Wow, what a night.
So I spent most of my evening messing around with my RAM because I was getting a memory failure message on boot.
After a great deal of faffing about, I isolated the stick that was causing the problems. The motherboard reporting on it was very strange because it actually reported a memory failure in a different DIMM than the one with the bad stick in. I found the bad stick by adding one stick at a time in the manufacturer-recommended order until I found the problem stick. Then I tried to boot with that stick and my system freaked with a "Can't access first 64kb of RAM" beep code. Bad stuff! Contacted Ebay seller, he's sending me out another stick of the same model. Yay good sellers.
OK so now I've got 44GB of RAM and finally got my SSD configured correctly (plugged into the SATA controller instead of the SAS controller)...was I going to just let all that RAM sit around and look pretty? It is quite pretty but NO!
I decided I'd take a swing at standing up the rest of the virtual infrastructure I need to run Unidesk. So I quick-and-dirty made a VM called RDS1 that I intend as my connection broker as a generation 2 machine, thinking let's take advantage of all the coolest new crap!
Then I downloaded, unpacked, and ran the Unidesk installer...and it installed. Just like that. Literally all I needed to do to install it was have the Hyper-V role enabled and run the damn installer...there were about 10-12 clicks involved in getting it installed. It was honestly more trouble getting Silverlight installed than it was getting Unidesk installed, haha - Silverlight required that I change my default security settings to allow direct file downloads in IE.
Now I'm preparing a gold image which means letting Server2012R2 update itself...which is a relatively long process. Unfortunately I had to generate another VM to create the gold image with because you have to use a gen1 machine for generating the gold image. Meh - the initial installation takes about 20 minutes, and the updates I know are going to take a long time so no biggie.
Man this was such a great day! wooT!
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Titan boots with full RAM complement!
Well, the other night I populated all my dimms with the 4gb sticks I'd been sitting on and swapped out my procs, so I was really excited about that!
Unfortunately, now when I boot I"m getting an error about a DIMM failure, although the correct amount of RAM is noted. However it doesn't run in triple channel mode - there should only be 4 channels (12 sticks in triple-channel) but it shows 5.
The first time I booted the problem was with RISER DIMM 2. I swapped the sticks in RISER DIMM 2 and RISER DIMM 4, and then the problem showed as being in RISER DIMM 1. So not likely a problem with the actual RAM, but with the riser dimms.
Some googling has shown it's one of two problems at this point:
1. A hardware problem with my motherboard that I'm just going to have to live with, as earlier revisions of the mobo seem to have this problem fairly consistently (need to find out what revision I actually have)
2. A seating problem with the riser board that I can fix with some physical coaxing
I have to delve into this more.
I also think I put too little thermal grease on the riser CPU, so I guess dismantling it makes sense anyway to check distribution there.
In any case, I now have a booting system with my 16x 3.06ghz threads and 48gb RAM! awesome!
Unfortunately, now when I boot I"m getting an error about a DIMM failure, although the correct amount of RAM is noted. However it doesn't run in triple channel mode - there should only be 4 channels (12 sticks in triple-channel) but it shows 5.
The first time I booted the problem was with RISER DIMM 2. I swapped the sticks in RISER DIMM 2 and RISER DIMM 4, and then the problem showed as being in RISER DIMM 1. So not likely a problem with the actual RAM, but with the riser dimms.
Some googling has shown it's one of two problems at this point:
1. A hardware problem with my motherboard that I'm just going to have to live with, as earlier revisions of the mobo seem to have this problem fairly consistently (need to find out what revision I actually have)
2. A seating problem with the riser board that I can fix with some physical coaxing
I have to delve into this more.
I also think I put too little thermal grease on the riser CPU, so I guess dismantling it makes sense anyway to check distribution there.
In any case, I now have a booting system with my 16x 3.06ghz threads and 48gb RAM! awesome!
Friday, August 21, 2015
Monitor problem resolved!
Biggest news from tonight imho is that I finally got my monitor problem figured out. It was a cheap and crappy VGA cable I was using that was causing all the headaches. Plugged in another I had and immediately all the problems - color bleeding, ghosting, improper resolution/refresh - went away immediately, like magic! Man what a relief!
