Inventec C202 Motherboards - 10Gbe and 4x SAS ports ~$20

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OrdinanceB

New Member
Apr 3, 2018
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@epicurean Yep, just on a dos boot disk. This board's CSM implementation is slightly broken. I had to use UNetBootin and a freedos image since it installs syslinux bootloader. Any Rufus made disk wouldn't work for me. Also has to be on a flash drive smaller than 4gb. I couldn't get the board to boot anything smaller than 4gb in CSM no matter how it was partitioned. UEFI was able to boot on disks over 4Gb. lmk how it goes.
 

epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
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@OrdinanceB . Wow. I was just about to write that the usual dos bootable usb which i use for bios updates does not work in this board at all!
Ok. Will go search for UnetBootin. Thanks!

update : after getting into the bios to boot from my 1GB usb stick, I get a blank screen.
 
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fake-name

Active Member
Feb 28, 2017
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CPU Showed up:

DSC00831_s.jpg

DSC00839_s.jpg

Unfortunately, no real luck with it coming up fully.

Right now, it at least starts booting, but it gets stuck during POST, and a LED on the mobo named "CATERR" (presumably for catastrophic error, apparently it's intel abbreviation) turns on.

All the peripherals do come up. The SAS1 and SAS2 heartbeat LEDs start flashing.

There's 8 LEDs on the mobo that seem to be an output of some sort (they're labeled MSB and LSB on each end). They're lit up 01010101 when it gets stuck, which is 0x55 or 85. However, 0x55 and 0xAA are commonly used as "hello world" values, since it's alternating bits.

I don't get any output from the monitor or a virtual console.

The IPMI doesn't show any errors, but it also doesn't seem to have a POST code viewer or any sort of "there was a hardware issue here" output, other then the system fans (which aren't present).

The only potentially suspicious thing is that the BMC event log is showing:

Code:
2       Pre-init Timestamp         Memory            System Event          State Asserted
2018-08-29 19_48_48-Clipboard.png

I'm not too sure what that means. At this point I suspect I may not have the correct RAM for the system, I'm just using some random Samsung M393B5170FH0 sticks I had lying about from an upgrade. They're 4 GB 10600R sticks.

Unfortunately, I have no non registered-and-ECC DDR ram, really at all, so testing potential fixes is kind of hard.

Ideas?

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I'm going to see if I can borrow an EEPROM programmer with a SMT ZIF adapter from work this weekend, so I can dump the BIOS and see if it has anything illuminating.
 
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fake-name

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Feb 28, 2017
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E3-1231 v3 is Haswell Refresh, perhaps its bios is too old to support it? it may boot with an og haswell chip like the e3-1230 v3
Aaaaaghhhhhh

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This motherboard was supposedly designed in 2015, so I assumed the year of overlap would be sufficent.
 

fake-name

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Feb 28, 2017
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Yup that too, iirc sandy and newer E3 will not work with ecc reg but will work with ecc unbuffered (my s1200btl/1240 rig for example. it won't boot with non ecc either
Argh, I'm spending too much money on this already.

I can confirm it doesn't do anything with the non-ECC from my desktop That uses plain old DDR3 (2x CMX8GX3M1A1600C11 and 2x CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10, I tried both types).

The system I have running this specific CPU is using 4x 18KSF1G72AZ-1G6E1, which I'm not *sure* is buffered or not.

Actually, come to think of it, I can probably borrow some DIMMs from that. I'm not running servers directly from the NAS anymore, so it's a bit overprovisioned anyways.
 

fake-name

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Feb 28, 2017
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It LIIIIVVVEEESSSS.

It does indeed require UDIMMs. Fortunately, as I have a system that uses exactly this CPU already, I just stole some ram from it.

Bios 1.png

The 10Gbe appears to be a Intel 82559EN. The two SAS controllers are LSI 2008. The PCH is indeed a C222.

Some interesting stuff:

Bios 2.png

The INTEL SSD is the ssd I've attached to it, and the flask disk is the thumbdrive I'm using to set things up. The XE slot appears to be the NIC PXE (its listed under "Network Device BBS Priorities", in any event).

I'm installing an OS now, we'll have to see if there's anything interesting once it's booting properly.

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`lspci` output:

Bios 3.png
 
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Rain

Active Member
May 13, 2013
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So the GbE interface isn't shared with the host.
Given it's labeled "Management In" on the board, I'm not surprised.

I don't yet have any 10Gbe network hardware, so would a SFP->1000Base T SFP Copper adapter work?
My first though was to ask if you had a switch with SFP (non-plus, just gigabit) ports and recommend a cheap passive SFP+ cable but then I came across this:

Can I use a direct attach cable to connect to a gigabit switch that accepts SFP pluggable modules?
No. The Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X520 Series only supports 10 Gbps speed when you use direct attach cables.
(From this page: SFP+ Modules, SFP Modules, and Cables Compatible with Intel® Ethernet...)

The Intel 82599 is used on the Intel X520 add-in card. A search for "Intel X520 sfp base-t adapter" resulted in this similar product on Amazon (link) with an encouraging review: Reasonable quality, good price, works with ixgbe driver (link). Based on this, I'd imagine the 10Gtek adapter you linked would work as well, but there's no really no way to know that either of them will work on this strange board short of trying it.
 
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fake-name

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Feb 28, 2017
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Should I just post here, or make a build-log thingie?

My current backup is a older atom D525 system, and rsync completely murders it for doing backups.
 

fake-name

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Feb 28, 2017
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No, but I still intend to use the thing, I've just been really distracted by other projects.

Also, I need to buy some DDR3 ECC UDIMMs, and ram prices ATM are freaking stupid.