Home Server 2015 Upgrade

[hansolo77]

Nice find Draco. What the world is waiting for is a true 3.5 SSD drive. Take your current 2.5 SSD and stack a few together. I saw rumors (don't remember where) that a 20tb SSD is moments away from being reality once the architecture is figured out on how to layer mutiple SSD's.

[hansolo77]

Anybody around here use BMC/IPMI? I had it working until earlier this week when I installed a new system fan. Now it doesn't work at all. In fact, the component doesn't even seem be detected in the BIOS. It fails it's boot up check tests, and doesn't display any available IP/MAC addresses. What's worse is it now looks like the sensors for the rest of the motherboard (voltages, fan speed, temps, etc) don't work now either. So this may be an early sign of a more serious problem. I've tried contacting the manufacturer's tech support, and got an automated response that the guy is out of the office for a week. Strange that a worldwide company would have a single individual running the entire customer service/tech support department. Anyway, he left a follow up email for another colleague, who obviously has a lot of other people having issues too, and clearly struggles with translations as English isn't his primary language. He gave me a tool to try and reset the BMC to a default state, but it failed. I'm not sure what else to try. Given the time delay between countries, I don't think he'll have a solution for me soon, so I thought I'd ask here and see if maybe somebody might have had dealing with this in the past.

Initially when it worked, I simply open my web browser to an internal IP address the IPMI is running on. It then prompts you to log in, and gives you basic low-level BIOS information, and allows you to essentially remote-desktop into the system using JAVA. Since I installed a new system fan, I wanted to watch the sensor readings to see if it was working sufficiently with cooling. Since then, I wasn't able to even bring up the URL, much less the login prompt. On the BIOS end of things, the BMC was configured to automatically obtain the IP/etc via DHCP, but it had failed. I tried manually specifying an address, but it also fails. It basically looks like the BMC portion of the BIOS was corrupted some how. The tool the tech agent gave me appears to be a generic password resetting tool that puts it back to the default. When it failed, it looks like it was trying to identify the BMC version before even running it's reset protocols. So yeah, it's definitely hosed.

I thought about maybe re-flashing the BIOS, but I'm already running the latest version. The rest of the system is stable as a brick. I don't really want to risk breaking something else by doing that. I'm going to wait and see what the tech agent says to do next. But I was just curious what other's experiences might be.

[nullPointer]

This is a weird question and probably not the case, but I had a somewhat similar experience recently when I dropped the guts for my system into a new case. After doing so I had a couple of system crashes. Coincidentally I also noticed that the power LED was not illuminating (which was kind of a shot in the dark since it was a new case and I wasn't entirely sure if it was supposed to illuminate, but I was pretty sure that it was). At the time I was installing everything I was slightly annoyed that the pin-out wiring for case illumination wasn't labeled for polarity. So I got back into the case, switched the wires for the PWR pins, and low-and-behold, no more system crashes and the power button lit up.

Fan pin-outs are usually keyed in such a way that you can't reverse them, but if not, it might be something to check. It might also be possible to offset a 3 pin fan on a 4 pin header. Like I say, it's probably unlikely, but if installing the fan is when things started to go pear shaped, it might be something to consider. Probably nothing, but who knows.

[hansolo77]

Thanks for the tip. This wasn't my problem though. It was a keyed fan plug, and could only go in one way. It's possible the corruption happened when I was messing with the fans, but who knows. I was able to fix this a few days ago and just forgot to update here. I did some more googling since the tech guy was obviously not at work on the weekend. I found a possible solution where somebody had a similar issue with another brand's motherboard, and took their suggestion of the fix that worked for them. I had to completely remove everything that was connected to the motherboard (power supply, battery, cpu, ram, expansion cards, fans, etc). Basically put it to state as if I just installed it into the case and didn't have anything connected yet. Waited about an hour, then reconnected just the essential bits (1 stick of ram, cpu, power switch, power supply). It booted up with the BMC/IPMI working. So I reconnected the rest, and it's been working ever since. I don't know how long it will last. I'm concerned this might be a sign of a more serious problem since the tech agent helping me sent a CC to the primary support guy and suggested sending me a replacement BMC chipset. The fact alone that they have backups of chips is enough to make me worry.

In any case, it's working now.