However in the process of changing I bent and half-broke a pin of my crappy cable (which is perfectly sufficient for my aged projector and works perfectly at low resolutions)...haven't tested it to see if the half-remaining pin is going to cut the mustard or if I have to spend another $3 on another cheap, shitty cable.
The other cool and improtant thing I started tonight was the Microsoft Learning Center course. Tonight's course was an hour just introducing and commenting on Server 2012R2 and setting the agenda for a multi-day virtual course.
There were very few surprsies as it's been years since 2012R2 was brand-new, soeverything I was at least familiar with, but the commentary about the improtance of features was pretty eye-opening.
Microsoft's definitely focused on making the value proposition around easy migration between datacetners and clouds, and they want to be able to DRM your use of their tools - even when Azure isn't in the IO pathm, for example, Azure is still responsible for controlling the process itself.
Goodness it's late and I"mt ired. Goodnight!
However in the process of changing I bent and half-broke a pin of my crappy cable (which is perfectly sufficient for my aged projector and works perfectly at low resolutions)...haven't tested it to see if the half-remaining pin is going to cut the mustard or if I have to spend another $3 on another cheap, shitty cable.
The other cool and improtant thing I started tonight was the Microsoft Learning Center course. Tonight's course was an hour just introducing and commenting on Server 2012R2 and setting the agenda for a multi-day virtual course.
There were very few surprsies as it's been years since 2012R2 was brand-new, soeverything I was at least familiar with, but the commentary about the improtance of features was pretty eye-opening.
Microsoft's definitely focused on making the value proposition around easy migration between datacetners and clouds, and they want to be able to DRM your use of their tools - even when Azure isn't in the IO pathm, for example, Azure is still responsible for controlling the process itself.
Goodness it's late and I"mt ired. Goodnight!
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Titan progresses
Well, I am absolutely determined to knock out at a more reasonable hour tonight.
I spent a bunch of extra time at the office today catching up on stuff and working through some thoughts I've had around work's hackathon. So, I didn't have much time to play with Titan today.
However I was able to get the monitor back up and running the way it was - as I suspected, it was just pretty confused and needed to auto-detect settings again on a more normative resolution.
I really need to order a...nope, done now. DVI-HDMI adapter on the way, hopefully that'll let me configure this monitor the way it's meant to be used, so it doesn't look so bad anymore. It's hard to argue with a 28" Viewsonic 1920x1200 monitor for $80...not complaining. Just want it to look half-decent. If I can't improve the picture over what's happening now I'll probably sell the thing and buy a proper monitor, probably a 23" range which is still quite reasonable.
What else did I do...confirmed the video card that came with this system *sucks* for 3d gaming. 3d anything, really. I know I've got the right drivers in but I could barely play Fingerbones from the Steam store without cutting resolution way down to 800x600.
Also confirmed my audio systems work fine with my headphones, although there's a buzzing sound I'm not happy about when I put the audio through my monitor's analog ports. Maybe I'll get an extender with a port on my desk instead. Love my rescued Shure monitors though, they rock.
I'm still having a lot of trouble booting from USB. Even using the internal header, I haven't been able to boot my Linux thumbdrive in this system, although it boots fine with other systems. Gotta dig into that tomorrow.
I really am keen on installing Hyper-V so I think I'm also going to invest some time really trying to find a course on that.
And my standing desk needs some serious work - keyboard and mouse are *much* too low, making for exceedinly uncomfotable typing/mousing after just a few minutes.
One thing that's really striking about this box is how quiet it is. A coworker suggested I be preapred for a very loud system because of Dell's use of delta fans. However it's extremely quiet. I know there are fans running but they are utterly unobtrusive, even with the system jammed in a misteable little unventilated corner like it is. This sucker is quiet. Stealth Titan. Not quite, but it's still a very pleasant surprise.
OK! Ramble over.
I spent a bunch of extra time at the office today catching up on stuff and working through some thoughts I've had around work's hackathon. So, I didn't have much time to play with Titan today.
However I was able to get the monitor back up and running the way it was - as I suspected, it was just pretty confused and needed to auto-detect settings again on a more normative resolution.
I really need to order a...nope, done now. DVI-HDMI adapter on the way, hopefully that'll let me configure this monitor the way it's meant to be used, so it doesn't look so bad anymore. It's hard to argue with a 28" Viewsonic 1920x1200 monitor for $80...not complaining. Just want it to look half-decent. If I can't improve the picture over what's happening now I'll probably sell the thing and buy a proper monitor, probably a 23" range which is still quite reasonable.
