The w2100z is loud, no two ways about it. And someone claimed that you can't make it quiet.

Well, I have a nice w2100z and I want to use it as a test server at home. I'm tired of the constant buzzing. So, I've ordered some things to help quiet it.

There are basically 3 things I can do to reduce the noise footprint:

1. Replace the loud components.
   1. CPU fans
   2. Case fans
   3. Power supply
2. Put the computer in a data closet.
3. Add some noise absorbers inside the box.

I've actually already relocated the w2100z and it still pollutes the ambient noise in my house:

You can see where I've pulled the w2100z off of that half-height telco rack mount cabinet. And I cleaned off that dust from a remodeling job in the house! Okay, I keep the closet door open all of the time to keep air flowing and I also have added a bathroom fan to push air through the closet:

I bring this up because closing the door or turning off the fan are big improvements. So, even with any improvements I make, I'll have to keep this in mind. One thing I have done is add a remote digital thermometer to the room. I'm trying to get an idea of how hot it really gets, but I won't know until summer time really hits.

Also, if I put the w2100z inside the cabinet, I might be able to leverage any sound insulation it will provide.

Okay, the real thrust here is that I ordered some replacement fans for the case and cpu. I like Scythe and I like to order it from NewEgg, except the Scythe Mini-Ninjas were out of stock. So I got them from EndPCNoise:

I went with the Mini-Ninja because space inside the w2100z is limited:

I've put a full height Scythe Ninja in a couple of Antec P180 cases and I've been leery of doing that for a dual-cpu system. I.e., one in a case is tight.

Anyway, the first thing I did was take some pictures of the current CPU fans in place, in case I wanted to add them back:

This also showed me where the fan connectors went. I thought I was screwed, as the current fans had a 3 pin connector, but the cpu fans that came with the Mini-Ninjas (and some quieter replacements:)

were either 3 pin or came with converters.

I pulled out the heatsinks, which was a bit of chore, but I followed the directions at Sun Java™ Workstation W1100z and W2100z User Guide. We can see the thermal grease on the bottom of the heat sink:

I used some alcohol pads to clean off the gunk:

Note that some has gotten on the "fins" and it appears there is small ding. I think that happened trying to get it loose from that last connector.

The CPU also starts out dirty:

And cleans up nicely:

Note that I'm not as concerned with getting this perfect yet. You can see the grime in the plastic retainer bracket and I'll only be worried when I get ready to add it all in.

Before I do anything else, I want to do a dry run to see if the fit is right. So I just place the towers on the cpus:

Amazingly, the daughter board has a better fit than the motherboard. Also, I'll probably not put a CPU fan on it as the case fan will do a lot of work there. Or if the CPU fan is quiet enough, perhaps I'll make sure to push and pull air across that CPU.

With the motherboard CPU, it looks like it will fit okay, but there are some connectors underneath which may cause complications:

The real problem is that the CPU fan retainer bracket that Sun has used is not standard! The 940 socket adapter has nothing to grab onto:

Hmm, we see that the Socket 478 assembly clip almost works:

Except that the CPU hole does not line up correctly!

If we pull the bracket, attach the clip, then we can see that we now know the dimensions needed for a replacement retainer bracket, and dang if it isn't a close fit:

But we can see that the mounting holes are just a bit off center and I'm not sure if the metal assembly might now be touching something else on the motherboard. If I knew for sure that it was not, I could probably bore new holes for the mounting screws. I'll have to think about that.

By the way, a quick search for replacement brackets showed that the Sun ones were not compatible with standard 940 brackets.

If I line up the holes, we can really see the gap:

It is about 3mm off and it doesn't look like there is any place to get that back.

I need a good solid connection or the thermal seal could break.

Does anyone know of a good replacement bracket? It seems proprietary brackets don't work well and the Scythe Universal Retention kit will not work.

I need to think about what I'm going to do before I make any modifications. :->

We had a town hall style event today and some Oracle brass were there to answer some questions.

What struck me most about the mood of the questions was the pride and ownership that Sun employees have over our products. Not only was there a paternal pride over the products we birthed, we had it for those that we adopted.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg, we wanted to know if our customers were going to be looked after. We have an emotional investment with them as well. I still have friends who buy Sun gear and I'm quick to answer their questions when they get stuck. I'm sure others do that as well.

I think that as long as a company's culture embraces that pride, their customers will get a product that they love. We've seen that to date with Sun and OpenSolaris - Sun employees want the quality poured into Solaris to remain in OpenSolaris. That is probably the biggest differentiator between Linux and OpenSolaris. And if you don't understand that pride and investment, you'll never accept OpenSolaris as open source.

But if you do understand how individuals at Sun own quality, then you'll understand how our products and customers are going to be looked after.

