X11SBA-LN4F vs A1SRi-2558F

Jailer

@Derelict:

@Engineer:

Oh, and here's the $216 link since you seem so hellbent against anything to do with me or this board:

http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=MBDX11SBALN4FO&vid=428&src=F

Looks like a $228 link.

The search through Google for "Supermicro N3700" and then click on the Shopping link.

You must have a coupon code or some other promotional offer saved. There is a small "11% off" tag that displays in the screenshot you posted that is not there when others (myself included) click on the posted link.

Care to share the discount code? ;D

jjduru

@jwt:

@Engineer:

My board cost $216 shipped from Comp Source.

Seems to be $228.33 here:

http://www.compsource.com/pn/MBDX11SBALN4FO/Supermicro-428/X11sbaLn4f-N3700-Fcbga-Pentium–Max8gb-Ddr3-MiniItx-MBDX11SBALN4FO-MBDX11SBALN4FO/

@Engineer:

I paid less than about $305 for everything in it.

So you've got $77 to spend for ram, disk, etc.

Now, what is your time worth?

Moreover, what am I to do with the negative reputation you're heaping on pfSense because you're attempting to run it on inferior platforms?

Somebody definitely pissed in your Cheerios bowl yesterday…

You should applaud the time and effort Engineer put into making this board work, yet all you can come up with is some undeserved negativism.

reilos

@Engineer:

To anyone who is interested in this board and the progress on it, please PM me. I'll keep you updated via PM. It's obvious that some of the people, including the powers to be, have an issue with it and/or this posting. I'll no longer update the status in this thead

Please don't let some smart-ass response leave you with such negativity. I've been following this thread very closely, since i was on a quest to build my own pfsense box, and i think you are doing great in contributing to this community with your effort to resolve this issue. Thanks for that.

Engineer

I've decided to update this thread because of lots of interest in this board.

After sending the board out via RMA to SuperMicro, they kept it for about 3 weeks or so and ran the tests that I had used to trigger the watchdog timeout. The engineering team came back and said that they had found the issue and had made a hardware change to my board. I have tried to get a better explanation as to whether this was a defect on my board only or ALL of these board but have received nothing back yet.

With that in mind, I tested the board for four days using Ubuntu 15.04 (was still on my drive). Previously, it would not run for more than 30 hours with going down. After the four day test, I installed pfsense and ran the same test. It has been running for two days with no issue so far. I'm not running a WAN but that doesn't matter as I was able to get it to crash previously without a WAN port simply by bombarding it with LAN traffic.

If anyone has any specific questions, I'll try to answer. If the board will run for seven (7) days without crashing the ports, I'll move it back into full WAN service.

jjduru

Much appreciated update.

On a side note, I cannot stop myself wondering what https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?action=profile;u=273195 is going to say about this.

Jailer

Thanks for the update! ;)

jwt

@jjduru:

On a side note, I cannot stop myself wondering what https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?action=profile;u=273195 is going to say about this.

Me, either.

Engineer

Have just moved this back into full service (WAN) and am running off of it since it made it 8 days (4 on Ubuntu and 4 on pfsense 2.2.5/FreeBSD) without a network going down issue. I'll keep people informed and answer questions that I can. Also enabled TRIM for the first time (finally).

Thanks for the help everyone and Merry Christmas! :)

Engineer

Currently at 4+ days on pfsense 2.2.5 / FreeBSD 10.1 without the LAN going down / Watchdog. I think it would be fair to say that this issue has been solved for my board. Now whether SuperMicro has to change other boards or BIOS is anyone's guess right now as I have no feedback from them yet.

bluepr0

Thanks for all the info!

I was wondering how it performs your board when under heavy usage and adding snort, ntopng,etc. I'm currently using a Mac Mini (late 2012) with pfSense and when using all my internet (around 200/20) the CPU usage gets around 40%). My CPU is a i5-3210M, looking at cpubenchmarks website it seems it got around the double of performance of yours… so that would mean (more or less) that when getting 200mbps from the router you should see an usage of around 80%.

Do you have any numbers on this? thanks!