What else did I do...confirmed the video card that came with this system *sucks* for 3d gaming. 3d anything, really. I know I've got the right drivers in but I could barely play Fingerbones from the Steam store without cutting resolution way down to 800x600.
Also confirmed my audio systems work fine with my headphones, although there's a buzzing sound I'm not happy about when I put the audio through my monitor's analog ports. Maybe I'll get an extender with a port on my desk instead. Love my rescued Shure monitors though, they rock.
I'm still having a lot of trouble booting from USB. Even using the internal header, I haven't been able to boot my Linux thumbdrive in this system, although it boots fine with other systems. Gotta dig into that tomorrow.
I really am keen on installing Hyper-V so I think I'm also going to invest some time really trying to find a course on that.
And my standing desk needs some serious work - keyboard and mouse are *much* too low, making for exceedinly uncomfotable typing/mousing after just a few minutes.
One thing that's really striking about this box is how quiet it is. A coworker suggested I be preapred for a very loud system because of Dell's use of delta fans. However it's extremely quiet. I know there are fans running but they are utterly unobtrusive, even with the system jammed in a misteable little unventilated corner like it is. This sucker is quiet. Stealth Titan. Not quite, but it's still a very pleasant surprise.
OK! Ramble over.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Titan has arrived
Not sure I've named my rig Titan yet, as it's the main character in one of my very favorite short stories of all time, called Shared Experience by Keith Laumer in Bolos Book II: Unconquerable. Titan is, as you might imagine, gigantic and loud and powerful.
However as this is my first workstation rig I'll probably use a different name. Possibly the first of Titan's friends in the book. I have to get ahold of a copy of the book to put the character names down. I'll name my network components after them.
So for now I'll call it Titan but only as a placeholder. Titan arrived today at work! And while it certainly is not loud, it is damn heavy...had to bring it down to my car on my wheeled chair.
I had a hell of a time getting it to boot from USB and I'm still struggling with that, actually. I *think* I needed to have a harddrive in, which I didn't at first - so I read a little while I used my wife's borrowed win8 ultrabook to put Ubuntu on one USB drive and Server 2012 R2 on another. I finally got the Server 2012R2 stick to boot from the internal USB port (inside the case) with the SSD attached. Server 2012R2 installed in like 10 minutes, it was pretty amazing.
Getting drivers installed was a little more of a pain than with a desktop OS, but not much really. My main issue is that I tried to get the damn thing to display on my monitor correctly and totally failed. Max resolution it would recognize was 1600x1200 which is technically a supported resolution but it doesn't look good at all. Things are sharp enough to read but there's bad color bleed and ghosting which is really distracting.
So I found a little app that allows you to manipulate EDIDs which I really don't even understand and I tried to force it to it's native resolution - which failed, and might have confused the hell out of the monitor as now it won't even display the lower resolution correctly (it's significantly offset).
I'm looking at two potential explanations, one that my video card doesn't support the resolution I'm looking for, which bears more investigation (diferent sources say diff't things on this card, a shitty Radeon HD 3450), and the other that this monitor may only support it's native 1920x1200 resolution on HDMI. I currently have it plugged in through a cheapo VGA cable. I have an HDMI cable which I might go ahead and buy an adapter for, DVI-HDMI. The cable is much longer so it'll be a lot less awkward to maneuver around the system, which is a total PITA right now because there's about 3 inches of slack in my VGA cable.
So all in all I've got all the drivers from Dell at least downloaded, got my bluetooth working, got my video working OK, updated BIOS (it was 16 releases behind!)...still lots and lots of crap to do before I start messing with plugging in additional ram and optimizing the SSD. And I still haven't been able to boot Linux on this thing yet.
And then it's off to Hyper-V land, I think! I've got about a dozen courses lined up at the Microsoft Academy. As I find really good stuff I might make a sticky blog to keep track of it for interested people.
Once again it's way too damned late for me to be doing this, ha.
However as this is my first workstation rig I'll probably use a different name. Possibly the first of Titan's friends in the book. I have to get ahold of a copy of the book to put the character names down. I'll name my network components after them.
So for now I'll call it Titan but only as a placeholder. Titan arrived today at work! And while it certainly is not loud, it is damn heavy...had to bring it down to my car on my wheeled chair.