Okay, the spuds and the drives work like a charm:

[root@ultralord ~]> format
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t1d0 <DEFAULT cyl 30391 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
          /pci@0,0/pci108e,5351@1f,2/disk@1,0
       1. c0t3d0 <DEFAULT cyl 38910 alt 2 hd 255 sec 126>
          /pci@0,0/pci108e,5351@1f,2/disk@3,0
       2. c0t4d0 <DEFAULT cyl 38910 alt 2 hd 255 sec 126>
          /pci@0,0/pci108e,5351@1f,2/disk@4,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^D

I want to create a pool for building kernels:

[root@ultralord ~]> zpool create builds c0t3d0 c0t4d0
[root@ultralord ~]> df -h /builds
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
builds                 1.1T    19K   1.1T     1%    /builds

Hmm, while I like the space, these are 640G HDs. Wait, I didn't use raidz:

[root@ultralord ~]> zpool  destroy builds
[root@ultralord ~]> zpool create builds raidz c0t3d0 c0t4d0
[root@ultralord ~]> df -h /builds
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
builds                 587G    19K   587G     1%    /builds

Much better - now I need to get some source and let it rip!

So I ordered 5 540-3025 for $15 off of ebay.com. And note, I easily could have had my manager okay getting 3 additional drives from my Ultra 24. Really, it is that easy. But DYI and blogging are fun!

The spuds were too tall. We can see here that we have room for 3 additional drives:

And yet we can only add two spuds here:

Note that the middle one is not even aligned properly into a slot!

So first off, if I just wanted to add one drive, the spud would work without any modification. Secondly, I'm not upset with the seller on eBay.com - I took a calculated risk on these spuds. Thirdly, I have a dremel and I'm not afraid to use it!

I did a quick visual comparison of the old spud and the new one, it looks like the top can easily be cut off at these points:

I can better show this with a red line in the back:

It won't effect the hinge and it looks easy enough to do. The first pass on the first spud is shown here:

I took my time and probably made it harder than it really was. You can see here how raggedy it looks:

That will need to be smoothed down. I don't need perfection, but I don't want to cut myself putting a drive in. I also don't want any pieces falling off due to vibrations and being sucked into a fan! A close up can really show how unacceptable this is:

I also want to show you a before and after picture so you can see what I took off:

I then quickly started on the second spud, focusing on cutting out portions:

I don't show the final results, but I did smoother cuts and I didn't have to sand it as much.

And we can see the two spuds added to the Ultra 24:

Okay, now I just need the drives to show up!

So I have a new Ultra 24 and I have a stack of sata drives. Hmm, perhaps I could mix the two?

One problem, I don't have the 540-6562 spuds. (see Sun Spud HDD brackets for a discussion) Evidently I can buy the 540-6562 off of eBay, except they do not have any.

I can find a set of 5 540-3025 for $15. And it turns out that these should work! See A review of the Sun Ultra 24 workstation for why I think so. In any event, $15 including shipping is a price I'm willing to take a gamble on. I guess I could always pull a drive off of my w2100z and try, but really, I can wait for my newly ordered spuds to arrive.

Note, I could probably get my manager to order me a brand new spanking drive with the spud attached. But that is no where near as fun as wondering if my order is going to work or not.

I'm waiting on a build to finish, playing a little bit of WorldOfGoo, and I notice that my Sun Ray is no longer connected to the server. Strange.

I've also lost connection to the other server in my data closet. Now, I know the battery on the UPS back there is almost dead, a brownout the other day caused a reboot. I go and check and they are okay.

I look at my Rosewill 8-Port Gigabit Switch and wonder if I loosened something when I connected my MacBook Air to it earlier that night. Nope, but then I wonder why only half the links seem active. I confirm my data closet punches into one of the silent links. I try moving it, but I don't have anything labeled, so who knows how well that is going to work.

I happen to have a spare Rosewill sitting there (good deal at NewEgg.com a couple of years ago), so I swap it in. And sure enough, the data closet is back.

I think the old Rosewill had been going of late. I'd noticed some strange hangs to web sites on one of my machines and not the other.

I'm still happy with the units - I've got another servicing another data closet. And the one that failed had been on for probably 18 months straight.

When I first started using 1and1.com for webhosting, I got frustrated with their emphasis on advertising their site and not seeming to help me. The straw that broke my back was when they couldn't help me load a module into their WordPress.com blog software. I called up sales and had them yank my account. The guy I talked to told me how to fix my problem - install the tarball myself.

That was over a year ago and I've been happy since then. I like being able to solve a problem by installing something.

I've since used them to host 97red.com for my son's soccer team. I've had a blast rolling my own perl scripts.

For my son's soccer club site Blitz United Soccer Club, I decided to go with Network Solutions which wasn't an easy choice. I did it in part because the board of directors had some positive experience with Network Solutions and it was the quickest way to move the domain pointers (administered by Network Solutions).

I held my ground and got the Unix offering. And I almost lost it when I realized that while the host was running Unix, I had no frigging ssh or shell access! What I have to do is use lftp to reverse mirror the site from my home web server.

