Mezzanine and Backplane Connectors

[Czero]

Hello,

just a little feedback, if anyone is following.
I tried a 750W HP server PSU, the one you start by shorting pad on the connector (HSTNS-PL18), with jumper 1 and 3 on, and I got a fixed amber led on the front panel!
VGA is also showing something, the pre-boot health summary.
Logs event are not so great, see the photo.
When I push the front switch, it flash green, then it's christmas light with a lot of red...
I tried reset nvram with no luck.

Any ideas?

Best regards,
rémi

 

[Czero]

Hello again!
Blades are up and running.
As I explained in my previous post, using the HP PSU helped me getting something.
What I did not said was that I had a fluke multimeter in Amp mode to check if the blade was draining more or less power.
I then tried plugging the PSU directly to the blade, and tadaa. Fix green led and bios starting, etc.

I know about burden voltage but I don't think the drop is enough to prevent the blade from starting...
Anyway, I used switch 1 and 3 like other gen.

I just need now to mods the case for fan cooling. Update all bios, etc.
I really want to make the mode for accessing pcie, so i'll keep you in touch.

Best regards,

 

[HaSQUE]

Hello everybody. I'm a "happy" owner of a full chassis with some add-on cards such as "HP VC Flex-10 Enet Module", "HP VC FlexFabric 10Gb/24-Port Module" and "HP VC8GB 20-Port FC Module" plus 8 nodes: gen. 6 and 7.

If anyone wants to investigate further, I'll be happy to help you. Just in case, I do not need these server parts, so I can do anything with them (for example, disassemble, solder, etc.)
If I can help someone just give me a call.

For me - main goal to achive working couple of nods, without chassis with proparly working network.

 

[Chris0709]

Hello everybody. I'm a "happy" owner of a full chassis with some add-on cards such as "HP VC Flex-10 Enet Module", "HP VC FlexFabric 10Gb/24-Port Module" and "HP VC8GB 20-Port FC Module" plus 8 nodes: gen. 6 and 7.

If anyone wants to investigate further, I'll be happy to help you. Just in case, I do not need these server parts, so I can do anything with them (for example, disassemble, solder, etc.)
If I can help someone just give me a call.

For me - main goal to achive working couple of nods, without chassis with proparly working network.

What would Interrest me is the connection between the 10g ports on the Back of the Chassis and their pins on the mezzanine Card. Maybe you could start to measure the Connector for the Flexfabric Module, so that we can figure out the route of the Network connections.

 

[Svanto24]

What would Interrest me is the connection between the 10g ports on the Back of the Chassis and their pins on the mezzanine Card. Maybe you could start to measure the Connector for the Flexfabric Module, so that we can figure out the route of the Network connections.

I'm with you there. I recently bought a BL465c G8 and a pair of Opteron 6380, with the intention of training AI models on it. I can run it independently with the ILO4 turned off and using the internal usb 2.0 for a 100mbit connection, but that's not exactly ideal.

Despite the seller I got it from stealing my CPU coolers, they *did* add a 10gb 554flb nic (P/N: 647584-001). Which is a 10gb multimode nic that can be found quite cheap on ebay, and I kinda feel like it would be a wasted opportunity not to try to leverage it somehow.

I tried to identify some of the components on the motherboard and the card.

The NIC's central ASIC is an Emulex BladeEngine 3 (SE-BE4310-P01 https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12356141 ), and I know it's a dual port card. Unfortunately, this still kinda helps me none in decoding the interface, as it supports 10GBASE-KR, 10GBASE-KX4 and XAUI according to its datasheet, and I have no idea what this particular card is using to communicate, and if it's going through another SerDes chip.

I didn't look under the heatsinks on the motherboard itself, as that would require for me to remove the motherboard from the case, which I'm a bit shy to do seeing as there's some sort of an insulating foil on the bottom that I do not want to tear.

Other than that, the most interesting thing I've seen was a LATTICE FPGA (LCMXO2280C-3FTN324C). I know absolutely nothing about FPGAs, but I presume it's gonna make things more difficult. I assume it's gonna pull its configs from one of the SRAM modules.

That's all I got. Which is, close to nothing.

 

[Svanto24]

I lied to myself, of course. Why wouldn't I screw with expensive hardware?

Naturally, under the heatsinks are just northbridge and southbridge of the AMD chipset. Really should have figured that out.
Tried to peek under the sheet but really, there seems to be no critical logic there from feeling around it. The PCB on the other hand is something like, at least 16 layers. Very impressive.


My hypothesis would be that the FPGA is crucial to transforming the signal from the onboard NIC, as I cannot see any PHYs on the NIC. Very intriguing from a technical standpoint, but using FPGAs as NICs is *waaaaay* out of my ballpark. Since I have no real interest in the Onboard Administrator module or the blade switches, this is where I get off the backplane train and start looking into the pci pinouts to hopefully make an adapter for regular pci cards.. If I understand it correctly, this means I can't run the iLO4, right? At least not without finding a way to flash it with openBMC somehow and even then, there's still the mystery of the FPGA.

For now, I'll try to find the pinout of the PCI slots. Anybody knows if the BL465c G8 supports bifurcation?

 

[RadekSu]

HI guys,

first of all a huge thanks for all your amazing job figuring it all out. This is extremely helpful.
Now maybe you could help me a bit more with my HP ProLiant BL460c G8.

I have an issue with this:

You could made it simpler by connecting directly to back connector.
I made found with multimeter that iLO network is directly wired to connector. Here is the pins:

A 10 - iLO Rx-
B 10 - iLO Rx+

A 9 - iLO Tx-
B 9 - iLO Tx+

Now before I found this post I measured the outputs on this backbone plug and also was under the impression that exactly those pins are used for the ethernet connection/iLO.
Just to be clear; I am not an electronic engineer and I used a very cheap logic analyser. I have some basic knowledge in that matter from my computer scientist study.

So basically the problem is that when I connect those four conduits to my router simply nothing will happen. Lights on my router won't come up, the BIOS reports no IP address. And router log file doesn't logs anything happening

It is kinda important for me because if I understand correctly this is the only way to install operating system on that machine.

Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.