I had a hell of a time getting it to boot from USB and I'm still struggling with that, actually. I *think* I needed to have a harddrive in, which I didn't at first - so I read a little while I used my wife's borrowed win8 ultrabook to put Ubuntu on one USB drive and Server 2012 R2 on another. I finally got the Server 2012R2 stick to boot from the internal USB port (inside the case) with the SSD attached. Server 2012R2 installed in like 10 minutes, it was pretty amazing.
Getting drivers installed was a little more of a pain than with a desktop OS, but not much really. My main issue is that I tried to get the damn thing to display on my monitor correctly and totally failed. Max resolution it would recognize was 1600x1200 which is technically a supported resolution but it doesn't look good at all. Things are sharp enough to read but there's bad color bleed and ghosting which is really distracting.
So I found a little app that allows you to manipulate EDIDs which I really don't even understand and I tried to force it to it's native resolution - which failed, and might have confused the hell out of the monitor as now it won't even display the lower resolution correctly (it's significantly offset).
I'm looking at two potential explanations, one that my video card doesn't support the resolution I'm looking for, which bears more investigation (diferent sources say diff't things on this card, a shitty Radeon HD 3450), and the other that this monitor may only support it's native 1920x1200 resolution on HDMI. I currently have it plugged in through a cheapo VGA cable. I have an HDMI cable which I might go ahead and buy an adapter for, DVI-HDMI. The cable is much longer so it'll be a lot less awkward to maneuver around the system, which is a total PITA right now because there's about 3 inches of slack in my VGA cable.
So all in all I've got all the drivers from Dell at least downloaded, got my bluetooth working, got my video working OK, updated BIOS (it was 16 releases behind!)...still lots and lots of crap to do before I start messing with plugging in additional ram and optimizing the SSD. And I still haven't been able to boot Linux on this thing yet.
And then it's off to Hyper-V land, I think! I've got about a dozen courses lined up at the Microsoft Academy. As I find really good stuff I might make a sticky blog to keep track of it for interested people.
Once again it's way too damned late for me to be doing this, ha.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Workstation on it's way - Dell T7500
It's much too late in the evening for me to be beginning a blog post. However...
Lots of cool stuff happening. I ordered my Dell T7500 system last week, along with 48GB DDR3 RAM (which turned out to be high-quality HP pulls made by Nanya, surprised me) and 2x 3.06 GHZ Quad-core Hyperthreaded Xeons, and a 512GB Crucial BX100 SSD.
That's a lot of fast for a kid like me. I've been playing with castaway systems in the corner of my room for a decade or two, playing with standing up little Linux servers for silly stuff like Mumble, basic websites, and the occasional nonprofit project.
It really boggles my mind just what's possible to purchase today with a few hundred dollars. This system can support up to 192GB triple-channel DDR3. It's got an onboard 8-port SAS RAID card. Sure, it's only got SATA 2.0 and PCIe 2.0 and USB 2.0 on board, but it has 7 expansion slots - 2 x16, 2 x8, 2 x4, and 1 x1 slot. That's a lot of expandability, ladies and gentlemen. And even current high-end enthusiast cards are barely pushing into the range where PCIe 3.0 is genuinely required.
Well, I'm seriously killing myself waiting here. I can't wait to get it all together. One pice missing is that I legitimately don't know how I'm going to connect the secondhand 28" 1920x1200 Viewsonic monitor I picke dup for $80. It's got HDMI and VGA inputs and I *think* the system I ordered has an onboard 2d workstation card with 2x DP++ ports, and the seller assured me that "it comes with all the cables you need to connect it to a monitor" - which doesn't mean jack, really. I have a VGA cable and an HDMI cable, and I hope that the adapters are either there in the box or that I can source them locally for cheap, ebcause I will NOT wait for a damned cable to ship to start playing with this rig.
So, what's my plan with the hardware?
I've been cruising on the Dreamspark website from Microsoft looking for training videos to get into Hyper-V virt. More and more companies are at least curious about implementing Hyper-V in a big way in their datacentsr and that's just going to increase later this year as Azure picks up more and more speed. So my basic plan is to get familiar with Windows Server 2012R2 Datacenter edition (I have access through Dreamspark with my alma mater, UCLA) and run some virtual workloads. I'd like to become more familiar with Active Directory and how to set up RDS for external access. I'm also super keen to get a decent last-gen video card with DX11 support (probably the Nvidia GTX 750 Ti) and try my hand at using RemoteFX with virtual desktops, especially in an attempt to make a multi-headed gaming rig that can run emulated console games.
