Hardware and configuration suggestions needed

[tvsjr]

A heavy price was paid to get to this point. So I hope you appreciate how good we have it today.

Oh, most of the Redditors still think the forum, and quite a number of the "old heads", suck. But that's OK. :D:D

Was the reason what you thought? ;-)

I was just amused and terribly pleased by your comment, because yes there's a reason for that, and on one hand it's fair to say that the reason is because Supermicro is an awesome platform, but on the other hand, things could have gone very differently and we could have ended up with a lot of consumer cheapskate builds on random problematic hardware had there been fewer people here willing to debate the finer points of ECC memory, PSU sizing, system cooling, reliable HBA and network adapters, and all the other fiddly aspects that contribute to engineering excellence.

I'm not surprised - it seems like quite a number of products with community support end up with a few "power users" who, whether intentionally or not, really set the direction on decisions such as these. Personally, I'm not the type to be a cheapskate in the first place, and I've liked Supermicro gear for a long time (I mean, I've got 8 SM boxes in the rack in my server closet... 90 cores in total... at home... I'm only a little sick, I promise!) My first FN build was my current production 16-core box, and I would never dream of trying to run such a product on a cast-off old laptop. But I'm weird.

And now I'm considering building a second box for an off-site backup/ZFS replication target... it'll probably go at the parents' home, so it won't be a rack mount SM box, and I kinda hate that...

 

[jgreco]

Some of the people that want to build crazy just don't post here. There are other places they go to get their information and they don't report problems here.

Fine by me. I spent too much time debugging NAS-gone-wild back in the day, and a lot of it turned into poorly-informed opinionated "I know better than you, I saw it on YouTube" claptrap.

Even more fun were the people that tried to win by complaining to iX. A discussion of PSU sizing where a poster was clearly advising n00b users to buy supplies that were too small turned into my requesting that he no longer provide such suggestions to impressionable n00bs. He went to iX and suddenly I had Hubbard and Co asking why I was being so rude. I beat back on that one since I had actually shown my math and reasoning, while the other side of the argument was along the lines of "well I measured it with my kill-a-watt and it was X watts." It's engineering, and facts and equations are supposed to beat opinions you pull out of your rear. I welcome a good engineering discussion, and I like to see people get useful information. Sometimes I get to teach it, which I enjoy. Sometimes I'm on the learning end. That's fun too. However, if someone is insistent on not even listening to the collective experience and knowledge here on this forum, then I fail to see why they don't just go do a blog post somewhere else.

So I guess I don't mind if the "build crazy" people go elsewhere.

It cuts the FreeNAS development team out of some potentially useful feedback.

Possibly, but probably not by much. The FreeNAS development team isn't really involved in the forums, with a few exceptions such as mav@. Notice how we're always suggesting people open up bug reports? That's the best interface with the dev team.

 

[Chris Moore]

90 cores in total... at home... I'm only a little sick, I promise!

LOL. What? That isn't right... You hoarding them all for yourself?

 

[jgreco]

LOL. What? That isn't right... You hoarding them all for yourself?

We should pass the hat around and collect a few bucks so we can buy him some salsa to go with all his chips.

 

[tvsjr]

We should pass the hat around and collect a few bucks so we can buy him some salsa to go with all his chips.

I'm a Texan. I have *all* the salsa, thx. :D

Let's see... 16 cores on the FreeNAS box... 3 VM hosts with 16 cores each... 6 cores in the Blue Iris server... 4 for PFSense... 2 domain controllers with 8 each. It works. :D