Something Random

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
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I am omnipresent
gZkHyS1.jpg
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
10,865
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Michigan
It looks lime my cable company changed my internet plan. It looks like I have 50/5 now up from the 22/2 I had before. I think I will be downgrading to their new standard 25/3 tier to save the $20 a month.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,931
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USA
We got a pair of Mellanox ConnectX®-3 VPI (MCX354A-FCBS) dual port 56Gb Infiniband cards (pdf warning) in for me to run some tests on. I'm trying to figure out how to build Linbit's DRBD 9.0.1 with RDMA support under CentOS 6.7 to see if it's possible to get near NVMe replication performance between two Intel P3700 800GB drives across the two QSFP+ peer to peer connection in two different servers. Specifically to address latency issues that two 10Gb ethernet adapters can't handle due to the TCP stack. My hope is (based on reading Linbit's performance testing with RDMA) is that the backend storage was their limiting factor.

I don't know if this kind of stuff interests anyone here for their day to day work. From my experiences so far with DRBD it's a pretty neat piece of software for replicating block devices between systems. I can write up the steps to get this working in another thread if it interests anyone?

I'm officially jealous. I can't even convince the management to buy a development setup (servers + some networking gears). Even moddification we make on the production environment is without a net. We happen to have a rookie on a remote location with domain admin powers. Yes, he screwed up a few times and I was the one who ended up cleaning the mess.


I would be interested to know more about this, but I'm currently in a mainly Windows Server with Hyper-V environment. As written above, I don't have the gears to try something different and since I'm the only senior admin for 10 companies and approximately 300 users, I don't really have the time to try new stuff. When I'll work elsewhere, then learning more about this would be great.


Small update on this. I learned soon into working on this project that the RDMA portion of Linbit's DRBD is an enterprise licensed feature so I was not able to test it (yet). My company is in discussions with Linbit to work out NDAs so we can get a license to try their enterprise software.

However, I did fall back to using the Infiniband adapters with IP over Infiniband (IPoIB). I started with some raw measurements to see where things stand and so far as I was able to determine, the most I could pump through a single QSFP+ port that has an established 56Gb link was roughly 24.8Gb/sec. This was with using the CentOS Infiniband software packages and opensm software. I did rev the firmware on the Mellanox adapters to their latest but this didn't help. It's very possible that the Mellanox OFED software suite may improved this but I was not able to get IPoIB to work properly in the time allotted to me so I fell back to the CentOS stack.

Overall I saw a 10-20% increase in performance in certain test parameters when compared to a similar setup configured with 10Gbe SFP+ as the difference between the tests. The tests consisted of running fio at 1, 8, and 16 iodepth against block sizes of 4k, and 64k in size. There is still tuning that can be done to improve Infiniband's IPoIB but I'm still very new to using this technology. There should be a lot more performance available once the TCP stack is taken out of the picture and communication is done right through RDMA.

Coug, these cards are loaners from Dell for us to evaluate them as part of our product offering. Without this it may not have been feasible or justifiable to convince management to purchase a pair of these. We are in need of a fast way to replicate an high performance NMVe SSD across two systems and so far this is working pretty well.
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
Joined
Nov 20, 2013
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1,823
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Eglin AFB Area
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sedrosken.xyz
So I downloaded and installed Visual Studio Community 2015. I selected all of the options without paying attention to the space required as I often do, not knowing that it was going to take up 40 GB... I'm considering uninstalling it and reinstalling it with a more conservative featureset but it took all night to install the first time. On a SSD.
 

Howell

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Feb 24, 2003
Messages
4,740
Location
Chattanooga, TN
If you just uncheck the parts you don't want the installer will figure it out. No need to actually uninstall and reinstall. I'd imagine it took so long due to decompression of the installer files.
 

Clocker

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 14, 2002
Messages
3,554
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USA
I've been playing the game with Comcast for a few years now. This year looks like my bill is bumping up by about $20 because my old 'promo' is no longer available now. At least they upgraded my internet speed and I have all the pay channels now (only watch HBO though for Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones & Starz for Black Sails).

For the extra $20 I'm going to take advantage of the speed:

comast_150.png
 

Clocker

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 14, 2002
Messages
3,554
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USA
I believe I'm running v 1.0. Anything newer than that?

Timwhit - I'm using Tweaknews. Per your recommendation, IIRC.
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
Messages
10,865
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Michigan
I believe I'm running v 1.0. Anything newer than that?

Timwhit - I'm using Tweaknews. Per your recommendation, IIRC.
That's not 1.0. 1.0 has a different look to the GUI.

Has anyone spent much time in Columbia?
Do you mean one of the many cities/towns in the US with that name, Columbia University in NY, or Colombia the country in South America?
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
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I am omnipresent
I've had three 128GB Lexar USB3 flash drives die in the last two weeks. Normally, they're not worth the time it takes to send them back but that's so offensively crummy that I think I'm going to do it on general principle.
 

