[jerkyjerk]

Man I didn’t realize this thread is that old already.

I’ll add an anecdote about XServe fan speeds.

The first gen XServe G4 (Tray load) blowers ran full tilt at just under 5000RPMS which is the max that shows up the Server Monitor gauge. Like I had mentioned there was no speed up slow down. It was one constant speed. The second gen XServe G4 (Slot load) blowers are controlled by variable speed controllers. Looking at Server Monitor right now the CPU fan is running is 3648rpms while the PCI blower is running at 1687rpms. I recently got a G5 (2005) model I haven’t done a comparison on the speeds yet but it’s not any louder than the Slot Load G4.

[jerkyjerk]

So I’ve noticed that there is a really inexpensive drive available but the specs say for the recent 2009 Intel XServes. Does anyone know if there is something different about these ones that prevent usage on older Intels or even G5 machines. I can’t seem to find a photo of the connector portion to see if it might have changed. Anyone with some insight or access to hardware to try it?

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB837G/A?afid=p210%7Cshpg&cid=AOS-US-SHOP-Shoppingcom

At this point I don’t care about what’s certified and what’s not, I’m in self-service mode with this hardware now anyhow (XServe G5) I replaced the drives on my XServe G4 with larger than certifed sizes without any issues so I don’t mind wandering a bit into the unsupported realm. It would be much simpler to be able to buy a brand new drive/carrier than to have to monkey around with ebay auctions looking for them which all seem to go for about $100 anyhow and for used ones at that.

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

I’m sure the XServe G5 is not too bad.

I eventually sold my original XServe and side-graded to a 2nd gen XServe Dual 1.33GHz (which I’m still using). There was a night and day difference between the two. The main difference was the 2nd gen machine had the ability to control the speed of the blowers (which I’m sure the G5 and Intel’s continue to do). The first gen’s blowers go full speed all the time making it so loud.

[jerkyjerk]

It can be done but if you’ve never worked with a lot of the software it can be a bit intimidating. It’s a lot to grasp. You will need to setup internal DNS first in order to get OD working. You internal domain name could be anything you want to call it we’ll say example.com. so your fully qualified name internally will be server.example.com. You probably should avoid using an existing name like apple.com.

Since you are going the free route and have registered tmac.podzone.net you computer will essentially have two names an external and internal name. You will need a DynDNS client that can grab your external IP from the firewall. I’m not sure if the simple GUI one will do that. I had played with ddclient which was a perl script client.
It’s been a while so there might be some better options available now.

Since this sound like the first time you are tackling setting up some of these services, I would focus getting the various services you want to use working internally first and then move on to DynDNS after. Baby steps is the way to think of it. Get DNS working, then OD. then move on to say the fileserver and webserver until you are happy. Once you are satisfied with it’s internal operation, you should be ready to enable access to the outside. That’s when I would start looking at the dyndns configuration.

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

I get Mactroll’s concern now. If you aren’t running your own DNS your ISP’s DNS will give resolve to the external address which could make it difficult to access the hostname internally.

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

NAT definitely presents some issues. I personally would be more concerned the otherway around, having the client send the internal address if you are behind NAT.

If you are behind NAT your dyndns client needs to acquire the external address from your firewall.

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

After looking over the initial posts again I noticed reference to tmac.podzone.net as being your dyndns name. From what I recall when playing around with dyndns on my parents computer to make remote administration easier(they too only have a dynamic IP) what dyndns technically supplies you with(if IIRC) is really a hostname not a domain name, unless you can setup further names under that. So tmac.podzone.net should be the hostname you would be reachable at. podzone.net is actually the domain name.

