This shows where the Asrock X299 steel legend motherboard failed. The i9-10980 CPU ran for ten hours then hung. I power cycled the machine and smoke came out. Here is where it originated from, the backside of the motherboard under the cooler backplate. The name goes on before the quality goes in.
Piece of Shit
I’m on my 4th MOTHERBOARD with the new server, this one I got running last night, it ran all night but crashed at 10:17AM, not the end of the world as I’d not completely dialed in the operating parameters yet, but I powered it down and back up to reboot since it was hung and a puff of smoke came out and that was that. Some component failed in a spectacular manner.
I have since learned that the Gigabyte board did not boot because it needs a BIOS upgrade for this CPU, so I’m going to re-install it, install the BIOS upgrade and send this Assmoke back to Asrock for repair.
Replaced the Asus Prime X299 IIA board with an Gigabyte X299 Aorus Master, this board won’t even post. Says bad memory, but I put in just two modules and no matter what two I tried it would not work, then I tried some Crucial memory I had on hand, it won’t post either, so there is something not right with the motherboard, and it was the last one they had in stock. So I ordered an Asrock motherboard, maybe third time is a charm. I ordered it two day delivery so should be here Saturday. In the meantime, this server is going to remain out of service.
This means Roundcube, Manjaro, Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, and Yacy will be out of service until I get a functional motherboard. To say this is frustrating is the understatement of the year.
Since elm successfully compiled on Rocky8, I decided to try metamail. It successfully compiled as well and is now installed and linked into elm.
Also, this is a reminder that friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com, mastodon.eskimo.com, yacy.eskimo.com, and manjaro.eskimo.com will all be going down for probably around six hours tonight in order to replace the motherboard.
The motherboard that is presently installed has two dead memory slots so a quarter of our system memory is not recognizable on that machine.
Roundcube mail is back. It is in the WebApps->Mail->Roundcube menu or the direct path is https://roundcube.eskimo.com/.
This is running on the new server and will be down between Wednesday evening and possibly Saturday though I may be able to get it back up sooner. I am replacing the motherboard, AGAIN, as the new motherboard is stable BUT has two dead memory slots so the machine is only seeing 192GB of 256GB of installed memory.
None the less, it is now an 18 core machine, 36 threads, at 4.8Ghz all cores.
The way I finally got roundcube working is that I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on a virtual machine on the new server. I have this virtual machine listening to a non-routeable IP address so that it can not be reached directly from the outside world to provide some degree of security to ancient software. Then I have it proxied through the main web server on the new machine which listens to both a public IP address and a private one that it can use to talk to internal servers. Something about 24.04 breaks roundcube, I know not what.
On the newest server, I have replaced the motherboard (was unstable and would only lock an i9-10900x at 4.0Ghz). Replacing the motherboard got that up to 4.3Ghz but did not fix the stability issue AND introduced a new issue, this new motherboard has two dead DIMMS slots and it appears to be a compatibility issue as many other users with Corsair memory have experienced the same problem.
Replacing the i9-10900x with an i9-10980xe CPU brought the stable clock speed up to 4.8Ghz (with 18 cores) and instead of the additional cores making it run hotter, it actually runs about 30C cooler under full load than the i9-10980xe does. So everything is good except the dead memory slots.
I’ve ordered another motherboard, this one from Gigabyte because Asus customer service has not been helpful. I plan to put the machine back into service with 192GB of RAM while awaiting the delivery of the new motherboard next Wednesday, so it will go into service and then go out again for motherboard replacement.
As previously noted, centos7, scientific7, and now centos-stream are going away. Centos7 and scientific7 at the end of this month, and centos-stream in a few hours as Redhat has already dropped the repositories for it ahead of schedule.
I’ve brought two new distros online, rocky8.eskimo.com is primarily a replacement for centos-stream, centos7, and scientific7. It is much like Centos WAS before Redhat took it over. Please let me know if there are applications that are presently missing or not working.
The other new shell server I brought online is popos.eskimo.com. Popos is a disguised Ubuntu (they are like Zorin, a Ubuntu with some of their own stuff placed on top). Because of the popularity of the release with the Linux community at large and the fact that Ubuntu based systems are relatively easy to maintain, I’ve added it.
If you have any other distros or services you would like to see here please contact nanook@eskimo.com.
Redhat screwed us again. Sorry for bad news, but Centos-Stream which originally was touted as a rolling release, i.e. no version numbers just continued updates, instead became a fixed release towards a given platform, i.e., centos-stream8 development for centos8, etc.
And so was discontinued along with Centos8 early I might add (end of life was supposed to be June 30th but in true Red Rat fashion they’ve already shut down the repositories.
We can not use any of the RedHat 9 derivatives here because they’ve taken NIS out of Redhat 9 and that is how our network authenticates.
I do not know if/when Fedora Rawhide will follow suit but I am going to install a Rocky Linux 8 server. Rocky has a ten year support policy so Rocky8 should remain available until May 31, 2029. This will give us some stability on the Redhat side for another five years.
Rocky Linux is similar to how Centos started out, an independent organization that takes RHEL open source, re-compiles it, replaces their artwork, and distributes it free. Centos used to do this as well but was absorbed by the Red Hat empire.
Mail lists and some aliases are currently out of service owing to the aliases file on the client mail server somehow being truncated and half not there. I am restoring from backups. While this is in progress mail lists will not work as ALL aliases for smartlist are gone and many users aliases are gone at the moment.
(Update the aliases file is restored, lists are back in service)
On other news, while waiting for the new CPU chip to get here I had the machine sitting in BIOS configuration screen and after about three days it shut itself down spontaneously.
Since I had already replaced the motherboard (some bent pins on the CPU socket necessitated this), I went ahead and replaced the power supply. Prior to replacing it, it would not run at all above 4.3Ghz and would not run stable even at 4Ghz, now it is running at 4.7Ghz, so there was some issue with the old supply, either a ripple problem or it would just not capable of supplying enough power on the 12v line. Since this CPU can use as much as 540 watts it requires a very robust supply.