SuperMicro sc847 chassis, 7 fans, all at 2900 RPM!

[philhu]

I got my NAS/SSD setup working perfectly, except, since it is a 4u server, it sound like a plane taking off!

It has 22 disks in it so far, copying files up to it as fast as I can, so I can sell the QNAP and Synology units I have

I need to find a way to set the fans slower. From what I can tell, the CPU units do not have fans, just heat sinks, but the whole array of 7 fans are currently plugged into a backplane with 7-4 pin connectors and then plugged into 4-pin CPU 1 FAN, labeled FAN8, which is where CPU fan is supposed to go, and then the system is configured to monitor CPU1 FAN to verify system health.

Nothing I do lowers the fans speed. I go into health and lower to 'ES-Energy saving or BL - Balanced'. The both are supposed to lower to either 30% of max speed

The system stays at room temp. I even pulled 2 fans and rpm of all others stay the same, temp stays the same. So I might pull 2 more, making 7 into 3. Problem is even 3 at 2900 will be loud. Much rather have 5 at 1600 or lower

 

[depasseg]

This has been mentioned a couple times recently. The backplane fan connectors run at full speed (and aren't affected by any of the BIOS settings). Move the fan connections to the motherboard. Do not pull out fans, unless you want to fry some drives.

 

[philhu]

When you say fry drives, you mean due to temps, not voltage right?

Taking out fans will not cause voltage abnormalities, just temps, right?

Ok, the fans plug into the backplane chassis, so I would need to get some 4-pin fan extenders to make that work, thats ok, just checking if I got the problem understood!

 

[depasseg]

Correct, I meant temps, not voltage.

 

[philhu]

It IS a bit funny though.

On bootup, the fans go to full power, during post, they drop to about 85% and then on hand-off to the OS, FreeNAS, they go to 100% again and then Freenas boots

So, they have some way to control them, probably not published or available.

I think I will get 3 splitters and run the fans as pairs for the 3 that work together, and the 7th separate to fan 3-4-5-6. Fan1-2 are cpu fans and do not want false cpu temps to force fans all over the place. That all sound good?

 

[danb35]

This doesn't sound right. I have an 847 chassis, and my fans throttle down. It's still noisy, of course, but they respond to the IPMI settings (I've just used the IPMI web GUI, not any of the command-line tools, or any of the scripts here). I don't have pictures handy of the interior of the system right now, unfortunately.

 

[philhu]

I did read about ipmi. My board does have an ipmi card v1.66 with two nics on it. But cannot seem to find good instructions to set it up

I did see a gui can be installed, but cannot find those either. Saw ways to set fan limits, not ipmi fan speeds

Would love to get ipmi setup and fix this problem

 

[philhu]

Does anyone know about ipmi on sm boards? I do seem to have an ipmi in the siocard slot, it has 2 nics on the back, with a blinking light, bios says ipmi 1.66

Freenas has an ipmi option. Does anyone have or point me to a howto to get ipmi working on a SM motherboard? From both FreeNAS as well as tohe tools etc, so I can use IPMI to lower my fan volume

Thanks in advance!

 

[jgreco]

So you must have some really old board, huh.

 

[philhu]

jgreco, Not really old. And FreeNAS sees it as a v2 board, which is good. The motherboard is 2012-3

More on IPMI...
The card has 2 NICS, one is supposed to be the 3rd lan nic, and one is for ipmi
Booting FreeNAS, it shows me the IPMI tab and the startup shows this:

Code:

ipmi0: <IPMI System Interface> on isa0
ipmi0: KCS mode found at io 0xca2 alignment 0x1 on isa
ipmi0: IPMI device rev. 1, firmware rev. 1.66, version 2.0
ipmi0: Number of channels 8
ipmi0: Attached watchdog

But nothing, I tried one port, no link, makes sense as FreeNAS would not have the '3rd lan' driver on a specialty SM ipmi board
But the other nic, gets a link, and shows traffic.

The sad news is I cannot ping it, or go to its web gui or even try a cli command, all return 'cannot find, etc etc....

So, what am I missing here? I am sure if the network really worked, I would see and be able to control it or see the IPMI web GUI

 

[jgreco]

What's a "v2" board? I'm probably a lot more familiar with the Supermicro motherboard lineup than anyone else here, but I have no idea what

jgreco, Not really old. And FreeNAS sees it as a v2 board, which is good. The motherboard is 2012-3

is describing. There's no socket 2012. A server mainboard from the year 2012-2013 era would have IPMI built-in and an add-on card for IPMI is not available. What you've described sounds like the AOC-SIMLP-3+ but Supermicro was building IPMI into the system board by the X7 era, and my memory is sort of suggesting that maybe the X7 was the last generation where you could add on an IPMI card, something like the X7DC* boards, which are roughly 2007 era. "v2" makes no sense to me.

