Month: May 2012
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Intel’s Socket 2011 vs. 1155/1156 – A size comparison
For those moving from 1155/1156/1366 you might be a little surprised at just how much bigger the new CPUs are; it’s little wonder that they require a twin-lever clamping system on the motherboard. Customer’s old CPU on the right (Intel i7-870, Socket 1156) and their new CPU on the left (i7-3820, Socket…
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Creating a static IP in OpenIndiana/OpenSolaris
If you’re running an OpenIndiana/OpenSolaris fileserver chances are you’ll need a static IP so that you’ll always know where to find it on the network. There is more than one way of doing this but by far the easiest is using NWAM, or network auto magic. Do the following (the # at the beginning…
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Fixing a ZFS pool which didn’t automatically expand
We had a look at a pool today which had a raidz1 vdev consisting of 2x2TB drives and 1x1TB drive. The 1TB drive failed and was replaced with a 2TB drive; however, on resilver the pool didn’t expand. Exporting and importing didn’t work, so we tried: # zpool online -e [poolname] [disk01] [disk02] [disk03]…
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How to test your system’s stability
If you’re overclocking or just unsure whether your system is performing properly a stability test can be quite helpful to determine just what’s going on. One of the most widely used and effective tests is Prime95; it’s lightweight, does a good job of stressing your CPU and RAM and will happily run for as long…
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Array Best Practices & backing up
Something to think about – we had a couple of models from the same batch die within a day of each other recently, and while that may be coincidence there may also have been something about that batch that made them die under certain usage conditions or at a certain age. Now, if they had…
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Adding another disk to a ZFS mirror
I was asked how to add a disk into a ZFS mirror today; this is an easy one: # zpool attach [poolname] [existing disk] [new disk] …and done! The pool will begin to resilver with the new disk as part of the existing mirror. You might want to do this to replace a…
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Ivy Bridge teaser
We finished our first Ivy Bridge 3770 build today; here’s a few teaser shots before a full write-up: More to come soon!
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BIOS update: Asus P8B WS
For those of you with the Asus P8B WS-based workstations, there is a new BIOS available which enables use of the new Ivy Bridge Xeons (#2009). You can download the BIOS update here.
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BIOS update: Asus P8B WS
Asus have updated the bios of this workstation board to support Ivy Bridge CPUs; please note that you’ll need a Sandy Bridge CPU installed to do this update so please make sure if you are upgrading that you do so before installing a new CPU. You can find the update (#2009) here.
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SAS Cable Length for Norco 4224+M1015
This is a question we get asked reasonably often – what is the right SAS cable length for a Norco 4220/4224 chassis while using IBM M1015 HBAs? 50cm: Doable but puts a great deal of strain on the connectors, particularly on the card end. 60cm: Enough with some slack and no excessive pressure…