But you know, I now actually like the model. It keeps an instant backup ready and it forces me to make the changes and view the results before I push. Right now I'm not using a database or PHP on the host, which may change my mind. By the way, my users just love the mail filtering and interface that Network Solutions offers. I've gotten a lot of leeway due to just that.

If you've ever wondered how the NFS protocol is maintained, designed, discussed, etc, now is a great time to watch it happen live. James Lentini has proposed a method to allow client to initiate a file "copy" from one location to another on the same server. With the traditional method, the client has to read the file from the server and then write it back. With the COPY proposal, all of that overhead is removed.

That part is pretty pedestrian and not being debated. What is being debated is a server-to-server copy proposal. You can see the benefits here:

                                         /
                                         /
             Existing approach           /            New COPY procedures
  Client           Source   Destination  / Client           Source   Destination
    +                +          +        /   +                +          +
    |                |          |        /   |                |          |
1   |>--get FH------>|          |        /   |>-COPY_NOTIFY-->|          |
    |               /|          |        /   |               /|          |
    |              / |          |        /   |              / |          |
    |             /  |          |        /   |             /  |          |
2   |<-----------+   |          |        /   |<-----------+   |          |
    |                |          |        /   |                |          |
    |                |          |        /   |                |          |
3   |>--get FH----------------->|        /   |>--COPY------------------->|
    |                |         /|        /   |                |         /|
    |                |        / |        /   |                |        / |
4   |<-----------------------+  |        /   |<-----------------------+  |
    |                |          |        /   |                |          |
5   |>--read-------->|          |        /   |                |<--read--<|
    |               /|          |        /   |                |\         |
    |              / |          |        /   |                | \        |
    |             /  |          |        /   |                |  \       |
6   |<-----------+   |          |        /   |                |   +----->|
    |                |          |        /   |                |          |
7   |>--write------------------>|        /   |                |<--read--<|
    |                |         /|        /   |                |\         |
    |                |        / |        /   |                | \        |
    |                |       /  |        /   |                |  \       |
8   |<----------------------+   |        /   |                |   +----->|
    |                |          |        /   |                |          |
9   |>--read-------->|          |        /   |                |<--read--<|
    |               /|          |        /   |                |\         |
    |              / |          |        /   |                | \        |
    |             /  |          |        /   |                |  \       |
10  |<-----------+   |          |        /   |                |   +----->|
    |                |          |        /   |                |          |

Don't read anything into the length of a horizontal request, i.e., the read at time 5 is not twice as fast as the write at time 7. Assume that everything is just 1 network hop away.

Also, ignore that we can have multiple reads or writes in flight. In the end, you can see that we will issue almost 1/2 the number of over the wire calls if we let the servers handle the copy.

And the mailing list is full of lively discussion about how to do this - there isn't a disagreement that it is a bad thing to do. Instead the discussion is all about how to implement it.

Rather than bias you towards my view, you can go watch the action in either the thread archives or join the working group alias nfsv4 -- NFSv4 Working Group.

I decided to undertake the editing of RFC3530bis, which is a second effort on RFC3530. The intent is to make the document cleaner, but to not introduce any over-the-wire protocol changes. (We have NFSv4.1 for that.)

The main effort so far has been in taking the text version of RFC3530 and converting it to XML. The reason to do that is that it really makes it easy to organize the layout. Effectively, this is just like keeping my thesis in LaTeX. Plus I always love compiling a document. The previous version of the document had been maintained in troff and the known source was out of sync with the official document.

So now you can look at the documents here:

1. draft-ietf-nfsv4-rfc3530bis-00.txt [draft]
2. draft-ietf-nfsv4-rfc3530bis-dot-x-00.txt[draft]

The first major change was the pulling of the XDR description of NFSv4.0 out of the main document and into a separate one. That allows for the easy creation of your own .x file from that document.

I had an Ultra 24 waiting for me at the Tulsa offices, and really, I never knew we had a Tulsa office and that it was a quarter mile from my house.

The machine was dead quiet when I turned it on and then it started to roar. The fans would not go off. The machine would actually not boot at all. All I could find were these forum posts - Ultra 24 FAN speed. I downloaded the 1.5 version of the BIOS and that did not help. After the reboot, the fans were still going. I then turned the machine off as I checked to make sure I hadn't disconnected anything when I added RAM. I hadn't, but the machine started to work after that. :->. I believe what was effectively a cold reboot enabled that.

The other thing I did notice is that the system came with Solaris 10. I went through the initial install screens and they appeared to be as sluggish as I remembered. I then installed OpenSolaris on the box (onnv_109) and the install screens there screamed. The UI was the same, the exact same series of screens, but the overall response level was much faster.

I've now recommissioned the machine name ultralord in my home domain.

Lisa Week has provided a synopsis of the Connectathon 2009 talks (of which most have a slide deck here). Note that Lisa's notes are the only record of what Bruce Fields presented. ;->