Finally got a motherboard that sees all the memory and all the SATA ports.  The server is operational though I still have to do some configuring and stress testing to determine how fast the CPU will operate stable and within thermal limits.  But it is basically operational at this point.  I hope to place it back into service this coming Thursday.

I was asked by Mark Richards to take some photos of the build so I’ve taken some at very stages of cabling.

Initial motherboard install

This was the initial install of the motherboard, before I had the CPU cooler in place or the video card and none of the wiring is connected yet.

Backside of computer. Wiring not organized

This is the backside.  You can see that the wiring is a completely disorganized mess.  This is mainly the result of six previous motherboard replacements, many having the connectors located at different locations and I did not want to tie everything down until I knew it was working.

The backside wiring in progress.

At this point, I’ve started to organize the wiring a bit.  You can see I’ve got the power cables all wire tied together so they’re not spread out all over the place.  Still not routed nice but at least neat bundles now.

The front side with CPU cooler and video card in place. I wanted to add an additional network card but turned out the intel card I bought off of amazon was defective and the dealer had a super short return interval which I felt was kind of slimy but oh well it only cost me $15 so not the end of the world..

Getting neater.  The orientation is a bit weird in this photo as the computer is on it’s side at the moment as this was just the easiest way to work on it doing what I was doing at the moment.

Final wiring of the back before I connected the drives.

This is the final backside wiring before I connected the drives.  The backside cut-through holes were so stuffed, I had to place some of the disk cables through the space between the disk carrier and the case because there just wasn’t room for any more wiring in the pass through.  The main thing that caused that was the excessively huge power supply cables.  Unfortunately, when you have a CPU that draws 540 watts, that’s 108 ampers at 5v, and 16 or 18 gauge just does not cut it at those current levels.

Final backside wiring with the drives connected.

This is the final backside wiring.

The front side with CPU cooler and video card in place.

This is the final topside with CPU cooler and video card in place.  Note that this is a Noctua 15D cooler, the stock 1500 RPM fans have been replaced with 3000 RPM fans and the thermal paste used is Kryonaut Extreme.  The combination allows me to get away with 540 watts of dissipation while keeping the CPU temperature below 86C.  Most water coolers won’t do as well.  This is noisy as all hell but given the co-lo facility sounds like a 747 taking off and the fans only spin up to full noisy speed when the CPU is fully occupied which really only happens using a small FFT stress test program.  Even compiling only results in about half the heat with all threads occupied.

So now to do some testing to find out how fast I can run the CPU while keeping it stable and under 86C (this CPU won’t be destroyed by going over that, Intel engineers tell me even 107C won’t destroy it but that it tends to become unstable and make errors above 86C so I set 86C as the throttle temperature on the motherboard to prevent that from happening.  Under real world loads though this is not a real issue.

I wish phone spiders were real for telephone solicitors and scammers.

I wish there were an Internet equivalent, Internet Spiders, for spammers and scammers.

If you live in Washington State, you may want to know about this: 

     Mail is back up and is now on a stable but slower platform.  I will need to reload Linux on the other machine as it has somehow become badly corrupted.  Systemd is not acting properly on the larger machine and is starting servi ces, particularly systemd-networkd which needs NOT to be running as I use network-manager, even though they are masked that breaks the network.  It’s not impossible that it has become infected with some sort of malware, though the last time I had machines with a confirmed virus was three decades ago.  But then there are those among us who consider systemd to be malware…  I have looked and can’t find anything but it is possible to disguise things as system processes, etc.  Given though that this happened right after a drive went south, it is more likely just corruption of something somewhere, maybe multiple somethings but then again our web server was recently the target of a denial of service attack so who knows.  Cleaning it out and starting fresh is the safest bet.

Mail is going to be down for approximately 2 hours to move from the present host that has some software networking instability issues and needs a reload to a stable host. Because this involves copying 400GB of data across a 1Gb/s link, it will take approximately two hours, I expect it to be back up around 23:00 March 15th.

Inuvik, the server that runs all the social media and also runs manjaro and alma shell servers is still out of service.  I can’t get an Asus X299 board that doesn’t have dead memory channels, they are all just shit, and I got a Gigabyte board that did work but one of the SATA controllers went south so four ports don’t work and the remaining four take errors.  Also the video card slot is intermittent.  I suspect the bad SATA controller chip is putting noise on the bus screwing everything else up.  I’ve ordered another one of these boards, be another week or so for it to get here.  Not sure why the SATA port crapped out, that is just weird.

     The DCI-P3 standard is INADEQUATE.  To my eyes at least, 620nm light does NOT appear RED, it appears watermelon orangish, NOT a pleasing color to represent say a red rose.  I don’t understand why it is so difficult to make pixel filters, or quantum dots in the case of Qled technology that make 670nm light so the full spectrum can be more accurately represented? Well Ok, I do understand the issue of filters when white leds are used as a light source since most white leds use shitty phosphors with essentially no real red content, but Qled quantum dots should be able to produce ANY color desired.  I do realize the eyes are less sensitive thus requiring more power to produce a bright real red, but all for spending the power to get an accurate color display.

     The machine which provides the mail spool, ubuntu, and some other systems is having issues rebuilding a RAID array after a disk replacement marking the RAID dirty and preventing it’s re-assembly.

    The machine is back up and operational at the time of it’s posting but I do not know yet if it will be stable.

     As some of you may be aware, I’ve been building kernels for Eskimo’s servers and for my own workstation tickless for some time and making them available to the general public.  Until now I have not made realtime kernels available because building realtime used to conflict with virtual machines, virtual GPUs, and some other generally useful features.

     When the realtime kernel was first integrated into the mainline kernel, UHD630 Intel graphics did not work and since that is what I have on my workstation I did not pursue it.  However, it is now working as are virtual machines under a realtime kernel. I have not yet tested virtual gpu passthru so I do not know if it is working at present but it is such a rare use case I felt it worth while to make this available regardless.

     You can download these kernels from https://www.eskimo.com/kernel/, or by ftp at ftp://ftp.eskimo.com://pub/kernel/, chose the appropriate version (usually only the most current) and the flavor client, server, or realtime.  Then if you have a debian based system, download the *.deb files and install with dpkg -i *.deb, or if you have Redhat based system, download the *.rpm files and install with rpm -i *.rpm.  Note you may have to remove conflicting packages like the previous header package.  To do so without having to remove half your operating system, specify the –nodeps option to rpm -e, for example rpm -e package, you may have to do this also for previous develop packages.

     These kernels are provided without warrantee, however, I would like to hear of something does not work.  If you encounter problems, please e-mail support@eskimo.com.

     The server Inuvik that provides all of these services has been down for a while.  I apologize this but I spent some time in the hospital with a serious infection and another month on home IV and working on computers will tethered to an IV wasn’t very tenable.

      I had ordered a new CPU but that CPU turned out to be defective, would not even post, and then yet another Motherboard also died.  I received a new motherboard, but it has a dead memory channel so it’s going back.  I have yet another I am trying to install now.  Yet another new CPU should arrive between this Wednesday and next Monday so hopefully I can get this b east back online soon.