I’ve got the R710 (mentioned in my previous post [1]) online. When testing the R710 at home I noticed that sometimes the VGA monitor I was using would start flickering when in some parts of the BIOS setup, it seemed that the horizonal sync wasn’t working properly. It didn’t seem to be a big deal at the time. When I deployed it the KVM display that I had planned to use with it mostly didn’t display anything. When the display was working the KVM keyboard wouldn’t work (and would prevent a regular USB keyboard from working if they were both connected at the same time). The VGA output of the R710 also wouldn’t work with my VGA->HDMI device so I couldn’t get it working with my portable monitor.
Fortunately the Dell front panel has a display and tiny buttons that allow configuring the IDRAC IP address, so I was able to get IDRAC going. One thing Dell really should do is allow the down button to change 0 to 9 when entering numbers, that would make it easier to enter 8.8.8.8 for the DNS server. Another thing Dell should do is make the default gateway have a default value according to the IP address and netmask of the server.
When I got IDRAC going it was easy to setup a serial console, boot from a rescue USB device, create a new initrd with the driver for the MegaRAID controller, and then reboot into the server image.
When I transferred the SSDs from the old server to the newer Dell server the problem I had was that the Dell drive caddies had no holes in suitable places for attaching SSDs. I ended up just pushing the SSDs in so they are hanging in mid air attached only by the SATA/SAS connectors. Plugging them in took the space from the above drive, so instead of having 2*3.5″ disks I have 1*2.5″ SSD and need the extra space to get my hand in. The R710 is designed for 6*3.5″ disks and I’m going to have trouble if I ever want to have more than 3*2.5″ SSDs. Fortunately I don’t think I’ll need more SSDs.
After booting the system I started getting alerts about a “fault” in one SSD, with no detail on what the fault might be. My guess is that the SSD in question is M.2 and it’s in a M.2 to regular SATA adaptor which might have some problems. The data seems fine though, a BTRFS scrub found no checksum errors. I guess I’ll have to buy a replacement SSD soon.
I configured the system to use the “nosmt” kernel command line option to disable hyper-threading (which won’t provide much performance benefit but which makes certain types of security attacks much easier). I’ve configured BOINC to run on 6/8 CPU cores and surprisingly that didn’t cause the fans to be louder than when the system was idle. It seems that a system that is designed for 6 SAS disks doesn’t need a lot of cooling when run with SSDs.
Update: It’s a R710 not a T710. I mostly deal with Dell Tower servers and typed the wrong letter out of habit.