Intel Atom C3950 + Tyan Tempest S3227

[starshipeleven]

Question: Why does TYAN motherboards not sell in Amazon.com? I know it's not for consumers, but I do find the low-end TYAN motherboards impressive with embedded CPU as low as 9W. This could be very useful for a router setup where minimal power consumption is required since it'll sit idle most of the time running either pfSense or VyOS.

Supermicro is a brand you'll find much more easily, especially on ebay.

Just be aware that if the board supports ECC it will NOT boot if you place non-ECC ram in it.

[GraysonPeddie]

Thanks but not to be rude, I didn't ask if the Supermicro or Tyan motherboards support non-ECC memory.

Anyway, are there any Supermicro motherboards that have the similar featureset as the Tyan motherboard that has an M.2 slot? A motherboard with 4-core CPU is fine for router/firewall use.

[stiiixy]

I don't see what's so theoretical, bunch of servers using a SAN is fairly standard industry practice? You can even have diskless NAS (i.e. front-end nodes, while SAN is storage back end)

On this Atom board you might install a (dual port) Fibre Channel adapter, or more Ethernet on the PCIe 8x slot.

The theory was you could manufacture without storage ports, not whether or not you would utilise network boot tech's.

[starshipeleven]

Thanks but not to be rude, I didn't ask if the Supermicro or Tyan motherboards support non-ECC memory.

I did not know your ram preferences so there was a 50% chance it would not be a good choice for you.

I always state that because Supermicro's behaviour is not stated in the manuals nor in documentation, does not throw errors or anything might help the user understand why the board isn't booting at all.

Anyway, are there any Supermicro motherboards that have the similar featureset as the Tyan motherboard that has an M.2 slot?

Why you would want an M.2 slot on a router/firewall?

I've been using decent USB 3.0 drives or UHS-I SD cards (on a USB 3.0 port) instead of Sata DOMs for many systems and it's never been an issue.

A motherboard with 4-core CPU is fine for router/firewall use.

They don't have relatively cut-down boards like the Tyan, at least yet. All ones with M.2 slots don't support ECC (and many have a industrial form factor, smaller than mini-itx).

Since I don't know enough your preferences, this is their atom boards lineup (where they state in the table if the board uses ECC or not, and if there are M.2 slots) https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/

If I was buying a board for a router/firewall from Amazon.com I would get this https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Mi...rds=supermicro

which is older gen (the one before the last gen) so they dropped the price to an affordable 260$ and does not cost 550$ or even much more, like the latest-gen boards.

[coder]

Just be aware that if the board supports ECC it will NOT boot if you place non-ECC ram in it.

What are you smoking? There are plenty of boards that support both!

It will say in the product specifications, and manufacturers usually release Qualified Vendor Lists which specify the exact model numbers of the memory DIMMs they've tested with it.

Supermicro, even: https://www.supermicro.com/products/...600/X10SRA.cfm

[starshipeleven]

What are you smoking? There are plenty of boards that support both!

I have plenty of first hand experience of Supermicro boards not booting at all unless you place ECC ram in there.

I'm not alone in this
https://forums.servethehome.com/inde...ost-beeps.595/ (see post 11)
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/com...c_motherboard/

Supermicro, even: https://www.supermicro.com/products/...600/X10SRA.cfm

Note the "Up to 128GB DDR4 ECC/non-ECC UDIMM (available with Core i7 only)".

That means that if you install a Xeon (which is the whole point of buying such a board imho) then you CAN NOT use non-ECC as the stupid thing will not boot.

As a general rule of thumb you should assume that all Supermicro boards that state they support ECC also CANNOT boot without ECC. If they don't support it (or the CPU you install does not support ECC), then they will work fine with non-ECC ram.

I'm not against this policy, at least it makes sure the ECC ram is recognized. What angers me is that it does not say much in the manuals, nor display an error message on screen to tell me why it isn't booting at all.

[coder]

I have plenty of first hand experience of Supermicro boards not booting at all unless you place ECC ram in there.

From your original statement, it wasn't clear that you were only talking about Supermicro boards.

I've used other boards that work with both.

[starshipeleven]

From your original statement, it wasn't clear that you were only talking about Supermicro boards.

I've used other boards that work with both.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I confirm that boards of other brands I used did work fine with both, even on servers.
(with unbuffered ram. I never really tried a server supposed to use registered/buffered with registered non-ECC because of ... reasons)

[AndyChow]

Why do you say this? Quickassist can provide massive performance increases in relevant workloads.

Name one. And no, I don't consider hardware assisted VNC into remote servers, nor hardware contained security protocols an advantage, unless those are peer-reviewed by an independent third-party. Everything it does, can be done by simple scripts you can write in an afternoon. Surrendering all your internal security to the primary corporation that tells you "it's fine" isn't my idea of security. As for performance increase, the major benefits are on things that you might use for a few hours per year, so not worth keeping such a huge window open.

I'm paranoid, not because I don't understand, but because I know too much. Give all the schematics and code to a university group to review and certify, and then I'll trust it. Otherwise, no thanks. Most of my routine maintenance, I can do just running a few make commands. Sure, you have to sit down and painfully grind through the horrible documentation that is autotools a few times, but it's an order of magnitude more powerful than any QuickAssist solution, and doesn't involve surrendering your security to someone else.

You don't fix your lock problems by giving the lock/unlock buttons to someone else.

[coder]

I'm paranoid, not because I don't understand, but because I know too much.

That an easy position to take, in the abstract. But what if something like QuickAssist is what made HTTPS-support economically viable for Phoronix? I guess you'd rather have an unencrypted connection that you at least know is insecure, but that's not necessarily a good solution for everyone.