Both for my work and private tinkering I often have the need to do bandwith tests over a network connection. Sometimes it’s troubleshooting ethernet connections up to 10Gbit, sometimes it’s testing an internet line, a WiFi link or actual real-world VPN throughput potential. Whatever the case I often need a good mutli-platform bandwith testing tool. For this I use a program called “iperf” and while it can be a bit daunting at first with a little know-how it’s actually pretty easy! Read on to find out how to use it in a variety of situations:
Don’t have enough ports available in your (Storage/ESXi) server? Even though modern motherboards come with 6 onboard port now a days, maybe it’s not enough for you. Or you are using a little bit older hardware and don’t have enough 6G ports (Only important to SSD’s really). A quick and easy way is adding a PCIe based storage controller. And while True Hardware RAID can be good to have, on lower end controllers it’s often more of a hindrance then a benefit. Especially when using something life software RAID or ZFS.
This guide will show you how to flash an LSI 9211-8i or 9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware. IT stands for “Intergrated Target”. This way the disks get presented to the OS is a raw form, much like your motherboard ports would do. This enables complete control, SMART data for your OS and Power Management such as spindown. It will also help you if you encounter the “Failed to initialize PAL” error while flashing.
I have been building private servers for over 12 years now, as written before my current server is incarnation/version 8 with several even having minor revision numbers between the big numbers. During this time I have accumulated some best practices for myself and one of them is to always perform a full surface scan on (new) disks I receive. Read more about it in this article!
A while back I built myself a powerful PC based HTPC and today a friend asked me to design one for him. Since I have it all figured out anyway, I can just as well put it up on here.
This third part will be a hardware and design overview of the Storage server that I am using. This server combines a NAS with some secondary functions for me such as SabNZBd, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, FTP, CrashPlan, etc. I know that kind of taints it’s pure function (serve me storage) but since I used a pretty hefty machine for it, all seems to be working quite well and since this is not a company installation I believe the otherwise wasted CPU power can be put to good use! This article will be one of the most complex because it will hold the configuration I made and also partially the reasons why.
