New member and new to this world! ;)

[Utking]

Hi guys!

I didn't know if i was going to introduce myself, but i'll go anyways Feel free to delete my post if it violates something or anything, lol.

Anyways, i'm a second year student, studying computer engineering in Norway, i took the route of network and security instead of pure programming so i wouldn't have to just sit on my computer all day (Lol it's what i do anyways when i'm at home). We are 17 in our class, the rest of them (90 that is) took programming.

I have a background as an certified telecommunication technician, worked 8 years with fiber that is, doing everything from installing, splicing, pole climbing etc.

I found this forum while reading about the c6100, i've just ordered one from ebay in parts, don't know if it was a good idea or

4 nodes.
8xl5520
192gb ram (4gb sticks)
10 hdd trays
1x Psu

I paid around 700usd for all of this including shipping to Norway. Was this terrible overpriced?

I'm looking forward to a lot of fun and grief with this project, as it's my first with real server HW!

I will retire my old homebuilt server, a crappy gigabyte motherboard, i5 2500. and around 12tb of storage.

What are the first thing i should do when i get this stuff? install Cent OS or?
Any tips would be highly appreciated! Also i have a couple of VM's i'll have to transfer over from virtualbox, but i guess i can export them to VMware or something.

Anyways i'm also looking forward to spend some more time on this forum, and hopefully learn a lot of things! ^^

Thanks guys! Hope it wasn't too long of an introduction

 

[Patrick]

Welcome to the forums! If you have four nodes, try different OSes on each to start out, figure what you like. Then learn to automate deployments of OSes on other nodes.

 

[warlockedyou]

Hi guys!

I didn't know if i was going to introduce myself, but i'll go anyways Feel free to delete my post if it violates something or anything, lol.

Anyways, i'm a second year student, studying computer engineering in Norway, i took the route of network and security instead of pure programming so i wouldn't have to just sit on my computer all day (Lol it's what i do anyways when i'm at home). We are 17 in our class, the rest of them (90 that is) took programming.

I have a background as an certified telecommunication technician, worked 8 years with fiber that is, doing everything from installing, splicing, pole climbing etc.

...

Thanks guys! Hope it wasn't too long of an introduction

Welcome! One thing I would say is have a budget before heading over to the Great Deals thread and to For Sale/ For Trade/ Want to Buy thread. I keep buying stuff I don't need because of this forum

The people here are very helpful and I learned a lot from these threads.

Cheers!

 

[pricklypunter]

Welcome to the mad house

You'll find whole days, wage packets and wives go missing playing with this stuff, for some that's a good enough excuse to buy another server

 

[Utking]

Welcome to the forums! If you have four nodes, try different OSes on each to start out, figure what you like. Then learn to automate deployments of OSes on other nodes.

Thanks Patrick!
I'll might try something like that when my server arrives! I have no idea how to work on this stuff, and i'm pretty excited^^
I was thinking of setting up two nodes as computing, and two nodes with 6 drives each, i guess i could pxe boot the other ones from these two? Correct me if i'm wrong please!

Welcome! One thing I would say is have a budget before heading over to the Great Deals thread and to For Sale/ For Trade/ Want to Buy thread. I keep buying stuff I don't need because of this forum

The people here are very helpful and I learned a lot from these threads.

Cheers!

Thanks! and haha, my student loan is my budget then i guess ^^ I've already checked out those two threads, but thanks for pointing them out anyways!

Welcome to the mad house

You'll find whole days, wage packets and wives go missing playing with this stuff, for some that's a good enough excuse to buy another server

Finally a place i can call home then!

Oh i have a bunch of different disks in my old homeserver and was thinking of using them again, could i set up a software raid?
I was thinking of starwind's virtual san as that one is free as well, would it then work to just have redundancy on some of the disks?

Thanks for the welcomes guys!

