ASRock E3C224: a note of warning

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jyavenard

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I got myself an ASRock E3C224 boards which I received yesterday.

For it, I got 1.35V low-voltage ECC RAM (certified Kingston RAM for that board).
ASRock manual and tech specs specify that it supports both 1.5 and 1.35V

Well, those idiots have set the lower non-critical value for the RAM voltage to 1.38V.

So when you use low-voltage RAM (1.35V), the logs get swamped with errors !

Using the freeipmi tools, I've changed the lower-NC value to 1.32V; but then it's the Vcore value that start to log events; even though it reports a constant 1.81V
So the logs gets filled up with:

512 02/04/2014 22:06:00 Vcore Voltage Lower Non-Critical - Going Low - Deasserted
511 02/04/2014 22:06:00 Vcore Voltage Lower Critical - Going Low - Deasserted
510 02/04/2014 22:06:00 Vcore Voltage Lower Non-Recoverable - Going Low - Deasserted
509 02/04/2014 22:05:59 Vcore Voltage Lower Non-Recoverable - Going Low - Asserted
508 02/04/2014 22:05:59 Vcore Voltage Lower Critical - Going Low - Asserted
507 02/04/2014 22:05:59 Vcore Voltage Lower Non-Critical - Going Low - Asserted
506 02/04/2014 22:05:49 Vcore Voltage Lower Non-Critical - Going Low - Deasserted

The other annoying thing is that the remote control power doesn't work via the ipmi web page: power off server - orderly shutdown does nothing.

if you select to reboot the machine from freenas, it will actually shutdown and you must press the power button after that.

Pretty annoying...
 

cyberjock

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Wait, what? Are you serious? Are they that incompetent? I'm sure you have a love to hate relationship with me too.. but that is just preposterous that they'd do something so amateurish.

Kind of confirms what I was concerned about.. quality was/is lacking. I had been cautiously optimistic about how well their products would be made. I think I've been saying "they have potential". Sounds like their attention to detail isn't so great. Not a good sign.

Well, for your sake I do hope they fix their screwups with some firmware/BIOS updates.
 

jyavenard

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The KVM also needs serious overall. When you press the reset button, or reboot the machine; the ipmi becomes shortly unavailable (you can tell as suddenly a Ping command continuously pinging the ipmi interface stops responding).


The KVM interface, then of course becomes unresponsive. By the time it comes back to life, often it's too late to press F2 to get into the bios!


I'm sure the BMC values will be sorted out with a firmware upgrade. For the reset/reboot, it's probably a hardware design issue and there's nothing you can do.


Unfortunately, it was the only server board I could find with the new intel 1150 interface, that had both PCIe and PCI slots.

The irony though, is that one of my PCI card I intended to reuse doesn't even works. When I inquired further, it seems that the PCI card doesn't receive enough power and disable itself

As I was swapping board around, I made the unfortunate discovery that when the board appears off, it isn't, the PCI slots are still powered. So when I plug the card into the 2nd PCI slot; it made some smoke :)
Upon reading the manual, it does state to unplug the power supply before putting a PCI card. So my fault.

So in the end, I didn't even need the PCI slot! I should have gone with the cheaper supermicro board X10SLM.

Getting it wrong on the voltage value though is unforgivable.
 

cyberjock

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jyavenard

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The first one only had 2 PCIe slot, I wanted three. The 2nd one was a special order and is twice as expensive.
With hindsight, as I killed my PCI card and have to replace it with a PCIe version, and all the troubles. I probably would have been better of with the SM one. It probably won't be as low power though, with plenty of features I won't ever need being a desktop board
 

cyberjock

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Yeah, I just quickly looked for boards with PCI and PCIe. I don't think either of those were ideal because they had audio and other useless stuff on the board.
 

ser_rhaegar

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Regarding ipmi loss of connection, are you using the dedicated port or a shared port?
 

jyavenard

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Dedicated... Or so I think... The ipmi network setting is actually very confusing. There are three entries in the configuration menu related to the network settings. One let you activate and configure a bridge (the default) with eth0 or eth1. Then you can select which port is to use (eth0 or eth1). I'm yet to see anything related to the configuration of the dedicated Ethernet port: it's all about eth0 or eth1.
I don't fully understand the documentation to be honest. And I'm not sure the people who wrote the manual understand either.
 

ser_rhaegar

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There should be three network ports on the board, are you using the one marked for ipmi? How many network cables are going into the server and into which ports?
 

jyavenard

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I have cables going to all 3 ports. One is to connect another machine in back to back. The other is the general connection, the third is to the ipmi dedicated switch.... I've used ipmi in the past you know :)
 

ser_rhaegar

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Normally ipmi disconnects during boot means you're using a shared connection. I'd double check the settings and look for a non-bridged option which sounds like it is really shared with a normal nic.
 

jyavenard

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I have disabled the bridge (it's on by default) But again, if you check the manual: http://download.asrock.com/manual/IPMI/E3C224-4L.pdf, you'll see that the manual ever refers to eth1 and eth2. There's nothing specific about the dedicated port.. Maybe you're right, and it is sharing the port rather than using the dedicated port. But if it does so, I see nothing in the settings on how to change that..
 

jyavenard

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You were right,, I have unplugged the dedicated ipmi network cable, I saw then one drop packet on my ping screen. Plugged it back, disconnected the main Ethernet cable, and I lost connection.

So now I'm not sure if disconnecting the dedicated ipmi Ethernet made it fall back to the main port (thinking so due to the drop packet), and it is now using the main Ethernet.
 

jyavenard

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Everything in the settings let me to believe that the actual dedicated Ethernet port serve no purpose.. All the settings refer to using either eth0 or eth1 or bonding those two together.. Nothing about a 3rd port...
 

ser_rhaegar

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I'm seeing the same in the manuals. Really odd. My only experience with them is for IBM, Dell, HP and supermicro server boards though.
 

jyavenard

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Ok, mystery resolved. Eth1 refers to the dedicated ipmi network, eth0 refers to the first main Ethernet device. You can configure one or the other independently, or bridge them. When I thought I was configuring the dedicated port, I wasn't.. As the main port uses two distinct mac address I got confused.

Very poor documentation though.
 

ser_rhaegar

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Glad to hear you figured it out and good to know about the settings.
 

jyavenard

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Well, this only lead to another source of frustration.... I changed the IP address of the dedicated port, now I can ping it but http interface has stopped responding. Cold reset did nothing. I had first attempted to change it via the dhcp server, but no matter what I did, the ASRock would stay on the old IP address... Gosh it sucks,,,,
 

jyavenard

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Well, manager to unbrick the IPMI chip thanks to ASRock which sent me a DOS utility to reset the controller and restore it to factory settings...

I still get thousands of log events due to the voltage of the CPU varying.
In their BMC settings they've set:
Lower Non-recoverable: 1.62
Lower critical 1.67
lower Non Critical: 1.719
upper Non Critical: 1.87
Upper Critical 1.92

Upper Non Recoverable 1.979

The Xeon runs mostly at 1.81V, but sometimes goes lower than 1.67V

In comparison, my supermicro X10SL7-F board has:
Lower Non-recoverable: 1.242
Lower critical 1.26
lower Non Critical: 1.40
upper Non Critical: 1.90
Upper Critical 2.088

Upper Non Recoverable 2.106

as you can see, the threshold window is much bigger on the supermicro board.

Well, at least I can see something once again... got scared for a minute; with a screen the machine was pretty hard to operate !
 
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