-jerky

[jerkyjerk]

What do you want to accomplish with the dyndns registration? Do you plan on running some services like a website or email or ftp or jabber and you are looking for a way to locate your machine “from the outside” since your ip changes at will? If that’s the point then it’s not 100% necessary to have your own internal DNS service since you aren’t going to be authoritative for the “dyndns.org” domain anyhow. It’s totally fine to continue to use your ISP’s DNS servers.What ever the internal hostname or domain name you setup your Mac OS Server or client really has no relation on the dyndns name. Internally your computer could be configured as foo.bar.org but your dyndns name will be foo.dyndns.org or even something unrelated like snafu.dyndns.org. Internal and external name can be different. If you have internal DNS setup nobody from the outside will ever query it looking for your computers dyndns.org name. They will always be looking to the authoritative dyndns servers which from my last query are:

dyndns.org. 86400 IN NS ns1.dyndns.org.
dyndns.org. 86400 IN NS ns2.dyndns.org.
dyndns.org. 86400 IN NS ns3.dyndns.org.
dyndns.org. 86400 IN NS ns4.dyndns.org.
dyndns.org. 86400 IN NS ns5.dyndns.org.

Hope that makes a bit more sense. If you are looking to setup some very DNS centric services like Open Directory, internal DNS becomes required but still doesn’t change the fact that your external hostname can be different than the internally used one.

-jerky

[jerkyjerk]

I got a reply back from a Highpoint person and the response was enlightening and raised another question.

He stated that the RR1820A [b]isn’t [/b]a software based card and referred to the RR3000 series as being an IOP card.
I didn’t know WTF IOP meant so of course I googled a bit looking for answers. Dell had an excellent write up on the [url=http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/power/en/ps3q03_dumouchelle?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz]various RAID implementations.[/url]

Here’s the meat of the link:

[b]HARDWARE METHODS[/b]
[b][i]I/O processor (IOP)–based RAID[/i][/b]: This is the most common method, and also typically the most expensive, most richly featured, and highest performing implementation. IOP-based RAID performs RAID functions on the disk using dedicated processors, memory subsystems, and peripheral devices. The on-board IOP executes the RAID engine, handles disk array rebuilding, RAID level migration, and other functions such as error recovery. IOP-based RAID can be either embedded on the server as RAID on Motherboard (ROMB) or placed on a host bus adapter (HBA).
[b][i]I/O controller (IOC)–based RAID:[/i][/b] This category uses the processor and memory resources of the I/O (disk interface) controller to execute the RAID engine. Although it looks similar to IOP-based RAID, IOC-based RAID has limited features and functionality because it shares the limited processor and memory resources of disk I/O controllers. Because of its small footprint and low cost, IOC-based RAID is usually embedded on the server platform.

[b]SOFTWARE METHODS:[/b]
[b][i]Driver-based RAID:[/i][/b] This software implementation is integrated within the driver of a specific disk controller. The driver contains the code to run the RAID engine within the OS environment and the BIOS runs the RAID engine in the pre-OS (boot) environment. Within the OS, this approach looks similar to IOP-based and IOC-based RAID in that actual physical drives constituting the RAID volume are invisible to the OS. However, driver-based RAID depends completely on the resources of the system processor and memory for RAID execution, and affects system performance in high CPU utilization environments.
[b][i]OS-based RAID:[/i][/b] This type of software RAID, usually implemented as a filter driver bundled within the OS, uses the processor and memory of the host system to execute the RAID engine. OS-based RAID is independent of disk controller type and uses disk controller drivers for disk I/O.

With that said my question for the Highpoint was to confirm if the all the RR family aside from the RR3000 card(s) are all IOC based designs. Since the IOC based designs are just using the common processor and memory resources of the card to do it’s normal work along an needed RAID processing that would explain why dpaton’s saw a huge diff in performance between the 2220 and the 1820. The cards processors are constantly upgraded like our desktops over time. The newer chips are just faster and as a side affect process the RAID task more efficiently.

jeff

[jerkyjerk]

Excellent. This is pretty encouraging for the use on my miniscule network at home, even using just four disks sounds like a viable option. I’ve traditionally relied on just appleRAID for my last several machines but the amount of data I want to put online far exceeds that capacity of the largest single disks available so RAID 1 isn’t really viable any longer. I don’t want to separate all the data across several mirror sets so I’m looking for at least 3TB of usable space with no more than than several concurrent file sharing users. I’ve been mostly concerned with the driver and hardware reliability since I don’t have any experience with the highpoint’s hardware. I don’t want to load up several TB of data to have it go poof because of crappy software. From the people I’ve talked to so far better performance was generally the most griped about thing thing. Stability issues haven’t come up very often.

