I love this kind of content. Does anyone else know of other channels that do this as well? I used to watch ru-vid.com a lot but he hasn't uploaded in a while.
If you have questions/comments/suggestions about the VGA problem check the description because I put a bunch of info on the troubleshooting of that in there. The 5.25" trays aren't backwards, based on other feedback I've got, they are designed to block access to the tape drive. You couldn't have and cables connected if you turned it around because the metal tab would be in the way.
Does something from the onboard gpu or vga make a connection via the case. or does the screws that hold the motherboard in the case cause the board to bend slightly
@AkBKukU, I may have figured out your internal video problem. It's possibly caused by a broken or bad connection caused by cracked or broken solder joints. The symptoms in the video you experienced has led me to this. You had explained that you had problems with the serial connector too, and it could be that solder connections are cracked or broken on those as well. I'd say resolder the VGA and serial connectors and retest afterwards with both and see if it helps the board's symptoms any.
@@rawr51919 Maybe, but I'm highly skeptical. SuperMicro boards are high quality. They don't come with brooken/bad solder joints on one port, much less two. To say the least, their build quality is quite the opposite of Apple.
For a GPU, might I suggest going with an RX 580 8GB? Has two more gigabytes of VRAM, you can pick one up for cheaper than a GTX 1060 6GB, and better Linux drivers.
@@Saturnman262 Well, it could be guilt of amd not supporting well some cards, but this amd gpu didn't work in my amd radeom 8850m, nor it did work well in any of the other amd gpus i tried. In the 8850m it didnt even worked at all, it would install propperly, but not even be detected as active by the system or programs wich use the gpu, only the intel one. The other amd gpus i tried it, it worked, but sort of, with visual glitches, a really *hard* tearing in every window or moving pixel basically and some performance issues. The closest i got to make the 8850m work is to see a steam launcher error stopping it from opening saying the gpu dont support glx. But well, i don't own any of these amd cards except for the 8850m, so these other may be really damaged idk.
@@eduardoavila646 what Zeke Sonxx said and also the amdgpu and radeon drivers are written by amd and open source included in the linux kernel for the past several years
Yes! You had me at the intro. People who don't make videos don't understand that we purposely don't bore them to death and cut stuff out if it's not relevant. Now I'm gonna shut up and watch the rest of the video! 🙏
What a glorious bodge job! Looking forward to part three. I know practically nothing about servers, and while they always look utterly frustrating to use/setup, I still love these kind of videos.
I'm now eagerly awaiting the video of you making the 5.25" dock for your portable SSDs. I hope you post the 3D models so I can make one too, since that seems super useful.
No it's not, it's just an anachronistic design. If you flip it over the drive won't align to the front case panel and that plate will block your drive connectors in the back.
You can move your fan tray back towards the drives and move the fans to the motherboard side of the tray. That should solve your space issue on both sides of the fan tray. You can also replace the fans with something thinner. And for god's sake, don't use twist ties to manage your cables near the motherboard. LOL. For your 5.25" drive bay, i believe there's two screws up front that would allow you to remove the tab bracket, leaving the 5.25" tray to easily accommodate your tape drive. They also make a plate to mount your Super Micro power supply to ATX. You could just as easily make one as well with a drill and a jigsaw (a file to get all the sharp edges clean). Personally, I'd just buy a proper EPS power supply for the task. Hope you found this helpful. Love the project, I've done this project myself many times over. Enjoy. :D
Why not use twist ties? Way better than those annoying zip ties wich everytime need to be ripped off or cutted to even ove a cable. Twist ties are reusable, easy to open are as efficient as twist ties to hold things, and you can get them for free in many places incluing breads, new porducts such as chargers, earphones, usb cables, etc. It's the perfect ties!
