Amateur Linux Hour

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Betonhaus said:
This thing has two PSUs and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them.

Also yeah it doesn't have hard drive trays, but I got a 3gb sas drive which it supports so I think I can just have it loose until the tray from Ali comes in. It comes with four hard drive bays but there's room for a second block of hard drive bays for the future. After supper I'll take a closer look at it, as I have no idea how I'm going to run memtest or install Debian if it doesn't have a gpu
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the second one is a backup
 
seri0us said:
the second one is a backup
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Yeah I eventually figured that out.
This thing is definitely interesting. Compared to using an old gaming laptop, this is lightyears better. And it's incredibly upgradeable.
 
Betonhaus said:
Yeah I eventually figured that out.
This thing is definitely interesting. Compared to using an old gaming laptop, this is lightyears better. And it's incredibly upgradeable.
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Do plug in both supplies, usually they load balance and run cooler.

I have one disk tray which if both aren't connected runs the fans at full power. Which is convenient to blow out all the dust from time to time.
 
I am so confused.
Debian can see the raid controller and reports it as "Broadcom / LSI MegaRAID SAS 2008 [Falcon] (rev 03)"
the problem is that all of the raid controller programs I'm told to install don't support it. yes i can force install megacli, storcli and storcli2 (haven't found a download for megactl) but none of them can see the controller.
I believe the drivers should be built into the linux kernel, but i really want to turn off raid so I can do software raid (or realistically mergerfs, so if one drive fails i could just use sonar or radarr to redownload the lost files without my entire storage pool being borked).
I'm hoping that if I boot the ThinkServer easystaryup cd it'll have a graphical controller so i can manage things.
but it seems all software is only targeted to Windows Server 2012, SUSE Enterprise Linux 11.2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, or Vmware ESXi 5.0 U1
and i don't want to buy the license to an old OS or run one. maybe i can spin up a virtual machine but this is getting complicated

And is it better to use debain or ubuntu? I'll just be running a swizzin package, maybe a Minecraft server eventually

is there any downsides to running the linux server under Microsoft's free Hyper-V Server?
 
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It’s an almost decade old server. I don’t want to be mean, you’re clearly excited to own an actual server, but any savings you made in terms of purchase cost will be very quickly offset by the power bill, especially this coming winter. In server world, older than five years is ewaste and they’d be happy to give it away for free so they won’t have to pay recycling fees. If against all reason the seller will accept a return, I think you’d be able to rather easily build a better server yourself. Get a Gigabyte mATX motherboard (Gigabyte supports ECC), 32GBs of pre-owned ECC DDR4 UDIMMs, a Ryzen 5600G, and a PCIe->SATA HBA from aliexpress/amazon, and put it in something like the Fractal Design Node 804. You’ll still have a slot to install a graphics card if you want to do transcoding or passthrough VMs, and you can even get 10GbE with a not actually very expensive M.2 adapter.

The nice thing about Ryzen 5000 is that it supports ECC, is very efficient, and can be downvolted for even more efficiency. The 5600G will also happily run multiple containers or even full VMs, including VMs you can game on if passthrough is your kind of thing. The decade old Xeon in your actual server is going to put out an awful lot of heat for really not very much performance at all by modern standards.
 
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snov said:
It’s an almost decade old server. I don’t want to be mean, you’re clearly excited to own an actual server, but any savings you made in terms of purchase cost will be very quickly offset by the power bill, especially this coming winter. In server world, older than five years is ewaste and they’d be happy to give it away for free so they won’t have to pay recycling fees. If against all reason the seller will accept a return, I think you’d be able to rather easily build a better server yourself. Get a Gigabyte mATX motherboard (Gigabyte supports ECC), 32GBs of pre-owned ECC DDR4 UDIMMs, a Ryzen 5600G, and a PCIe->SATA HBA from aliexpress/amazon, and put it in something like the Fractal Design Node 804. You’ll still have a slot to install a graphics card if you want to do transcoding or passthrough VMs, and you can even get 10GbE with a not actually very expensive M.2 adapter.

The nice thing about Ryzen 5000 is that it supports ECC, is very efficient, and can be downvolted for even more efficiency. The 5600G will also happily run multiple containers or even full VMs, including VMs you can game on if passthrough is your kind of thing. The decade old Xeon in your actual server is going to put out an awful lot of heat for really not very much performance at all by modern standards.
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This server isn't ideal, no. but it cost me $50 for all the parts needed to make it run, plus hard drives which i can transfer to a new server later on. I'll keep an eye on the electricity bill tho, I'm hoping it won't be too bad.
I'm going to try the Microsoft Hyper-V server. If anything else it'll let me install an OS that in theory can configure th hardware, and i can migrate the actual server to new hardware easier this way.
 
