Setup and First Tests With both PCIe cards now working, I wanted to do some quick verifications that the 10GbE interface was being used. I hooked up my R730 and Supermicro 2U server to my switch with a DAC cable. I search around the internet and found this brief guide on using iperf. I downloaded iperf3 on both machines with apt install iperf3.
On the R730 running Proxmox, I ran iperf3 -s and on the Supermicro Server I ran iperf3 -P 20 -c <ip_of_proxmox>.
After getting the “easy” BIOS updates and hardware swaps out of the way, I needed to perform the final steps of trying to get both PCIe cards working in my future TrueNAS server. I had an Intel X520-DA2 SFP+ PCIe Card, and some Toshiba NVMe Drives on a AOC-SLG3-2M2 PCIe Card. That would get me 10GbE networking and hopefully a filesystem that could saturate that link. Well that took me several days to get both working.
Today was a slightly boring day prepping the 1U server I was using for sale. I swapped my CPUs over, applied new thermal paste, and then tested the 2U server again.
Hard Drives I started by using dd to wipe each of the disks. It's slow but I trust it. It doesn't have confidential information anyways, no common passwords, etc. I typically run a few passes of this command
sudo dd status=progress if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=64K Having the progress flag is helpful for seeing where you are in the runtime, and increasing the block size from the default values can speed things up quite a bit.
New Method Attempt 3 - Windows Server After failing with FreeDOS, I wanted to get my BIOS update over with as securely and quickly as possible. I decided to do what my intuition told me to do in the first place. I installed Windows Server 2016 on it in a matter of minutes and copied the file over from another machine on my LAN. I tried running the batch scripts annnnnddd they didn't work either.
After some easy wins on Day 1 with things I had already done before, I wanted to move onto updating the BIOS on my new Supermicro Motherboard. My motherboard shipped with an Intel E5-2630 V3 CPU, but I was planning on using my E5-2680 V4 CPU in the system. A BIOS update would likely improve the stability of this change out.
Like the IPMI Firmware, it was ancient. I really want to know if an enterprise was actually running this thing in production like this.
Some loose plans: I heard about the 100 Days of Homelab Challenge from Techno Tim and thought I'd jump on board with documenting what I tend to do anyway. I'll try to keep on top of it every night, but I'm writing this retroactively because I hadn't touched this site in years and had to remember how everything was set up. That's fun.
I have several projects I'm working on that will likely take the entirety of the 100 days without even thinking about it.
This document describes how to create a project in Eclipse that targets the STM Nucleo Boards, specifically the Nucleo-L433RC-P. The documentation for this is all over the place, so I figured I would attempt to help where possible. I'll walk through installing everything, modifying templates, and everything up to compiling the source and debugging on the chip.
Installing Everything In this section, we are going to install a ton of software that will get us able to compile things.
A fellow student at my University asked me the other day if I could design a circuit board for a workshop teaching how to solder. I immediately accepted because I've been wanting more experience with designing boards for the CNC machine at our school. Deciding what I wanted to make was hard, because it had to meet the obvious criteria of being cheap to produce and having a low part count, but it also had to be fun.
This is actually a write up of some tests I did last month that has yet to turn results, so I'm putting it on the back burner.
The Problem There are two common problems with CNC Milled PCBs.
Without a silkscreen, solder is attracted nearby areas of copper. This can be harmless, like getting solder on the ground plane all the way to detrimental where shorts form easily. I've experienced both populating these kinds of boards.
Hi all. This is my new website. It probably doesn't look that good, don't really care, I made it in 2 hours from Domain purchase to deploy. What matters here will be content. I've just been wanting a place where I can document all the experiments and things I'm learning.
Here's a few of my goals for 2018 and what may be popping up here in the near future.
Practice PCB layout techniques, both for production boards and CNC Prototyping.