Holy crap what a disappointment. I've been jonesing for an upgrade for about 6 months now (my current desktop is a Mac Mini 2009) and was eagerly awaiting an updated mini.

So the new mini has a new Ivy Bridge cpu. Whoop-dee-doo.

It only has one Thunderbolt port but at least it does have USB 3.

It only has Intel 4000 graphics. That's a crappy gpu that uses main memory. The reason I wanted a newer mini was so I could play a video game made in the last 5 years. As far as video games go, this mini is worse than the last one and only marginally better than my 3 year old one!

Looks like it's Hackintosh for me because this mini sucks.

Building my file sever was a nightmare. Various issues in no particular order.

• VirtualBox causes Solaris host to “pause”
• KVM crashes Linux host when trying to passthrough LSI scsi controller
• ESXI uses a lot of ram
• ESXI requires windows client
• mysql doesn't work through nis (owner permissions)
• setting up a useful solaris zone is a lot of work
• xen can't create any vm. XenUnifiedLookupByName error
• rebooting takes several minutes
• ipmi continual ends the session after 60 seconds
• console redirect doesn't always capture F-keys
• VMWare guest machines can't boot off of passed through hardware

I recently purchased the hardware for a new server, I'll get into the details of that in a later post, however I did want to quickly mention a problem I had.

I tried to burn in my S5512WGM2NR motherboard, a Sandy Bridge motherboard from Tyan. It has the the C204 chipset paired with a Xeon E3-1230 and for memory a respectable (at time of writing) 16 GB of ram (4 x KVR1333D3E9S/4G 1333MHz DDR3 ECC CL9 UDIMM).

Anyhow, the MemTest from Fedora 15 locked up instantly and the official MemTest from http://www.memtest86.com/ locked up within 60 seconds or whenever you hit a key. I'm now using MemTest86+ from http://www.memtest.org/ and it works great.

tl;dr

Use MemTest86+ from .org not MemTest86 from .com.

note to self

This ram is weird, unbuffered ecc (udimm) is not common

The Sandy Bridge reviews sure paint a nice picture for this new cpu. I'm currently leaning towards the i5-2400 or the i7-2600 if I'm feeling rich. The K series are unacceptable since they don't support VT-d.

However, unless the platform can do the following I won't be buying it.

I want to use a discreet video card and the on-chip video card simultaneously. I want to run my htpc in a virtual machine and “give” either of the cards to it via pci passthrough. By having the htpc own the card it should have great performance and if I break X on either the host or the htpc guest I just have to flip the input on my receiver and continue on my way.

Since I currently use kvm and not xen, kvm will need to be upgraded to support display pci passthrough. The guest will need to be full screen of course, Spice may be required.

So hopefully Fedora 15 will be able to handle all that.

Since it's been two years since my last raid cost analysis, I figured it was about time to do another one.

Goals:

• increase my storage. Currently 1000GB using raid5 (3 x 500GB drives)
• preferably only use 2 drives as it costs money to spin an extra drive
• not spend too much

more…

I just upgraded my servers raid5 drives and figured I'd post my cost analysis. Put that way it almost sounds scientific…

more…