I feel like i must be missing something basic. how the hell do i make Debian recognize an attached pci raid controller?

...oh i see. I have to reinstall again
 
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Betonhaus said:
I feel like i must be missing something basic. how the hell do i make Debian recognize an attached pci raid controller?

...oh i see. I have to reinstall again
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Generally the best thing to do is figure out how to tell it to go into pass-through mode or transparent mode, or whatever that particular model calls it.
Often the bios has a utility for that if you have the proper keypresses and may need to enable Option ROM in Bios.

Then the drives can usually be moved to a new system without reformatting. The controller based RAID generally can't be used with any other controller.

Configuration utility compatibility is often annoying as similar models are often totally different. You may be able to get a bootable config tool(as you mentioned).
 
I reset the bios to recommended defaults and now I can access the RAID's bootable admin page with ctrl-H during boot. it's marked the one drive I have as "bad" which might be due to it sitting loose without a drive tray to keep it properly connected. I can now see the drive using megactl-status in Debian, but megacli refuses to work so I can't try marking it as good. but so far it's an improvement, as now I just need to determine if the drive is actually bad or just marked bad, and figure out how to mount them directly, bypassing the raid setup.
 
I finally figured out megacli and can manage and manipulate the raid controller, but my SAS drive refuses to be marked good. Either it's just bad, or it's because it's sitting loosely without a tray to ensure it's seated properly. I'll wait for the trays to come in the mail and test them, and if that doesn't make the drive work then I can get them cheap off facebook. so now I'll just set the server aside until parts come in.
 
Betonhaus said:
I finally figured out megacli and can manage and manipulate the raid controller, but my SAS drive refuses to be marked good. Either it's just bad, or it's because it's sitting loosely without a tray to ensure it's seated properly. I'll wait for the trays to come in the mail and test them, and if that doesn't make the drive work then I can get them cheap off facebook. so now I'll just set the server aside until parts come in.
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I have seen people use small bits of cardboard to prop/wedge drives to be at the proper height in drive slots. Not ideal but it can work as a stop gap.

Did you also check this page for any downloads for drivers/firmware you might need?
 
indomitable snowman said:
I have seen people use small bits of cardboard to prop/wedge drives to be at the proper height in drive slots. Not ideal but it can work as a stop gap.

Did you also check this page for any downloads for drivers/firmware you might need?
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Sadly all of Lenovo's software only supports rpm based destributions that are a decade obsolete. I did try to do the firmware update, but that requires burning a dvd and I don't even know where to get those nowadays
 
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Betonhaus said:
Sadly all of Lenovo's software only supports rpm based destributions that are a decade obsolete. I did try to do the firmware update, but that requires burning a dvd and I don't even know where to get those nowadays
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Have you looked for any in your nearest Goodwill?
 
Betonhaus said:
That is one of my next steps. Both my old server and new one have dvd burners so I should be able to burn them easily enough. I'll have to look up what tool is used to burn disks from command line linux tho.
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Have you simply tried writing the ISO directly to a USB stick? Sometimes that works. I think there are also software that can do that 'smarter', like maybe rufus or unetbootlin.
 
davids877 said:
Have you simply tried writing the ISO directly to a USB stick? Sometimes that works. I think there are also software that can do that 'smarter', like maybe rufus or unetbootlin.
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I tried, it did NOT like the USB sticks and that seems to be a reoccurring problem. rufus refused to write the firmware iso to usb
 
Betonhaus said:
I tried, it did NOT like the USB sticks and that seems to be a reoccurring problem. rufus refused to write the firmware iso to usb
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Boot your OS in a virtual machine and mount the ISO to that. No reason to faff about with optical media in 2023.
 
snov said:
Boot your OS in a virtual machine and mount the ISO to that. No reason to faff about with optical media in 2023.
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Considering the ISO is to configure the drive controller that the system probably booted off of I suspect as soon as you tried to hand off the PCIe card to the VM it would all come crashing down.
 
snov said:
Boot your OS in a virtual machine and mount the ISO to that. No reason to faff about with optical media in 2023.
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Somehow I don't feel like that would be safe when updating system firmware, if it even works at all. Rufus already doesn't recognize it as a bootable disk, meaning it probably means something unique to the bios - but only when accessed the correct way.
 
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