Ive had success pulling the terminalfrom the plugs on mb status leds etc then just heat shrinking each individual terminal. Its an easy way to get around the weird mb layout
@4:40 and @24:00 - I think that 5.25" mounting bracket is in backwards, the bit looks to it's a backstop for the drive, and I note that the other one does not have the same metal piece. And I think I see it on the other bracket, but at the back. I *think* your CPU fans are blowing the air the wrong way, they are going to fight with the large case fans. With a server the idea is to pull as much air from the front of the case, over the hard drives, through the heat sinks and out the back. So if I am guessing right, it looks like your CPU fans are blowing air against the large fans in the middle and the small ones on the back. Those backplanes have 2 Molex connectors to allow for the increased current through the wires. This type of chassis is designed for high speed (10k RMP) SAS drives, and they can pull a fair bit of power, especially 4 of them starting up at once. I suspect SATA drives won't be an issue, using just one, though I'd monitor the wires for temperature for the first few boot ups.
The lip on the bracket is meant to go in the front. The fake optical drive plate mounts directly onto the front of the brackets. I've heard from some other people that it is probably meant to block access to the interface on LTO drives to prevent accidental(or without authorization) ejection of the tape. I can double check the CPU fans, I have all the labels facing towards the back. So I think they are all blowing the same way. But it won't take much to look. That is what I was thinking on power as well. This is exactly the kind of thing I think it would be useful to have a flir camera for. Then I could easily measure the cable temp. I can just feel it as well, but numbers are always better. I've got a lead on a 1200W PSU and I'll be sure to check everything as I load it up.
@@TechTangents the lip part of the bracket is there to support the CDROM false front. It serves no other purpose, especially not purposely preventing any kind of drive from fitting or blocking buttons. That said, the whole front part of that bracket is removable. It is held on with one screw on each side.
Those CPU fans are aligned correctly. You can see at 11:40 that they're pushing air into the rads, not sucking air through the rads, so they'll be blowing front-to-back as intended. (though it's good to check on those because they're built to be mounted in either direction, and the fans are flippable)
Seeing what you're going through makes me so glad I got lucky with the HP Proliant ML350 Gen 6 I bought almost 2 years ago for $80 + $25 for shipping. I put a little over $200 in parts in it. In the end I have dual 6c/12t Xeon L5640 CPU's, 36GB of RAM (with the ability to easily do up to 144 GB if I wanted to), a 24 port SAS expander w/ battery backup and redundant PSU's. It does everything I need it do and has plenty of room for expansion (I can hook up to 30 HDD/SSD's to it!) But most importantly it just works. I'm excited to see Part 3 to see if you get everything worked out!
You were dead serious (I mean not really) with that SCSI cable and I couldn't help but laugh every time I looked at it. Real ghetto, but if it works, it works.
Had to laugh about the complaint of how noisy it is. I'm here looking at this 4u chassis because of how quiet it is, to replace my 2u sun x4440 that sounds like a 747 taking off. Anyone out there that can recommend a sub $100 cpu+ram+mobo that will fit in an atx server chassis with at least 16 cores? or a way to quiet down a sun x4440 with 4 cpus? not much room in there with the second level.
Regarding that face plate in front of the tape leds and controls: it was probably meant for something very specific. If you have a dremel, you could probably saw/file that lip off, clearing access. It's a pity that there's a whole border around as well... But with the protuding bit "filed" away, perhaps you can remove the front cover and place it on front of the plate, with the drive behind it ? Oh, and hot-glue the loose mainbaord socket that came off back to the mainboard - it's meant to keep the plug better attched.
I know this is old, I got your videos playing, I got a dual Xeon e5-2470 server and Intel S2400SC Motherboard for free, the board would not post with both CPU's, I was looking and looking and playing with it, and I found a resistor that had a cracked solder joint by CPU 2, with my el-cheapo dollar store grade soldering iron, I got it back on there and she boots now. Aside from it not wanting to display anything at all from any dedicated GPU on any of the PCIE slots, it does really well. I got TrueNAS installed on it now, works well even with a few VMs, I just never use it, I main rig is a Threadripper 1950x and I don't really store much that couldn't fit on a couple of 1TB drives, well I did buy a 8TB cold server spare on ebay and I use that just for a games back up drive over the network al thought I dislike windows for sharing crap, it never seems to work well with other computers sometimes. I do wish I could find a better more reasonable use for it, rather it sitting there.
Ah the fun or horror of it all. I have been doing this stuff for over 20 years and use to enjoy going through everything. Now I just sometimes can't seem to stand it. It was one thing before the internet and you built servers from ground up and have a good old Netware 3.12 install. Then sit back and enjoy how well it worked once it was all together. Now you order something from a name brand mfg. Follow all the instructions and boom. So many issues and problems. Esp. ones that don't show up asap. Don't get me wrong. About 1 year ago I was walking through a goodwill and found a 4u rack mount case. After a few months of piecing together a few parts on a phenom version 1. I installed open suse to setup a minecraft / forge server for my son. It replaced a 32 bit dual xeon system rackable system running an older version of opensuse. I enjoyed every minute of building that and installing software.
Well.... having heard the "BIOS beepery"... that sounds a lot like the onboard VGA being unable to recognize it actually has a monitor connected. I think someone already pointed it out: A) check the onboard VGA connector for any cold/broken solder joints AND also check the contacts for continuity (poke one of your pointy DMM leads into the connector and probe on the MoBo side) / B) check your VGA cable for proper pin-out (there are some "touchy" VGA chips who really don't like el-cheapo-grande VGA cables where the cheapskate monitor vendor pinched pennies and left out grounds or forgot to correctly wire the "color monitor" ID and/or EDID pin).
Sidenote, a fanbridge is made to be removed for 'intervention' ;). And, thank you for cleaning it up :P. Still waiting for you to convert a normal ATX, oh wait. You just started mentioning switiching out the PSU, pjew! Damn, I'll be editing this until the end I feel.. I hope you noted the screws for the front 'plate' on the 'blockplate' ?
Just a thought, the twin molex connectors on the hard drive back planes could be for two power supplies. Two power supplies to allow for replacement of a failing power supply in an always on server so that the server never loses power to hard drive etc.
Could the fault in on the motherboard? More specifically, in the video chip due to it being faulty or with bad tjunctions or bga solders? And when it heats up a bit or the ambient temperature reaches a certain level, it works propperlly? So that's why it worked that time in the video but not before, and not aways? It really sounds and seems to be just like my dying haswell laptop. Sometimes it starts normally at the morning in the summer, when it rained at the night before it probably wont boot. If i'm in a air conditioner it probably wont boot. When it doesn't boot, if i disconnect its fan and try to turn it on over and over again until it heats up a bit, usually even on these days it boots. So basically it's affected by ambient temperature and if i heat its cpu up, it boots and works flawlesslly. My laptop has a i7 4500u wich has a chipset integrated to the processor, and its dying.
FYI its absolutly normal that IPMI boots verfy slowly. IPMI is basically its own operating system, with all the bells and whistles. uh btw most of the chips have their own OS too, thats why those new super multicore intelcpus takes ages to even initialize their 28 cores. we can talk baout that IPMI is bad, but the idea is to make everything on a software level to reduce costs on different servers and chipsets, same time you need a decent enough security level. so it boots up their own architecture, delivering standadiszed interfaces to the outside world while same time theres little to be done to port ipmi to another chipset. kida like uefo just it needs todo more. it needs all the drivers for sensors, needs to forward graphics and inputs, needs usermanagement (at least a basic one) and a full blown networking stuff to work on TCP 4 and 6. also offering interfaces to various apps and even has its own webinterface (so needs a webserver too). all that booting on a lowend cpu, cause you dont wanna boot ipmi on your main chipset, it works independent on your interfacecard. yet nobody wants to spend a fortune on that card so cpu is limited, ram is limited, which is all fine for the purpose but boot sucks
I don't know why people complain about those sense you can refill them with a compressor and a tire valve alot easier then dragging a air line in the room ; )
It's not a problem with the connector itself, it's a problem with the base management controller (=IPMI cpu). These chips integrate VGA and multiple additional peripherals to provide remote control over the system. It might be that the solder balls under the chip are cracked... it might be that the whole chip is just dying.
Very unlekly to the connector to be the issue. And taking in account what he said, that it takes way longer to boot sometimes, it probably has issues in other places, maybe in the video chip.
You don't need to connect both molex on the backplanes. I have the exact same ones, the other connector is for redundancy (for using two different PSU).
Doesn't the face plate of that drive tray unscrew and come off? Looks rather unsightly as it is, and removing would get rid of that long tab over the LTO4 drive buttons.
24:14 While not while you're adding the Arduino to unmount the drive with the button, you have your program report back to the Arduino when the drive is successfully unmounted, which would then trigger a servo on the drive bay to open the door? Would be pretty neat.
What if you just cut off that drive bay tab? Instead of having to 3d print a bunch of bracketry? Or can you mount the drive bay backwards like the fan controller was?
They have many normal EATX boards, but some of them are indeed very special. For example my X8DTU-F is not very ATX (only fits with heavy case mods). I will most likely add a vertical GPU bracket.
thats ebcause you wanna take on supermicros offer to use also thier cases. then it all comes together absolutly nicely. there simply so many variables you wanna get right that you need to go for one manufacturer. those 3rd party case only vendors are not delivering. there only a few vendors do that liek dell, supermicro, ibm and so on for a good reason. on larger setups you need to fit a gazillion drive lanes, keep proper airflow to the passive cooled cpus (nobody in their right mind uses active cpu coolers in a datacenter), same time offering interchangeable parts (like hotswap fans, HDD trays and hotspwapable powersupplys) between hole generations of servers. all that working with varisou standards (lika sata and SAS), supporting case health indicators (so your sas controller can point you to faulty drives and report temps) and on and on... ofc all that has to fit in enterprise monitoring, so you can monitor all your servers from different vendors in one software and also play nice with inventory and management. so yea theres more to it than just swapable drivebayse and a 19 inch format with rails.
btw all vendors change their basics only once every 5-10 years. so you can indeed take out a fan of server a and put in in server b. or powersupplys, or drivebays. that way you only need to keep a minimum stock of replacements in your datacenter and do not have to keep track on which inventory belogns to which servers. once you have filled your first row of racks with lets say 350 servers you gonna be thanking god for that. to have all that means tradeoffs and major effort by the manufacturer which you pay for. on that perspective those servers are all pretty cheap. btw think about for a secodn what kind of engeneering you need to have hotswapable powersupplys, hotswapable cpus,... same time interchangeable over the next 10 years with every generation while chipsets and powerconsumptin and standards can change.... yea really annoying...
No, you can use IPMI to do it via HTTP. People that don't like SuperMicro boards are usually people who want them to be desktop boards. They're not. As a server board, they are very well designed, and the chassis + board combos are fantastic. Every "weird" thing they do usually has a very clear purpose when you look at systems integration as a whole. They're a breeze to work with when you aren't fighting them trying to make them something they're not.
Why don't you fit the SSD socket that you're going to make between the 2 5.25" drive bays above the wiring that is there. it looks like there is plenty of room for it and you can use the other 5.25" bay for something else?
in regards to the dumb layout of the board. a lot of these supermicro boards were designed to work great in their own brand of case but i've found over the years that they don't work out great in other brand cases. also if you have a supermicro case with the power supplies and PDU in it would be sooooo much easier to get everything connected. they are expensive to ship though believe me i know!
How are you intending to accelerate rendering? Are you planning to use CUDA with NVENC? From what I've seen, the quality of NVENC is very poor in comparison with ffmpeg. The last time I tried doing any hardware encoding, I found that CPU encoding was actually just as fast as VAAPI. Though I didn't actually get a non-corrupted VAAPI encode. IF you can find a software encoder that runs on CUDA, that might be the best quality.
From my experience, when using cqp CUDA is way better than h264 that ffmpeg usually uses. And the rendering is "ligh-years" smaller. So you can bump up quite a bit the quality of the video and stil have a faster render than h264 alone. I can have a way higher bitrate (in general) and still have a lower rendering time, or have a similar rendering time and render with CUDA awmost lossless with the same time i would do my normal render with h264 in ffmpeg. Maaybe i'm doing something wrong, maybe all tools i tried (not so many tho, kdenlive, ffmpeg itself, handbreak, and some other wich used ffmpeg) i used them wrong? Because i can really render way faster using CUDA. Same for recording. I can't for example, record bemangdrive in my rig with h264 in obs with a decent video quality, it is pixelated or it is totally laggy. With nvenc and cqp15 i can get a really sharp image, and also record anything basically, it only uses about 10-20% of gpu and awmost nothing out of my cpu. My system specs, btw, are a i5 7500 (yeah if i waited i could get a way better ryzen 5 :/) + 8gb ddr4 ram and a gtx 1060 3gb. In sony vegas (where mainly i rende stuff) the i5 7500 hold back really hard the 1060 even using cuda.