You could potentially be more helpful here by telling us what you actually have, in detail, because trusting my rusty memory and resources is not a good idea.

In any case, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is just something you're going to have to play with. The BMC on boards of that era are less-well-integrated than the modern IPMI/BMC onboard controller systems, and it may be that there's no way to affect fan speeds through IPMI tweaking. Or it may be that you need a different wiring harness to enable fan control. None of these things are guaranteed to be easy to figure out on a system that's almost a decade old.

 

[philhu]

Recap: The SM Board x8dtn+, dual quad xeon, 48G, sio card Sim-lp3+ (picture enclosed), with 2 nics on it. I read that one was a 3rd LAN Nic, and the other is for the ipmi. Under Freenas, one stays dead, probably no driver for it in FreeNAS, the other gets link and traffic lights.

During post, it says:
Initializing IPMI module, please wat....done

Free nas says in dmesg:

Code:

ipmi0: <IPMI System Interface> on isa0
ipmi0: KCS mode found at io 0xca2 alignment 0x1 on isa
ipmi0: IPMI device rev. 1, firmware rev. 1.66, version 2.0
ipmi0: Number of channels 8
ipmi0: Attached watchdog

The freenas saying firmware: 1.66 version 2.0, make me think it is a ipmi v2 system. From what I read, there are v1.5 and v2 systems for ipmi

A x8dtn+ is not a decade old, it was listed for sale in 2011, and mine was manufactured Jan 27th, 2012. It had firmware upgrades until 2013 R2.1c. They even sent me a v2.2 BETA that was never released.

So what is the SIM-LP3+ board in the sio slot then? And I am assuming the BMC was built on, since it saw it at start of post. The slot is defined on the SM site as 'IPMI 2.0 (SIMLP) slot'. The ipmi configuration is in the bios, so it probably is an onboard IPMI with the slot to allow the IPMI nic card?

Tweaking to make it work is fine, I just cannot get it to list on the address I assigned it both in freenas/system/general/ipmi or on the post screen

 

[jgreco]

Recap: The SM Board x8dtn+, dual quad xeon, 48G, sio card Sim-lp3+ (picture enclosed), with 2 nics on it. I read that one was a 3rd LAN Nix, and the other is for the ipmi. Under Freenas, one stays dead, the other gets link and traffic lights.

The LP3+ does have two ethernets on it. The top one (farther from the mainboard) is the IPMI processor's ethernet interface. The lower one is an additional Intel 82541 for the host platform. Figure out which one has link and traffic.

During post, it says:
Initializing IPMI module, please wat....done

Vaguely promising.

Free nas says in dmesg:

Code:

ipmi0: <IPMI System Interface> on isa0
ipmi0: KCS mode found at io 0xca2 alignment 0x1 on isa
ipmi0: IPMI device rev. 1, firmware rev. 1.66, version 2.0
ipmi0: Number of channels 8
ipmi0: Attached watchdog

The freenas saying firmware: 1.66 version 2.0, make me think it is a ipmi v2 system. From what I read, there are v1.5 and v2 systems for ipmi

A x8dtn+ is not a decade old, it was listed for sale in 2011, and had firmware upgrades until 2013 R2.1c. They even sent me a v2.2 BETA that was never released.

*YOUR* X8DTN+ might have been manufactured or sold at some point after it was designed and released. Yes. However, it's a Nehalem (CPU)/Tylersburg (PCH) platform, from the 2008 era. From my perspective, Intel releases a chipset, then Supermicro designs a board around it, and then Supermicro proceeds to manufacture and sell the board for some number of years. The fact that Supermicro sold the board in 2010, 2011, etc., doesn't mean the board dates from those years. It was designed in 2008. That's the relevant part for the purposes of this discussion.

If you want to look at it a different non-year way, in the time since Nehalem was released, we've seen Westmere, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, and Skylake. So I'm just gonna call your system a great-great-great-great-granddaddy server and feel reasonably justified in doing so. Old isn't *bad*. But it is old.

So what is the SIM-LP3+ board in the sio slot then? And I am assuming the BMC was built on, since it saw it at start of post.

Tweaking to make it work is fine, I just cannot get it to list on the address I assigned it both in freenas/system/general/ipmi or on the post screen

Perhaps it's dead. There should be two LED's on the front edge. The top one is IPMI power. The bottom one should be blinky, as it is a heartbeat indicator.