 

[pricklypunter]

Probably best going for mirrored/ striped pairs, if you have small groups of similar sized disks

 

[Utking]

Well the problem is that almost none of them are at the same size. I've used Stablebit drivepool to JBOD the disks, and then just had folder replication on for the ones i wanted to have backup of, and of course external backup as well as offsite backup

 

[pricklypunter]

Another possibility, if you are not really worrying about storage capacity at this point but still want some redundancy, would be to pick the largest bunch of disks you have, that are at least the minimum capacity required for your project, and use ZFS to pool them into a raidz1/2. It's wasteful though, in the sense that you'll end up with basically a raid 5/6 comprised of stripes the size of the smallest disk used, but it's doable and you get all the ZFS loveliness thrown in for free. Obviously you still have the penalties that go along with any raid schema, but modern CPU's rip through xor calcs now, so it's still reasonable performance wise

For example, say you had 4 disks, 3 of which were 1TB and one of them was 3TB and you create a raidz1, you end up with a pool of 3TB usable, not counting overhead. So basically 3 striped disks at 1TB plus a parity stripe of 1TB. You lose 2TB, not ideal, but not the end of the world either if all you are doing is storing some data and OS's to play with

 

[MiniKnight]

Welcome to the fray @Utking

You need an avatar image.

 

[Patriot]

Welcome!

 

[Utking]

Welcome to the fray @Utking

You need an avatar image.

How do i change my Avatar btw? do i need some more posts? I'm getting a permission warning when i click on my picture

Welcome!

Thanks!

Been studying a lot, and i haven't gotten my cpu's yet, so i'm itching to fire this c6100 up! I know it's a bit old now, but it should be fun to learn more about this, especially since we're having a course in networking and security next semester at uni

Hmm, about my storage problem i still haven't figured this out yet. I've tried 4 node proxmox with Ceph (Just with VM's), but i couldn't figure out how i could create a storage for file sharing as well. If anyone has any tips it would be highly appreciated!

Anyways i'm looking forward to a lot of fun with this project, as well as being on this forum!

And thanks for the warm welcome guys!

 

[gigatexal]

a bit late to the welcome party but welcome nonetheless!

i came here for the raid reliability calculator, found ZFS, and never left the rabbit hole. The community (the members) is what makes this the coolest place.

 

[Utking]

Hey! And thanks gigatexal!
I've read a lot of forum posts and threads here now, and it's a lot of fun!

My C6100 is up and running, currently in the sofa, believe it or not ^^ But i still haven't managed to find my perfect setup yet, it's so hard! And so much to learn!! i only know how to setup a share in ubuntu server before i got this, and that's about it^^

 

[gigatexal]

In the sofa? Do post some pics. That's one way to tame the sound

 

[Utking]

Yeah so i use some pillows just to muffle the worst sound >_<

 

[nthu9280]

Welcome to the forums. Intersting way to muffle the sound.

Once you have everything running with latest BIOS/FCB FW, you may want to look at L5630 procs should be ~$10 ea or less.

Also a word of caution...try to stay away from the great deals forum. They are addicting. I bought a lot of stuff that I really didn't need.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

[Utking]

Yeah it helps a bit at least I should have gone with the l5630 as the 5520 locks my memory at 1066 MHz, and appearantly 1.5v :S a shame when I have 1.35v ram

How do I update the FCB? The firmware and bmc I've done

 

[nthu9280]

Depends on the Fan Control Board (FCB) you have. If you have PIC18, you can. Mine is PIC16 and I can't. Read up on the Taming the C6100 and the main C6100 threads here.

I stumbled on this link Dell PowerEdge C | Latest Firmware which has different versions of BIOS, BMC FW etc including the newer Poweredge C systems as well.

 

[Utking]

Depends on the Fan Control Board (FCB) you have. If you have PIC18, you can. Mine is PIC16 and I can't. Read up on the Taming the C6100 and the main C6100 threads here.

I stumbled on this link Dell PowerEdge C | Latest Firmware which has different versions of BIOS, BMC FW etc including the newer Poweredge C systems as well.

Well i seems to struggle with the FCB, when i try to run the update from dos, all i get is no pic 18 error. But my FCB has the 7 pin fan connectors, and it also says revision B01 on the board.

However the bios is 1.04 on the PIC.

Do you guys have any ideas? My problem is that when i boot it up first time it ramps up, then lowers back down. But if all the nodes have been powered off, and i power them on, the fans screams and never settles down.
If i then try to update the fcb in dos it gives me the error, but then after some seconds the fans settles to 4000rpm again. weird :S

 

[nthu9280]

I had this in my notes from somewhere.

PIC16 - Dell P/N: 06F98Y
Fan connectors are 5 Pins

PIC18 - Dell P/N: 0JYG7C
Fan connectors are 7 Pins

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk