13th of October

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Two i7-8700’s running Seti
Three i7-6700’s running Asteroids and Seti

Nvidia GPUs
Two running GPUgrid and Seti

Raspberry Pis
Twelve running Einstein BRP4 work


Supermicro BIOS update
I haven’t updated the Supermicro BIOS since I got it. It came with a BIOS version 1 and they are up to version 3 now. I decided its about time it got updated due to all the Intel Spectre patching that is happening and download the latest from their website. The instructions say to put it on a DOS boot disk and run it. How to create a DOS boot disk in this day and age? I have a USB floppy drive and MS-DOS 6 upgrade diskettes, but even that doesn’t work.

After a lot of googling and coming up with suggestions that don’t work I ran across one that actually worked by using Rufus to create it. After that it was fairly straight forward apart from the couple of times when the machine rebooted and appeared to have died (it powers off), but leaving it to do its thing it got there. I expected a reboot after applying the BIOS but not two while booting up again.


Load balanced internet
After last weeks issues with the Telstra internet connection not working to US destinations but the other one did I had a bit of a look at load balancers. It seems they are usually combined with a network firewall appliance so I might get one of those. I don't think the firewall built into my current routers is particularly effective so it should also improve network security.

I need to get the Telstra internet connection changed back to ADSL and get another modem to get it going. Personally I would like to get rid of the home phone which would solve the problem of scam phone calls from overseas, but the wife wants to keep it. This would all change if/when the NBN comes around as there is no point in having two phone lines when NBN offer speeds up to 100Mbit on a single connection. They don't think they be doing my area until 2019.


File server changes
One of the other projects I have is to replace the file server, however I am looking at reusing the existing one running under some derivative of Linux in order to move away from Microsoft products. That was one of the reasons to update the BIOS. I plan on setting the RAID controller to JBOD mode and then using ZFS for its file system, however the server doesn’t have ECC memory which is recommended for ZFS file systems. It can take it but I didn’t buy it at the time due to cost.