Stereodude

Not really a
Joined
Jan 22, 2002
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Michigan
What? I am a civilian, not aligned with American politicos.
Way to miss the joke. Every four years some celebrities swear they're going to leave the country if ______ wins. I was wondering if you were making that sort of threat, or if you were worried about being deported because you're an illegal. :razz:
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
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17,497
Location
USA
Way to miss the joke. Every four years some celebrities swear they're going to leave the country if ______ wins. I was wondering if you were making that sort of threat, or if you were worried about being deported because you're an illegal. :razz:

Celebrities have options. My function is affected only moderately by political policies.
We have to be non-partisan.
 

mubs

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Nov 22, 2002
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4,908
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Somewhere in time.
I've had three 128GB Lexar USB3 flash drives die in the last two weeks. Normally, they're not worth the time it takes to send them back but that's so offensively crummy that I think I'm going to do it on general principle.
AFAIK, Lexar went crappy many years ago. I have a 256 MB (yes, that's correct) Lexar Jumpdrive whose write protect switch is malfunctioning (I can't write to it in any position). Only Lexar product I bought. Rest all - flash drives, memory cards, everything has been Sandisk for the last dozen+ years, and none has failed so far.

The write protect switch was useful; I could put pics on it, protect it and take it to a printing service to make hard copies of pics without getting infected when they stuck it into their PC. I achieve the same thing now with a standard SD card (they have write protect sliding switches) shoved into a small USB card reader.
 

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 21, 2002
Messages
8,729
Location
Québec, Québec
I knew everything in this video, except the 35 feet from the power line on the ground. Congratulations to the Pudget Electricity company for making informative videos like this one (there are many others from them).
 

time

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 18, 2002
Messages
4,932
Location
Brisbane, Oz
It's good of you to notice, Merc, but it's not exactly a "happy" event. It's essentially a wake.

Of course, this year it fell on a Monday so most of us scored a long weekend ... the level of social happiness definitely went up a few points. :)
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Jan 17, 2002
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I am omnipresent
I rather thought a solemn moment at 11AM followed by many shrimps on the barbie (or the mid-autumn equivalent) would be in order.
 

time

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 18, 2002
Messages
4,932
Location
Brisbane, Oz
The solemn event is the *dawn* service, after which they play the Last Post.

Then there's a wait until 1pm (depending on the state) until the licensed establishments open for business.

Entities that got into trouble included:
a) a major supermarket chain that slyly opened in the morning to cook BBQ chickens, ready for sale in the afternoon
b) a politician that tried to link a contentious housing tax concession to military veterans
c) a TV network that went for an ad break in the middle of the Last Post (played by a lone bugle).
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
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Nov 20, 2013
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Eglin AFB Area
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sedrosken.xyz
So last week my desktop finally kicked the bucket after ten years of being a cheaply-made yet reliable little machine. It survived the better part of those ten years in a heavy smoking area. So I do my due diligence and do an autopsy on it... rapid-onset capacitor failure. Damn things popped like popcorn. Most of them were Rubycon MBZ series caps. It hangs in the middle of POST, I'm frankly surprised it gets that far. One day out of the blue it went down with a BSOD and was just never able to come back up.

Prepping the case, drives and power supply for my graduation build: MSI H110M-VD Pro, Celeron G3900 (still comfortably faster even than my Core2Duo, and has the potential to be upgraded to an i7 at just about any time should I need it), 1x8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport LX PC4-19200 (gives me room to upgrade to 16GB quickly and easily if I need/want to). The integrated graphics are just a hair slower than the HD4650 I was using, but will use much less power and support more hardware decoding of video, not to mention the driver support will be better just about anywhere I go that isn't XP. The VD part of the motherboard refers to the video ports on offer, 1 VGA and 1 DVI, which is what my twin monitors use. I might go one step further to the Eco model, which also has an HDMI port. It's decent for expansion as far as I need/want, is decent for performance, and should barely sip power compared to the A64X2, all for a decent price all told at about ~$150 total.

The power supply should do fine. The load should be less than it was with the A64X2 board, and I checked inside and everything seems just dandy bar some dust I had to clean out. The board does not require a "Haswell ready" auxilary CPU power connection, just uses good old 4-pin P4 power.

In other news the STLP state conference came and went. STLP stands for student technology leadership program, it's a Kentucky thing apparently. I was in it some time ago, even won the state championship at Elementary/Middle level in the computer repair challenge back in eighth grade. I tagged along for the Certipalooza event they were having there. Long story short I got my MTA certs in OS Fundamentals, Networking Fundamentals, and Security Fundamentals in short order, only spending about five minutes on each test and scoring a 94, 77 and 80 respectively. Not bad for never having had a class on the last two. The practice test had my friends and I both thinking we were going to fail spectacularly. I walked out with the most certs out of anyone in the state, and got a prize for my troubles. It's being sent to the school now, as are my cert certificates or whatever they are.

On the subject of my using Windows 10, I turned off all the privacy concerns and telemetry settings using Spybot S&D creator's Anti-Beacon. Seems to do the job, also handles reapplying of the settings in the event that they are reset by updates as they are wont to do. I also use Avast free and Spybot S&D free itself for protection, had a bit of a scare recently and got scared straight. This team of programs is just about the only one that I feel it's worth running on older machines such as my laptop. Just about everything else brings the computer to their knees while doing absolutely nothing, it's crazy.
 
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Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
22,303
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I am omnipresent
I'm not particularly comfortable just slapping my address on a site that anyone can look at, so those who want to send me something can PM me and I'll send it to them.

I think we'll probably set up something communal. I've run these things before for SF members. I ran it by a couple folks and I'm sure we're going to be OK for... something, at least. Anyone else who wants to kick in a bit, PM me and I'll put it in the bucket.

What's your laptop situation right now sed?
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
Joined
Nov 20, 2013
Messages
1,823
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Eglin AFB Area
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sedrosken.xyz
My Core 2 Duo is my only laptop, that i3 I tried to fix fell apart some time after I got it. Thermal sensor stopped working right and it would cost more to fix than it was worth. I get what I need out of it.
 
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