Setup LAN on X10SL7-F

[Mike77]

If've just build my new machine and am still struggeling with the setup.

At the moment the problem is the LAN setup, or at least the Network Link Status, as shown in IPMI. I can't seem to find out the meaning of the options in IPMI.

Can anyone tell me if this option shows al connections or just the dedicated IPMI connection?

My switch tells me that there are three connections (2* Gbps and 1 * 100 Mb). But in IPMI it shows only an amazing 100 M Full Duplex connection.

What does 100M mean (Mb, MB, nothing of the previous)?

I have an managed switch (TL-SG2216). So I believe it should be possible to setup something better then a 100MByte connection....?

 

[danb35]

My IPMI only shows the status of the IPMI interface. I don't see anywhere that it shows the status of the other two LAN ports. This is on an X9SCL, not an X10SL7, but I'd expect them to be similar in this regard.

 

[Mike77]

@danb35 Thanks for clearing that up!

You wouldn't happen to know if the IPMI options Dedicated, Failover and Share have any impact on the two normal NIC's? It might be nothing, but I'm kinda worried that this dedicated IPMI NIC moght slow the normal connection down in some way.

 

[mjws00]

No impact that is noticeable. The dedicated nic is nice if you have a separate management network for ipmi. Many just have one cable plugged in (myself included.)

There was some chatter on one of the AsRock boards a while back that there were stability issues that went away when failover and sharing was disabled. Never heard anything about a Supermicro board.

 

[SweetAndLow]

100M refers to 100megabit. And you shouldn't have to worry about setting anything up. If you just plug everything in it should work at max speeds. Your questions are a little confusing and I'm not sure what you are worried about? With the ipmi it can be used on its own interface or you can share it with other interfaces and access it from the gigabit ports. Doing that will not allow down the interface very much.

 

[Mike77]

100M refers to 100megabit. And you shouldn't have to worry about setting anything up. If you just plug everything in it should work at max speeds. Your questions are a little confusing and I'm not sure what you are worried about? With the ipmi it can be used on its own interface or you can share it with other interfaces and access it from the gigabit ports. Doing that will not allow down the interface very much.

Thanks for the answer. So the 100Megabit just refers to the dedicated IPMI NIC and has nothing to do with the other two NIC's. Excellent.


I was worried that one or more of the connections of the Gigabit NIC's was/were being affected. I now have all three connected to the network through a managed Gigabit switch (TP-Link TL-SG2216) and am trying to find out how I can speed things up.


I must say that there still must be something wrong in the setup, because I'm still not seeing the speeds that I was hoping for.


I set up the Samsug 850 Pro (see below) as a Cif share and copied a set of files (circa 70 GBytes) between this share and a Windows 7 computer, also connected to the switch with two Intel Gigabit NIC’s.


Parts of the second system:

• Motherboard: H77MA-G43 (MS-7756) 1.0;
  
  
• Intel Core i7-3770;
  
  
• 2X Corsair 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3 DIMM’s;
  
  
• Samsung EVO 850 500GB;
  
  
• 2x Intel Gigabit CT NIC’s;
  
  
• Windows 7 Pro 64 SP1.
  

The onboard Realtek of the second system is not connected.


All five NIC’s have there own IP.


The 70GBytes of data that I was copying between the computers comprised:

• Large archive files;
  
  
• Picures;
  
  
• Movies;
  
  
• Music;
  
  
• Office files;
  
  
• Etc.
  

The speed never reached 100Mbytes/s. The fastest speed was 99,6 Mbytes/s.


I tried copying the files between all IP’s combinations, but that doesn’t seem to matter.


So if you have any idea what to do about this, I’d love to know.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Thanks for the answer. So the 100Megabit just refers to the dedicated IPMI NIC and has nothing to do with the other two NIC's. Excellent.


I was worried that one or more of the connections of the Gigabit NIC's was/were being affected. I now have all three connected to the network through a managed Gigabit switch (TP-Link TL-SG2216) and am trying to find out how I can speed things up.


I must say that there still must be something wrong in the setup, because I'm still not seeing the speeds that I was hoping for.


I set up the Samsug 850 Pro (see below) as a Cif share and copied a set of files (circa 70 GBytes) between this share and a Windows 7 computer, also connected to the switch with two Intel Gigabit NIC’s.


Parts of the second system:

• Motherboard: H77MA-G43 (MS-7756) 1.0;
  
  
• Intel Core i7-3770;
  
  
• 2X Corsair 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3 DIMM’s;
  
  
• Samsung EVO 850 500GB;
  
  
• 2x Intel Gigabit CT NIC’s;
  
  
• Windows 7 Pro 64 SP1.

The onboard Realtek of the second system is not connected.


All five NIC’s have there own IP.


The 70GBytes of data that I was copying between the computers comprised:

• Large archive files;
  
  
• Picures;
  
  
• Movies;
  
  
• Music;
  
  
• Office files;
  
  
• Etc.

The speed never reached 100Mbytes/s. The fastest speed was 99,6 Mbytes/s.


I tried copying the files between all IP’s combinations, but that doesn’t seem to matter.


So if you have any idea what to do about this, I’d love to know.

Those speeds are exactly what I would expect. Actually they are much better considering you did a real world test and not a synthetic test. You maxed out your gigabit network.

 

[Mike77]

Those speeds are exactly what I would expect. Actually they are much better considering you did a real world test and not a synthetic test. You maxed out your gigabit network.

Thanks! I was afraid of that. I actually was hoping that it would reach 120MByte/s. Sadly the realworld won't let me.

Does the server have anything to do with the time it takes to open a directory and load the files/thumbnails? Is there a way to speed that up? I'm talking about a photo directory, with thousands of pictures that need to be loaded everytime the directory is opened in Windows. This takes a lot of time.

 

[pirateghost]

First things first, you only need one nic. Assigning multiple NICs addresses in the same subnet does you absolutely no good.



Edit: I should probably clarify. One LAN nic and one ipmi nic is perfectly acceptable since, for all intents and purposes, they are different 'systems' when it comes to the network.

 

[Mike77]

First things first, you only need one nic. Assigning multiple NICs addresses in the same subnet does you absolutely no good.



Edit: I should probably clarify. One LAN nic and one ipmi nic is perfectly acceptable since, for all intents and purposes, they are different 'systems' when it comes to the network.

Thanks. I understand that at the moment the network isn't going to be faster then 1 Gigabit, seeing that I don't have the 10Gig and/or fiber hardware. All the NIC's are connected because there is more then one computer on the network and I was also testing if there was a difference between the different NIC's. Maybe a bottelneck or a bad NIC.

Besides that I'm always looking for a way to aggregate the connections so that the speeds add up.Let's call it Super Samba ;-) Saldy this doens't see to be an option at the moment, meaning that I can only get Load Balance, LACP or something like that.

But there might be a way to speedup opening the file's and directories onon the Windows Machines.

Furthermore I'm also loooking for a way to make the program's run on the server and just stream the data to the connected machines. This because I do a lot of data analysis and don't want to slow everything down as a result of the network. The goal is to have the database and the analysis program on the server and just send the query's to the server from an outside station, without running anything on the outside station.

 

[SweetAndLow]

There are a couple threads around here that discuss smb improvements. I read all of them and made these modifications to my cifs service, add them to the Auxiliary parameters field. You can also disable hostname lookup.

Code:

ea support = no
store dos attributes = no
map archive = no
map hidden = no
map readonly = no
map system = no