1U Supermicro Server 6x 10GBE RJ45 X10SLH-LN6TF LGA 1150 H3 X10SLH-N6-ST031
- Thread starter Bert
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For some reason, seller didn't ship the item for a few days. And then with all the things going, I realized I won't have time to play with it for fun so I asked the seller to cancel the item. Seller claims BIOS being locked should not be an issue for installing an OS but I didn't want another big paper weight. I may consider buying the motherboard alone.
IMHO, if we can get the BIOS issue fixed, this will be a terrific firewall router with the correct software. Many firewall routers use intel CPU and AFAIK, most routers uses ARM cpus. I worked on software load balancers so intel CPUs can handle this workload without custom ASIC but correct software is the key.
IMHO, if we can get the BIOS issue fixed, this will be a terrific firewall router with the correct software. Many firewall routers use intel CPU and AFAIK, most routers uses ARM cpus. I worked on software load balancers so intel CPUs can handle this workload without custom ASIC but correct software is the key.
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I'm now showing that Seller Notes on the auction says "BIOS updated" and it no longer says it has a password IN THAT SECTION. The main description does still say it, but I don't know if that can be edited after the auction is posted as easily. I remember it saying it had a password in the Seller's notes; does anyone know if UnixSurplus figured out a way around it?
Excellent! I ordered mine earlier this afternoon figuring if nothing else I can use the chassis and was going to try flashing the X10SLH-F BIOS to it. I might still do it, but we'll see, and at least I don't need to.
So do you think that password applies to every motherboard of this type?
And perhaps more importantly, I was thinking of buying this instead of spending money on a 10G switch. Would that be daft of me?
I would be flat-out shocked if it didn't. The X10SL7-F is one of the more popular boards out there for FreeNAS given it includes a SAS2308 controller, and as far as I can tell the primary difference between that board and this one is a whole bunch of 10G ports instead of a SAS2308. You'd still have a pair of PCIe ports as well to work with for an HBA.
Now if the seller would just get around to actually SHIPPING mine, since I bought it last Thursday...
don't know off hand, but it is a 1U server, so it is unlikely to be quiet without some fan mods at a minimum.
The MB appears to have only passive cooling, so it's going to need a decent amount of air flow or some added fans.
It does not appear to be a great deal. Quick search shows the CPU runs about $40+ on ebay and $100+ on the general market I think. RAM was about $60+ on Newegg. YMMV.
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You might be surprised. PWM counter-rotating fans like those used in this chassis idle at moderately reasonable speeds and while it's louder than my desktop at idle, it's not a screamer by any means. The problem comes when it goes under load, in which case yeah, it can get loud. But so can a desktop, too.
I have 1U SuperMicro server like this and they are pleasantly quiet, definitely not a screamer. Of course, not something I will put into my bedroom but they are not much louder than my 3u system.
I bought the motherboard from the other seller who offers unlocked bios. The motherboard came but it is boot looping. I am pretty sure I set up the system correct as I have done hundreds of times before. I have never seen supermicro board boot looping. Has anyone had a similar problem or know solution to my problem?
I got accepted for $140 earlier today,
I would normally pick it up on way home from work but schedules are different these days and I'm not in a hurry. 10G seems like overkill for a network appliance.
You could make it functional in that role fairly easily. It would work.
Performance would be limited by the fact that it would require all packets to be processed by the CPU. In a "real" switch the layer-2 functions happen in a matter of uSeconds and the first bits leave the switch almost immediately after the CRC is checked, so a packet comes in and leaves very quickly and very little inter-packet delay is introduced.
With this simulating a switch the whole packet needs to be received before it is processed by the CPU, the CPU needs to decode it and then send it back out on the other "ports". This creates single packet latency which is AT LEAST the time it takes to read a whole packet and likely adds 10's of ms additional delay. Note that this is not really as bad as it sounds because the NICs in this box do some offloading and some parallel processing gets done - e.g., the NIC is reading and preparing the next packet while the CPU is processing the last one - but the inter-packet delays introduced will dramatically limit throughput.
You will ultimately be limited in total throughput by the CPUs capacity.
In a home environment with very little of your traffic actually requiring 10Gbe performance and almost certainly never more than 2 hosts talking to each other at that rate you may be OK. It will never be really satisfying for benchmarks but it will work decently for "real" home/lab network workloads. It could really work rather well if you also use this device as your VM host for most services or stack disks onto it as a NAS because that will make most of your traffic most of the time actually terminating to this device rather than using it as a "switch".
You'd also learn a LOT doing this. About how switches work, about how to simulate them on a server, the upsides and downsides of doing this, about high speed networking performance, etc. Depending on how much you experiement you could lean a lot about different options for how high speed packet processing is done and the toolsets to implement it (e.g., VPP vs DPDK vs BPF, and combinations of these). Some of those lessons might be time consuming and perhaps even painful...
If it were me and I needed a low-cost entry into 10Gbe networking I'd just buy one of these: MikroTik
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