Beyond that I also really want to try out Nutanix Community Edition and also baremetal KVM, which I have played with in the past.
And finally, I also want to configure this thing with a dual or triple-boot into Windows and Linux for gaming, again once I have a half-decent gaming card in it. I'm definitely torn on whether I can/should buy a separate SSD to run baremetal OSes on. I'm also not sure how I'm going to license a local version of Windows - for now I'm assuming I should probably try to turn either 2008R2 or 2012R2 into a workstation OS by applying desktop packages; there are entire communities out there dedicated to making gaming work on these OSes so I know it's possible.
Or maybe I'll just hustle a friend for a Windows 10 Retail SKU. Or maybe even just buy one myself *gasssppp*
Heh. Anyway it's really late here as I need to be up at 2:30am to start my shift in the UK.
Woot!
~Micah
Lots of cool stuff happening. I ordered my Dell T7500 system last week, along with 48GB DDR3 RAM (which turned out to be high-quality HP pulls made by Nanya, surprised me) and 2x 3.06 GHZ Quad-core Hyperthreaded Xeons, and a 512GB Crucial BX100 SSD.
That's a lot of fast for a kid like me. I've been playing with castaway systems in the corner of my room for a decade or two, playing with standing up little Linux servers for silly stuff like Mumble, basic websites, and the occasional nonprofit project.
It really boggles my mind just what's possible to purchase today with a few hundred dollars. This system can support up to 192GB triple-channel DDR3. It's got an onboard 8-port SAS RAID card. Sure, it's only got SATA 2.0 and PCIe 2.0 and USB 2.0 on board, but it has 7 expansion slots - 2 x16, 2 x8, 2 x4, and 1 x1 slot. That's a lot of expandability, ladies and gentlemen. And even current high-end enthusiast cards are barely pushing into the range where PCIe 3.0 is genuinely required.
Well, I'm seriously killing myself waiting here. I can't wait to get it all together. One pice missing is that I legitimately don't know how I'm going to connect the secondhand 28" 1920x1200 Viewsonic monitor I picke dup for $80. It's got HDMI and VGA inputs and I *think* the system I ordered has an onboard 2d workstation card with 2x DP++ ports, and the seller assured me that "it comes with all the cables you need to connect it to a monitor" - which doesn't mean jack, really. I have a VGA cable and an HDMI cable, and I hope that the adapters are either there in the box or that I can source them locally for cheap, ebcause I will NOT wait for a damned cable to ship to start playing with this rig.
So, what's my plan with the hardware?
I've been cruising on the Dreamspark website from Microsoft looking for training videos to get into Hyper-V virt. More and more companies are at least curious about implementing Hyper-V in a big way in their datacentsr and that's just going to increase later this year as Azure picks up more and more speed. So my basic plan is to get familiar with Windows Server 2012R2 Datacenter edition (I have access through Dreamspark with my alma mater, UCLA) and run some virtual workloads. I'd like to become more familiar with Active Directory and how to set up RDS for external access. I'm also super keen to get a decent last-gen video card with DX11 support (probably the Nvidia GTX 750 Ti) and try my hand at using RemoteFX with virtual desktops, especially in an attempt to make a multi-headed gaming rig that can run emulated console games.
Beyond that I also really want to try out Nutanix Community Edition and also baremetal KVM, which I have played with in the past.
And finally, I also want to configure this thing with a dual or triple-boot into Windows and Linux for gaming, again once I have a half-decent gaming card in it. I'm definitely torn on whether I can/should buy a separate SSD to run baremetal OSes on. I'm also not sure how I'm going to license a local version of Windows - for now I'm assuming I should probably try to turn either 2008R2 or 2012R2 into a workstation OS by applying desktop packages; there are entire communities out there dedicated to making gaming work on these OSes so I know it's possible.
Or maybe I'll just hustle a friend for a Windows 10 Retail SKU. Or maybe even just buy one myself *gasssppp*
Heh. Anyway it's really late here as I need to be up at 2:30am to start my shift in the UK.
Woot!
~Micah
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