Nvidia cards are better on Linux? For gaming yeah though AMD have made plenty of strides with the open source AMDGPU stack and it's more than enough for me with my RX 480, but I wouldn't use them for processing on a server
It's possible that those fans are drawing too much current from the motherboard and the PSU doesn't have sufficient power for both. What wattage is the 1U PSU you're using?
I'm thinking just replace the connector, i imagine before he got it, the place it's been stored wasn't the cleanest before and these old connectors just get messed up somehow when uncared for over long periods of time.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 For the sympthoms he describes, like taking longer to boot not booting everytime, and all sorts of issues, probably the vga/IPMI chip is dying or his solder (either the external bga or the tJunction) are bad.
@@eduardoavila646 it makes me wonder why he got it, I would have thought that he'd want something already set up for his rendering server, this seems like more hassle than its worth
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 Probably because in the end it is cheaper than the awready setup one. And plus he likes to thinker with hardware and software, so there is even this second reason "just for the sake of doing". Even i, did some projects like that, like trying to find a distro in more than 100 that worked in a sis m672 chips based laptop. Just for the sake of doing, technically i awready have a core2duo like this one but with a way better and supoorted intel chipset. Its a hobby, i guess
@@eduardoavila646 I know but with certain essentials, I don't think you want to have to return to recurring problems if they hold up the content from being produced as this is a source of income for him
The video issue might be a cracked solder joint under the chipset. When you put the board in the case it might be flexing the board slightly disconnecting the cracked solder joint. Just a theory. Sadly not much you can do about it if it's correct.
Edward James Bickels yeah it probably would fix it if you managed to reflow it without damaging anything. But considering the motherboard is entirely working other than the video and he’s gonna be putting a video card in it anyway I really don’t think it’s worth the risk.
I mean no disrespect, i'm just some random student from the internet, buuut... you said VGA was bent badly and "disconnected" (more like friken' ripped) soldered pin(s) was not a possible suspect for you? Really, dude? Again, mean no disrespect and patiently waiting for part three. Keep it up, your server videos are great and helped me out on some occasions!
You could open the power supply and solder some more wires for drives etc.. i think... the PSU board will probably have holes for more wires. These wires would have to come from spliters or dead PSUs laying around.
Those 1U PSUs are usually packed tight. Good luck working on them. Also, I don't remember if he quoted the wattage, but it might not be enough for dual Xeons, a graphics card used as a rendering accelerator, and a ton of drives. An off the shelf 1200W would fit, should have the right connectors, and would have ample current. I know, budget and all that, but this is a justifiable expense.
@@nickwallette6201 Yep, the additional connectors, if possible, would be just a jerryrig until he gets the propper psu. Using splitters, in my experience isn't a good thing. Usually they aren't well done, and add up to the resistance of the wire and usuallt are thiner than the rest of tge wires restricting more the current flow. Not only that but they connect two or more devices in a single molex, wich can lead to heating in that molex cable or not enough energy getting to the connected parts. I usually avoid those, even if i have to cut some sata connectors in some psu's to install molex connectors or vice-versa.
Jesus Christ, 40 min video of complaining about everything wrong with the setup, complaining about your tape drive mount, 2 mins with a dremel or grinder and cut the front tab off. spray paint it black and it will look uniform, why drag on about the PSU when you say your going to replace it. If your getting frustrated with a build, step away make a plan and come back to it,, no point sitting there complaining about every little thing.
Both Nvidia and AMD graphics card designed specifically for servers so they can use the power of the GPU for processing purposes. And video editing makes use of GPUs too.
