ria is now a 1U rackmount machine with 4 hot-swap drive bays. It's a Supermicro CSE-815TQ-600WB chassis with a Supermicro X9SCi-LN4F motherboard, Xeon E3-1270v2 CPU and 32G of RAM. Its main drive is a new 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD, and there is a refurbished HGST Ultrastar 3TB drive to hold backups of other machines. It replaced what I'm now calling oldria.

ria came about as the result of my need for more RAM in my gateway. The previous gateway was a D510 CPU which could only address 4G of RAM. While that's sufficient for gateway duties, I wanted to run more elaborate intrusion detection software and ZFS. I also wanted a rackmount chassis so I could remove the shelf from my rack and make room for some of my Middle Atlantic rackmount drawers.

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Note that in the pricing below, I lumped the chassis, motherboard, CPU and RAM price into the chassis price because I bought them all at once.

ria hardware

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  CSE-815TQ-600WB	Supermicro 1U chassis with 4 hot-swap drive bays	CSE-815TQ-600WB	1	$525.00	$525.00
  Samsung 850 Pro 256GB	256GB SSD	MZ-7KE256BW	1	$107.99	$107.99
  Hitachi HUS724030ALE641	Ul;trastar 7K4000 3TB 7,200 rpm SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" drive	HUS724030ALE641	1	$56.99	$56.99
  Supermicro X9SCi-LN4F	Intel Xeon motherboard, 4 LAN + IPMI, 4 SATA 2.0, 2 SATA 6.0	X9SCi-LN4F	1	$0.00	$0.00
  E3-1270v2	CPU	E3-1270v2	1	$0.00	$0.00
  RAM	8GB DDR3 ECC RAM	RAM	4	$0.00	$0.00
  Total					$689.98

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ria software

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  FreeBSD	FreeBSD 11.0-STABLE	FreeBSD 11.0-STABLE	1	$0.00	$0.00
  Total					$0.00

As usual for my headless machines, I'm running FreeBSD.

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Grand Total

• ria hardware	$689.98
  ria software	$0.00
  Total	$689.98

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Manuals

• Supermicro CSE-815TQ-600WB chassis (PDF)
• Supermicro X9SCI-LN4F motherboard (PDF)

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Diary

• May 3, 2024
  
  • ria is now running FreeBSD 13.3-STABLE.

• May 21, 2023
  
  • ria is now running FreeBSD 13.2-STABLE.

• April 27, 2023
  
  • ria is now running FreeBSD 12.4-STABLE.

• July 28, 2020
  
  • ria is now running FreeBSD 11.4-STABLE.

• October 19, 2019
  
  • ria has been updated to FreeBSD 11.3-STABLE.

• August 11, 2018
  
  • I installed the 0086L4 fan, replacing the dummy fan block. I had to use a 4-pin fan splitter cable, which isn't a great idea with RPM monitored fans but the 5th fan header on the motherboard is near the rear faceplate and I didn't have any 4-pin fan cables long enough to cleanly route from that header to the new fan. I'll order one from Amazon and replace the splitter setup when the new cable arrives.

    The new fan should help keep the Mellanox ConnectX-2 card cool.

• August 6, 2018
  
  • I ordered a 0086L4 fan and a 2.5" drive tray from Supermicro direct. I need the fan to keep the new Mellanox ConnectX-2 card cool. The drive tray is to allow me to put another SSD in ria or kiva.

• July 13, 2018
  
  • ria is now running FreeBSD 11.2-STABLE.

• December 19, 2017
  
  • ria is now running FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE.

• June 14, 2017
  
  • ria is now running FreeBSD 11.1-BETA1.

• March 14, 2017
  
  • I installed the new version of ria. It's nice to have 32G of RAM, a Xeon 4-core CPU and 4 gigabit ethernet ports. I don't really need the CPU except to be able to address RAM. The previous hardware was constrained to 4G of RAM. Which is plenty for simple gateway tasks, but I want to be able to use ZFS and I also want to run more elaborate intrusion detection software. I'm glad I went with a Supermicro chassis since the hot swap cages are the same as those in kiva.

    The new hardware is in the rack and doing its duty. Since it's only 1U, some rack space was made available. i installed two of my Middle Atlantic 2U rackmount drawers so I have space to store tools, extra fans and spare hard drives.

    It is interesting that it might turn out that the new machine is roughly equivalent in power consumption to the old machine. If true, I'll chalk it up to newer CPUs having wider and more effective SpeedStepping, an efficient motherboard, SSD instead of a spinning drive for root, and fewer spinning drives.

• March 6, 2017
  
  • I finally ordered a replacement for ria. I've needed to do this for a while. Normally I don't have CPU load issues on ria, but it's severely memory constrained at 4G (due to Intel Atom D510), and I want to be able to revive some of my old monitoring software and also run ZFS. The latter is the main impetus for more RAM.

    The machine I ordered is a used 1U server from eBay. A Supermicro CSE-815TQ-600WB chassis, X9SCi-LN4F motherboard, Xeon E3-1270v2 CPU, 32G of RAM. I ordered a Supermicro MCP-220-00043-0N drive caddy in order to install a Samsung 850 Pro in one of the hotswap bays as the root drive. I may later change to ZFS on root, and it's possible I'll move the Samsung 850 Pro outside of the hot swap bays. I also ordered a Supermicro CSE-PTFB-813LB front bezel. I don't need the lock, but I do need the filter. I have a similar bezel on kiva, and it's very useful in my environment (my unfinished basement).

    I don't really need the oomph of an E3-1270v2 CPU, and hence I might replace it with an E3-1265Lv2 to save power (and heat/noise). The one area where CPU has been an issue on ria's current hardware is compiling the kernel or 'make buildworld'. So it will be nice to have a significant bump in performance when I'm upgrading/updating. And I'll be happy to have additional gigabit ethernet ports, since it gives me some flexibility I currently do not have. Cordoning off my WiFi and IoT devices, for example. And having a separate network to connect to kiva if desired.

    The new hardware won't be her until next week. Hopefully the failing hard drive in ria will last that long. I already have the Samsung 850 Pro loaded from a good ria backup in case I need to swap it in before the new hardware arrives.