Engineer

bluepr0, sorry, I don't. I looked at your specs and your processor is a dual core with hyperthreading while this one is a slower quad core processor. Your CPU load number seem higher than I would have expected thinking that your processor should handle higher speeds at lower CPU load. I'm not experienced enough yet to say that though…just a guess on my part.

Are both of your cores pulling 40% at that time or is only one core pulling 40%? When simply pinging in and out, the average was 6Mbps in / out and I never saw any core above 4% load with all three other cores running 100% idle (using command top -S -H from the shell or from the command prompt). But, I have not other packages running and am running basic, slow (compared to yours) internet. Was trying to build a low power, somewhat future proof unit that could handle up to 1Gbps including encryption (AES-NI) in the future. Your numbers make me second guess my choice and think that I may have overestimated this board. sigh

Edit: After reading a bit, it seems it doesn't take much (relatively) to run a 1Gbps plain connection but adding SNORT, etc. is where much more processor power is needed to pump data through. SNORT is single threaded so it would eat up much more of a single CPU core (I did read you can run multiple copies of SNORT and load balance it out but it was much more difficult to do so).

bluepr0

I ran again the tests, using top command to see the CPU usage (it seems the CPU usage on web interface is also accurate, making an average of all the cores or am I wrong?)

Here's the screenshots

1. This is using all my download bandwidth from the internet http://d.pr/i/1h6X9/3UOn6rvy
CPU usage is around 30% here

2. This is using all my download bandwidth from internet + iperf (maxing out gigabit) http://d.pr/i/1bL1T/5PWn64bR
CPU usage is around 84% here

What do you think?

Thanks!

Jailer

Looks like Squid is what is eating up a lot of your resources @bluepr0.

Engineer, thanks for the update. I was going to ping you and see how things were going so your response was perfect timing.

bluepr0

Yep! stopping snort, ntop reduces quite a bit the CPU usage. See http://d.pr/i/1eYwd/NinxWFhR (usage is around 50%)

Engineer

@Jailer:

Looks like Squid is what is eating up a lot of your resources @bluepr0.

Engineer, thanks for the update. I was going to ping you and see how things were going so your response was perfect timing.

Right at 7 days now. Never made it above 4.5 or so previously. :)

bluepr0

great to know! I'm wondering what they change on the board? does the other boards out there will only need a BIOS update or it's a hardware problem?

Engineer

@bluepr0:

great to know! I'm wondering what they change on the board? does the other boards out there will only need a BIOS update or it's a hardware problem?

@bluepr0, I honestly don't know. SuperMicro said it was a "hardware modification" but they will not disclose what was changed and I cannot see any physical changes to my board. When I asked whether other boards are affected or only mine, I was told that if there are any other boards out there with this problem, they will fix them. Sorry guys, I wish I could give you more but SuperMicro won't let it out. I have not seen a new BIOS other than a new IPMI firmware.

reilos

So i decided to go with the A1SRi-2558F board (and ECC RAM). Connected LAN1 to WAN (ISP router in bridge mode, connected through surge-protected RJ45 ports on the UPS), connected other 3 LAN ports and IPMI to my (managed) switch.
Installing pfSense onto the SSD through IPMI mounted ISO… Sudden reboot... 2nd try... Install went fine, but reboot after a few minutes. My first thought is was something with the pfSense install. But....
Went into BIOS settings and before i could even make any changes... Reboot. So it's NOT a pfSense issue.
Disconnected all network cables except IPMI, restored default BIOS settings, did 10 cycles of memtest86 (took almost 3 days)... No errors and no reboots.
Then I connected LAN1 to my network, configured it as the WAN port and connected an AP to LAN2 (configured as LAN). Booted pfSense, did nothing for about an hour and no reboots.

So, I am now thinking it's a problem with 1 or more of the LAN ports. I want to do some testing, maybe anyone has some idea on how to do effective / efficiënt tests on the LAN ports?

jahonix

Do you use STP or UTP cables?

reilos

@jahonix:

Do you use STP or UTP cables?

I use all CAT6 U/UTP cables. For the whole network, including test setup.