Supermicro Storage Server

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Mitchell

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After outgrowing the storage space on the Poweredge 2950 I ended up purchasing a Supermicro 24 bay server from eBay.  The server came with 8GB of memory, one AMD Opteron quad core 1.8GHz processor and 24 hot swap bays.  I had previously been looking at the Norco 24 bay cases but this ended up being a lot more economical option because I could get the entire server with everything included for about the same price as just the Norco case.  Once I received the server I started taking inventory of what it all contained, what I still needed and what upgrades to it would be possible in the future.

The motherboard has two processor sockets with two banks of memory, one for each processor.  Only one of the process sockets was populated and there was 4x2GB PC2-5300P DDR2 sticks of memory in the first memory bank.  In total the server has 16 memory slots which will allow a lot of memory to be added in the future.  The motherboard also has a lot of expandability via add on cards.  There are 4 PCI-X slots, 2 PCI-e slots and a special connector for an IPMI card.  The IPMI card (SIM1U+) was included and it has a wire that goes to a network jack attached to one of the PCI slots on the back of the case.  This network jack gives you a dedicated jack for out of band management otherwise you can use the first regular ethernet jack for management if you don’t have the dedicated ethernet port.  Out of the four PCI-X slots, three of them are populated with SAT2-MV8 cards which each have 8 sata ports that connect to the 24 hot swap bays in the front of the case.  These cards are limited to SATA2 but this shouldn’t be an issue unless you are trying to use ssd drives.

The server has two hot swappable power supplies (Ablecom PWS-902-1R) which are quite loud but work well for adding redundancy to the system.  There are also six hot swappable fans besides the PSU fans.  These fans are very load even at idle and replacing these will be a high priority before I start using the server for file storage.

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Outgrown Poweredge 2950 Fileserver

Posted on August 16, 2013 by Mitchell

My home lab has had a Dell Poweredge 2950 for quite a while now and it has been used for storing files and backups but recently it has been nearing capacity both in terms of storage space and performance.  I have been using NFS to store some virtual machines when they are not in use but the 2950 server has been to slow to use with running virtual machines.  This could be caused by a number of things including the low amount of ram (Only 4GB), the speed of the disk or the network connections.  Either way it is time to start looking for an upgrade.  My original plan was to purchase a Norco RPC-4224 case and build my next file server from scratch but when I started pricing out all the parts it was going to be in the $1500 – $2000 range before having any hard drives in it.  This is when I decided to start looking at eBay to see what other options are available.  I was looking for something that had 24 bays so that I would have plenty of room for future expansion, was powerful enough to do encryption and compression on all data and was reasonably power efficient.  I ended up finding a Supermicro 24 bay server that came pre-built which fit all my requirements.  It comes with a single CPU but a second CPU can be added.  It comes with 8GB of ram but also has 12 open slots so a lot more ram can be added.  This unit should arrive in the next week and then I will be testing it out to see if it meets everything that I was expecting.

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pfSense Installation – Watchguard X750e

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Mitchell

 

235747F0-4EB1-4064-875E-F13769D4AB51Previously I had been using a Dell Poweredge R200 to run pfSense for my home network which worked great but it was kind of overkill for what pfSense really needed to run optimally so I ended up selling the R200 and moving pfSense to a virtual machine.  The virtual machine worked ok but it was not great because when the Esxi host would go down or need to be restarted, I would have issues getting all the VMs to come back up because the router was gone so they couldn’t check with pfSense to get an IP address.  In order to get away from running pfSense in a virtual environment, I decided to try installing pfSense on a Watchguard X750e firewall appliance.  I had seen some tutorials on the pfSense documentation site about how to do this and it looked interesting to me because of how many network ports were available on the X750e.

I started by purchasing a Watchguard X750e off of eBay for $100.  There are many different models and versions of Watchguard appliances on eBay.  The X750e is more expensive then some of the others but it is also newer and has all gigabit network ports compared to some of the others which only have 100mb.  After purchasing the firewall appliance I received it a few days later and it was packaged very well.  I was a little nervous about what the condition of it was going to be because the seller had only stated that it powered on and that was all they tested.  This ended up being why I was able to purchase it cheaper then other options and this time it worked out well.  The firewall appliance was in good condition and powered up without any problems.

The first thing I wanted to do is try the firewall appliance with the Watchguard software on it.  This was more for curiosity more then anything.  I plugged it in and connected a Ethernet cable to my laptop and I was able to connect without any issues.  Once in the web interface it asks for a licence key in order to active the appliance.  I did not have a licence key so I couldn’t go any further then this.  The Watchguard software looks like it could be pretty interesting but the purpose of this appliance was to use it for pfSense so I didn’t put any more work into going down the path of the Watchguard software.

The installation of pfSense seemed straight forward based on what I read but it ended up being more difficult then I expected.  Hopefully what I found out will help others that are trying to do this and help them to not run into the same issues as I did.

If you are just looking for the official guide, that can be found in the pfSense Documentation.  This documentation was very helpful for me but I will cover a few things that they seem to have left out.

  1. The first item that I ran into was flashing the bios.  Everything I had read said that you needed a Compact Flash card that was 256MB or under in order to flash the bios.  The reason for this is that with the current bios settings it will only read a card of 256MB or less. (With the model I received it came with a 512MB card so that limit of 256MB may have been for an older version).  I tried booting the 4GB Compact Flash card that had the embedded version of pfSense on it before flashing the bios but it wouldn’t read the card.  Even when I put the flashing software on a 256MB Compact Flash card the firewall appliance would not read it.  All the documentation says that you should hear three beeps and they be able to see text on the console connection but I would never get the three beeps only the first beep after it checks all the memory.The reason for this ended up being that it didn’t want to read the 256MB card.  I ended up find a forum after days of searching that suggested that the smaller the Compact Flash card the better chance it would have of working.  The user on the forums suggested a 32MB Compact Flash card.  So I purchased an old 32MB card off of eBay for a few dollars.  When it arrived I connected it to my Macbook Pro and used dd in the terminal to copy the image over to the card.  I tried inserting it into the Watchguard appliance and it booted up without a problem.  I heard the three beeps and I could then see text on the console connection that I was using.  For anyone running into this same issue try using a 32MB Compact Flash card and it should work without issue.
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