Now the other thing to note here is that the IPMI ethernet is almost certainly a 10/100 or possibly even just a 10Mbit affair; make sure your switch is set to autonegotiate. You could also try attaching to it directly using a laptop or computer and seeing what speed's negotiated. Honestly I can't remember.

The manual for the thing is linked above but I don't see it as being all that helpful.

 

[philhu]

Thanks for helping....The SIM-lp3+ is not dead. It does have a power light, and does have a blinky light. As you said, one port is dead (the 3rd nic port) and the other does have a link light, and a blinky traffic light.

>So I'm just gonna call your system a great-great-great-great-granddaddy server and feel reasonably justified in doing so. Old isn't *bad*.

Thats fine, still runs rings around a Synology/QNAP NAS, believe me!

I never thought of 10/100 or even 10. I will check the port in my managed HP switch, see what it negotiated or set.

The FreeNAS description in dmesg is where I got board/etc revs:
"IPMI device, rev. 1, firmware rev 1.66, version 2.0"

Bottom line is that if FreeNAS sees it, the lights work, etc, it probably is ok, correct? The speed stuff is why I cannot ping it most likely?

Oh, I can't seem to find your attached manual.

 

[jgreco]

Thanks for helping....The SIM-lp3+ is not dead. It does have a power light, and does have a blinky light. As you said, one port is dead (the 3rd nic port) and the other does have a link light, and a blinky traffic light.

That's generally promising. It means the thing's running.

Thats fine, still runs rings around a Synology/QNAP NAS, believe me!

No doubt. Give them another five or ten years and that might not be the case, but yesterday's heavy iron can still crush today's SoC without even trying.

I never thought of 10/100 or even 10. I will check the port in my managed HP switch, see what it negotiated or set.

The FreeNAS description in dmesg is where I got board/etc revs:
"IPMI device, rev. 1, firmware rev 1.66, version 2.0"

Bottom line is that if FreeNAS sees it, the lights work, etc, it probably is ok, correct? The speed stuff is why I cannot ping it most likely?

Really can't say. It really isn't unheard-of for a network port to go dead or some other stupid problem to crop up, especially on something that's a little older. Your best bet is just to start trying stuff. For debugging network connectivity, see if you can hook up a laptop or PC directly to it. See what link speed is negotiated, and/or try trolling around manually. 10/half should *always* work. Running wireshark on the port while you're doing it might identify if perhaps it has some other static IP address that it's trying to use. I can name twenty things of varying likelihood and it'll still be item number 21 that gets you.

Oh, I can't seem to find your attached manual.

Linked in #11 above.

https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/other/AOC-SIMLP.pdf

 

[Mirfster]

While I don't use SuperMicro, perhaps you can cross-reference BMC/IPMI firmware versions with @danb35 to see if you should try a newer/older version.

Reason I am saying this is because on my Dell C2100/FS12-TY servers the last thing you want to do is update to the *newer* versions of BMC firmware. If one does use the latest (1.79 or 1.8x) then the symptoms are exactly as you mentioned; fans running full speed and sounding like a jet.

However, if you use =< 1.7 things are beautifully quite. It does spin up the fans at first from a cold start; but that is just the initialization/sensing and quiets down.

Not saying that this is your issue, but thinking it may be worth investigating.

 

[jgreco]

While I don't use SuperMicro, perhaps you can cross-reference BMC/IPMI firmware versions with @danb35 to see if you should try a newer/older version.

Reason I am saying this is because on my Dell C2100/FS12-TY servers the last thing you want to do is update to the *newer* versions of BMC firmware. If one does use the latest (1.79 or 1.8x) then the symptoms are exactly as you mentioned; fans running full speed and sounding like a jet.

However, if you use =< 1.7 things are beautifully quite. It does spin up the fans at first from a cold start; but that is just the initialization and sensing and quiets down.

Not saying that this is your issue, but thinking it may be worth investigating.

This is a substantially old platform and the IPMI and BMC are separate things. It's almost as crappy as your beloved Dells.

 

[Mirfster]

It's almost as crappy as your beloved Dells. :p

Lol, true. Just thought I would mention it for "reference". WestMere Here~! ;)

 

[jgreco]

Lol, true. Just thought I would mention it for "reference". WestMere Here~! ;)

Heh, sorry, couldn't resist the cheap shot.

I suppose one of these years I'll have to forgive Dell and give them a second chance.

 

[Mirfster]

One day I will convince you to give one a try. Worst case, it would be a nice quite JBOD. Not a big fan of the other PowerEdge Servers personally, just this particular model happened to hit all the right spots for me.