[Asterisk-Users] Re: What is the best Dell Machine for Asterisk?

[Steven]

I am ordering a Dell 2800 today.
>From averything I have read, there should be no issues with the box.
It will be SMP and with the following changes I have made my 1750, very stable.

REF:
FYI on zttool output on SMP system

--- Results after 56 passes ---
Best: 100.000000 -- Worst: 99.987793 -- Average: 99.999564
Only 2 were 99.987793, the 54 others were all 100.000000.

I got this by making the changes below on my dual proc Dell 1750.

setpci -v -s 01:08.1 LATENCY_TIMER=8
setpci -v -s 00:0f.1 LATENCY_TIMER=8
setpci -v -s 01:04.0 LATENCY_TIMER=8
setpci -v -s 01:02.0 LATENCY_TIMER=8
setpci -v -s 00:0f.2 LATENCY_TIMER=8
setpci -v -s 01:04.0 LATENCY_TIMER=8 (these are USB, SCSI HW RAID driver, Ethernet, Video, etc. I did not alter ZAP cards, nor any
bridges or buses)

echo 1 > /proc/irq/17/smp_affinity (Ethernet)
echo 1 > /proc/irq/18/smp_affinity (SCSI HW RAID Driver)
echo 2 > /proc/irq/20/smp_affinity (TDM)
echo 2 > /proc/irq/24/smp_affinity (TE411P)

I also turned of the startup of irqbalance.

The setpci changes did the most work concerning reaching 100% in zttest.

Irqbalance was causing the the processor handling the interrupts of the zap cards to change very often.
This would impose a delay during the change and cause the zttest numbers to drop/be inconsistent.

Because I turned irqbalance off, the irqs are processed round robin style, which is also not good.
Therefore, I hard coded the processor affinity for the zap cards to one proc and all other high load irqs to the other proc.
If you have more than 2 procs, you can spread them out even more. If you do not turn off irqbalance, the affinity changes will be
overwritten by it.

I made these changes on a live system without issue.
I set these changes in  /etc/rc.d/rc.local to reset them after reboots.


-- 
-- 
Steven

May you have the peace and freedom that come from abandoning all hope of having a better past.
---    -      ---  - - -       -    -     -   -   --  - - - --- - ------   - - --- - - -- -  -    - --   -   -    -
"Phil Pritchard" <phil at pritchard.asn.au> wrote in message news:43B303DD.6060304 at pritchard.asn.au...
i could not recommend dell more.
 and also to say, there is loads of support for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels for most if not all of there hardware.
"times are a changing!"

the best bang for buck(only a few months ago) is the poweredge sc430..(extremely quiet, without a load)
works perfectly, everything!

with regard to irq problems, you will get that with any machine/hardware. not just dell.
when i build or commission a new server, i always run hardware tests. like ram, hard drive, processor and motherboard.
checking motherboard for interrupt conflicts etc.(with all cards installed)
the best all round tool for this is the UBCD. universal boot cd ( goggle )
there are a few versions, ie. a small(about 35meg) and a large one( abit over 100meg)...for memory.

i have a lot of dell machines, including some very old ones.. that still go hard...
the engineering in these machines is the reason why i use them.
i have pulled a lot of machines/servers apart, and there one of the best..


there my bit! hope it helps...

Phil




William Boehlke wrote:

We have more than a hundred Dell servers in production at customers. We use
them because we can have them serviced easily, just about anywhere.

They are principally 1850s and 2850s, or their predecessors, in T1 and
larger applications.

The reported IRQ problems are easily avoided if, for example, you don't use
more than one card in a server or, better yet, don't use cards at all.



-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of C F
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2005 5:22 PM
To: Walt Reed; Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] What is the best Dell Machine for Asterisk?

Last time I checked Dell does support Linux.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&
oc=pe2850-max&s=bsd
Scroll down to the OS chose and you'll see out of 26 choices only 4
are M$, the rest minus one are for a total of 21 linux choices.

On 12/19/05, Walt Reed <asterisk at linuxguy.com> wrote:

Why oh why would you want to install *, which runs on Linux, on a
machine made by a company that does NOT support Linux? Both IBM and HP
do a pretty good job of supporting Linux. So do other Linux oriented
companies like PenguinComputing.com

Digium cards have historically been a little finicky in regards to which
machines they work in, but Sangoma cards should work in virtually any
modern machine that has the right type of slots (careful with some
modern servers that ONLY have PCI Express slots.) Hopefully someone can
comment about modern digium cards in regards to compatability. Have they
gotten better?

On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 08:44:38AM +0800, Hiu Yen Onn said:

Then, how about Acer? Does it work well with asterisk?

Simone Cittadini wrote:


Matt Florell ha scritto:


The best Dell for a production environment Asterisk server is no Dell
at all. They make some great workstations, but I've had many problems
with their servers(as have many others on this list) when trying to
use them in production for Asterisk. Take a look at the Digium
compatibility list:
http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=compatibility



*I've installed a PowerEdge 2850 - Xeon 3.0GHz/2MB, 800FSB with two
TE410P in it, the cards didn't worked out of the box, but they worked
after a couple of hours googling around, and it is in production since
3 months, never gone down.
*

*(I'm not advocating dell, actually I don't even like dell as a
society, only sharing my experience)

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