment with, enough to last me years.

Andrew
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