Used Supermicro 4U server or homebuilt?

[Death Dream]

Almost two day test for the initial 64GB that shipped with the box. Just installed the other 64GB and testing that now.

I still do not have the harddrives or the SAS Controller. Controller should be here tomorrow. Harddrives are not even ordered yet. I could transplant some of my 3TB Red drives into it but probably will not.

 

[Death Dream]

This is the card I suggest as a replacement:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-H220-6G...9205-8i-P20-IT-Mode-From-US-Ship/192639052923
It has a different controller chip and firmware but it should be a easy swap out for the hardware RAID card.

Is this controller able to handle 10TB drives?

 

[Chris Moore]

Is this controller able to handle 10TB drives?

Sure. No problem. I have a server at work with one of those controllers running 124 x 10TB drives by way of six expander backplanes.

 

[Death Dream]

Bought 10, 10TB EasyStore external hard drives and shucked them. I got five of them today and installed. I'll get the other five on Monday. Then I get four SSDs on Friday for the OS and Jails.

 

[Death Dream]

This is the card I suggest as a replacement:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-H220-6G...9205-8i-P20-IT-Mode-From-US-Ship/192639052923
It has a different controller chip and firmware but it should be a easy swap out for the hardware RAID card.

Chris, was I wrong to assume P20 meant firmware version 20? Kinda liked the idea of not having to deal with flashing this thing but it came with FW version 15.10.01.00 instead.

 

[Chris Moore]

Chris, was I wrong to assume P20 meant firmware version 20? Kinda liked the idea of not having to deal with flashing this thing but it came with FW version 15.10.01.00 instead.

It may be a problem with the vendor. If you didn't get a card that was already updated to the correct firmware version, you can update it yourself, or send it back for a refund. I don't have any control over what a vendor on eBay actually ships vs what they advertise. I have been burned a few times myself. Just today I got a box of ten hard drives that were supposed to be Seagate but turned out to be HGST, so I filed a claim and turned them around to go back where they came from.
The firmware needs to be IT mode Firmware version: 20.00.07.00 ... The sub version 07 is important because there were some problems with previous versions when working with ZFS.

 

[Chris Moore]

This is the page to download from:

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9207-8i#downloads

This is the download I would get:

 

[Chris Moore]

From the command line of a running FreeNAS system, you can type sas2flash -list and it will show you a page with this text (or similar):

Code:

root@Emily-NAS:/tmp # sas2flash -list
LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01)
Copyright (c) 2008-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved

        Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2308_2(D1)

        Controller Number              : 0
        Controller                     : SAS2308_2(D1)
        PCI Address                    : 00:03:00:00
        SAS Address                    : 500605b-0-09ef-7220
        NVDATA Version (Default)       : 14.01.00.06
        NVDATA Version (Persistent)    : 14.01.00.06
        Firmware Product ID            : 0x2214 (IT)
        Firmware Version               : 20.00.07.00
        NVDATA Vendor                  : LSI
        NVDATA Product ID              : SAS9207-8i
        BIOS Version                   : N/A
        UEFI BSD Version               : N/A
        FCODE Version                  : N/A
        Board Name                     : SAS9207-8i
        Board Assembly                 : H3-25412-00J
        Board Tracer Number            : SV45308383

        Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
        Exiting SAS2Flash.
root@Emily-NAS:/tmp #

The important bit being this:

That says it is IT firmware and the correct version.

 

[Bozon]

Actually, Unix was designed to run printing technology for the marketing department. Or that is how the Bell Lab designers got their funding to develop the first version of Unix. That is why NROFF was written for the first unix version.

From an article:

"So Thompson and Ritchie got creative. They formulated a proposal to their bosses to buy one of DEC’s newer minicomputers, a PDP-11, but couched the request in especially palatable terms. They said they were aiming to create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today. The fact that they would also have to write an operating system for the new machine to support the editor and text formatter was almost a footnote."

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/the-strange-birth-and-long-life-of-unix

I was looking for the original bell lab articles on Unix, which also stated the same version of events, but I couldn't find them today.

 

[Chris Moore]

Actually, Unix was designed to run printing technology for the marketing department.

What is this related to?

 

[Bozon]

What is this related to?

Oops, sorry, it would have made more sense if I had included the original quote.

...I understand that Unix was built to run telephone switches, not for general computing, ...

 

[Chris Moore]

I understand that Unix was built to run telephone switches, not for general computing, but I'd have thought that over the years it would have become at least a little more intuitive...

From what I have read, about the early origins of Unix, before it was even officially named Unix, the very first use was probably to play a game named Space Travel and the guys that were working on it were probably doing it in their "spare" time because Bell Labs wasn't initially funding the project. It was developed on a "little used" PDP-7 system that belonged to Bell Labs and the developers worked for Bell Labs, so it became a "work product" and Bell Labs ended up owning it, but these guys were goofing off with something they thought was fun. They had been working on it for more than a year when they got official funding an were provided with a better system, a PDP-11/20, and tasked to develop a text editor for doing typesetting. So, the first thing actually developed for "work" was a word processor. That was between 1969-'71, and the OS was not ported to anything other than DEC computers until around 1977 when it was ported to an Interdata 8/32.

It was a real shame when that anti-trust decision in 1983 allowed AT&T to make it a commercial product because that almost killed it.