dpaton’s comments about the RAID processing got me kind of curious how Hightpoints hardware works. Most modern PC motherboards and SATA cards that say they have RAID support usually do their magic in the driver. That can be good and bad depending on the quality of the driver. I think the driver approach yields better performance compared to OS software RAID but can suffer from poorly written drivers. Where the OS software RAID should in be in theory more mature and stable but a bit slower. I’ve posed the question about where the actually RAID processing goes on with the various RR cards to Highpoint sales. Looking at the specs only the 3220 seems to have a general purpose CPU on it(IIRC some embedded Intel type) but hope for some clarification on that. If I get any interesting info back I’ll post it here.

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

You said performance isn’t great across 4 drives and you are currently using 8 drives. Using 8 drives do you a see a difference at all between 4 and 8? or is it just a marginal difference?

Thanks for the feedback s

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

I’ve been toying around with Leopard by itself for a bit now and feel ready to tackle the same thing. I’m in the same research mode as you at this time. From what I’ve read so far, I’m leaning towards what’s behind door number 3. I’ve never been a fan of upgrade installs. I’ve given it a go in the past with poor results and would end up rolling back to what I had and migrating the data instead. IIRC I tried with both 10.2 -> 10.3 and 10.3 -> 10.4. There’s a whole section about what can and can’t be migrated from Tiger to Leopard in the Leopard documentation.

Like Dave, I’m definitely interested in hearing what others are planning or doing as well.

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

They have three types of records you can add. Alias (CNAME) Machine (A) and Service (SRV).

From the testing I’ve done so far on Leopard I feel I’ll still need to forgo the GUI and hand edit my zones. The biggest weakness I see so far is the Zone transfer (AXFR) is either all or nothing. There isn’t any ability that I see to limit zone transfers to specific host(s) in the GUI. Reverse zones don’t have any checkbox like forwards. IIRC the zone stanza in named.conf has allow transfer set to none. I don’t expect something like a GUI to TSIG to configure zone transfers just a few text fields to add the secondaries IPs would be ok.

Here are a few screen grabs of the GUI if you haven’t seen it already.

[url]http://www.jerkys.org/leopard/dns1.png[/url]
[url]http://www.jerkys.org/leopard/dns2.png[/url]
[url]http://www.jerkys.org/leopard/dns3.png[/url]

jerky

[jerkyjerk]

This is a bit of slow response. I’m not sure if it’s too late to be of any use to you.

The copper cables have distance limitation that sould like they would be too short for you. You’ll probably need to look at fiberGoing from the specs of the fibre GBICs supported you want to use 50/125 Multi-Mode Fiber. Single Mode will be for really long runs which doesn’t seem like it applies in your case. From the fiber drops we’ve had run at work there’s not much difference between 6 and 2 strand cable itself. The labor to fish the cables can be costly unless theres some conduit in place for it so we always run the higher strand count cables on any new drops we need. I don’t recall what the cable’s official name was but it’s got a stiff plastic sheathing on the outside. with the 6 strands packed inside with some filler cord material something synthetic I think. We usually have our maintence guys pull the cable and have someone else terminate them since it requires some special tools and the knowledge of how to use those tools.

This is lifted from the Apple specs page:

Supported SFP Types
4Gb Short-Haul Transceiver (supports up to 500m with 50/125 m MMF)
Finisar FTLF-8524-P2BNL
Finisar FTLF-8524-P2BNL-LS
2Gb Short-Haul Transceiver (supports up to 500m with 50/125 m MMF)
Finisar FTRJ-8519-P1BNL
Pico Light PL-XPL-VE-S24-11
Pico Light PL-XPL-VC-S23-11
JDS Uniphase JSM-21S0AA1
JDS Uniphase JSP-21S0AA1
JDS Uniphase JDS-42S4AA1
2Gb Long-Haul Transceiver (supports up to 10km with 9/125 m SMF)
Finisar FTRJ-1319-P1BTL

[jerkyjerk]

here was the iPhoto article I was thinking of http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050904072808460

here’s some other info that might help with iTunes:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=44055
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93195

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