 

[Bozon]

From what I have read, about the early origins of Unix, before it was even officially named Unix, the very first use was probably to play a game named Space Travel and the guys that were working on it were probably doing it in their "spare" time because Bell Labs wasn't initially funding the project. It was developed on a "little used" PDP-7 system that belonged to Bell Labs and the developers worked for Bell Labs, so it became a "work product" and Bell Labs ended up owning it, but these guys were goofing off with something they thought was fun. They had been working on it for more than a year when they got official funding an were provided with a better system, a PDP-11/20, and tasked to develop a text editor for doing typesetting. So, the first thing actually developed for "work" was a word processor. That was between 1969-'71, and the OS was not ported to anything other than DEC computers until around 1977 when it was ported to an Interdata 8/32.

It was a real shame when that anti-trust decision in 1983 allowed AT&T to make it a commercial product because that almost killed it.

Yes, that is essentially what the Bell Lab Journal articles talk about. The early system predated Unix and didn't have much in common with it. It is only when they promised to develop a word processor, so that they could get funding for a better machine, that the development took off. So it was probably the best trojan horse project ever. Sure we will develop a word processor and by the way we developed a computer language, compiler, and operating system also. Because the only real deliverable was the word processor ( nroff ), they really didn't have to deal with operating system bloat.
The biggest issue with most of the other operating systems of the day was complexity. The Unix developers did away with this by defining almost nothing as part of the operating system. All the utilities were stand alone applications that were built on top of the operating system. You want to interface with the operating system, then you'll need to run the shell program, sh. You wan't to copy files, you will need to run the program cp.

This is still true today, nothing makes the GNU people madder than talking about Linux and all of the GNU tools as Linux. They even put it in their acronym definition. GNU -- GNU's Not Unix. Linus develop an operating system, but most of the things we use on it were developed by the GNU people.

Of course, FreeNAS is developed on top of BSD, and that is a different story entirely.

 

[Death Dream]

This is the page to download from:

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9207-8i#downloads

This is a huge pain in the ass.

DOS version of sas2flsh gives an error. "Failed to initialize PAL". Researching says to use UEFI.
UEFI sas2flsh v20 says "controller is not operational" Researching that says to use P14 Installer. However, there is not an UEFI installer for sas2flsh P14. I found a sas3flsh but I doubt that should be used. (Source: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/flashing-hp-h220-h221-sas-cards.40052/#post-262741)

Saw another person in the same boat as me have success with the Linux version of sas2flsh P14. (Source: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/cross-flash-hp-h220-to-lsi.67775/)
What distro of linux should I use? Tried with Linux Mint but that couldn't use the file type.

 

[Chris Moore]

This is a huge pain in the ass.

I am sorry you are having trouble with this. If you have a system board that is UEFI capable, you often do need to use the UEFI version of the flash utility. I actually keep a really old, pre-UEFI system around just so I don't need to deal with that.

Here is a video that might offer you some answers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f1jhNKw33c

 

[Death Dream]

I am sorry you are having trouble with this. If you have a system board that is UEFI capable, you often do need to use the UEFI version of the flash utility. I actually keep a really old, pre-UEFI system around just so I don't need to deal with that.

Here is a video that might offer you some answers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f1jhNKw33c

Yeah, saw that video. Didn't help because UEFI installer just errors out. Even the SMC2308.NSH installer failed. I actually need a system that isn't UEFI capable so I can use the P14 DOS installer. All my machines are though. I'm going to take it to work tomorrow and see if I can get it going on an old desktop or something. Otherwise I'm going to return it and buy a different card. The amount of time I'm spent on this isn't worth the $42 I spent on the card.

 

[Death Dream]

Finally! I went to work and upgrade on a PC that did not have UEFI. Upgraded with DOS P14 installer with 20 Firmware following the instructions here: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/flashing-hp-h220-h221-sas-cards.40052/#post-262741

 

[Death Dream]

@Chris Moore While googling around looking for a solution, I saw you you actually were able to boot off an SSD on supermicro chassis. I cannot seem to get this to work. Do you have any tips?

Basically the BIOS doesn't see any of my hard drives or SSDs that are attached to the SAS controller. I have a SSD that is attached there that I would like to be the bootable drive. So far I've only had luck booting FreeNAS from an USB Stick. When FreeNAS is going, it sees all the drives as they should be. I do not know how to initialize the SAS Controller for the BIOS to boot from those hard drives though.

 

[Death Dream]

@Chris Moore While googling around looking for a solution, I saw you you actually were able to boot off an SSD on supermicro chassis. I cannot seem to get this to work. Do you have any tips?

Basically the BIOS doesn't see any of my hard drives or SSDs that are attached to the SAS controller. I have a SSD that is attached there that I would like to be the bootable drive. So far I've only had luck booting FreeNAS from an USB Stick. When FreeNAS is going, it sees all the drives as they should be. I do not know how to initialize the SAS Controller for the BIOS to boot from those hard drives though.

More searching just results in saying to use the onboard SATA connectors for bootable devices. Which is the obvious answer.

 

[Chris Moore]

More searching just results in saying to use the onboard SATA connectors for bootable devices. Which is the obvious answer.

You just need one of these internal brackets to put your boot device in. That is what I use. I thought I had already posted that info.
Don't waste a hot swap bay on a boot drive.





This is the bracket you need.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101828