Back to the point - idea was to boot some linux distribution to have working shell with basic toolset and test my SSD performance. Of course I'm a geek - I *had* to use PXE! My list of images was growing fast today. Not because I had so many needs, just because not everything was running as expected.
Enough to say, I was happy with PXE too fast - ESXi installer from PXE runs smoothly and I took it as a good sign. Not so fast though!
As you noticed my list now contains lots of different images now. Here you find full list with PXE boot result:
- Local Boot (BIOS Order) (PASS)
- ESXi Installer (PASS)
- FreeNAS Installer (FAIL)
- NAS4Free Installer (FAIL)
- OpenFiler Installer (FAIL)
- Knoppix Live DVD (FAIL)
- Ubuntu v14.10 (FAIL)
- Gentoo x64 Installer (FAIL)
Well, I have to say - Indeed I have chosen good image for a kickstart!
While I was able to "boot" almost all of them (all except Knoppix actually, most likely because of size of DVD image), it turned out that most of them is trying to mount CD somewhere in the middle of the boot process and that obviously failed miserably. There's no CD!
Next thing - booting from PXE/TFTP is quite slow and it takes a few minutes to download 327M VMware image. It was so slow that I've made some benchmarks:
While I was able to "boot" almost all of them (all except Knoppix actually, most likely because of size of DVD image), it turned out that most of them is trying to mount CD somewhere in the middle of the boot process and that obviously failed miserably. There's no CD!
Next thing - booting from PXE/TFTP is quite slow and it takes a few minutes to download 327M VMware image. It was so slow that I've made some benchmarks:
PXE/TFTP: 5m51sec // QNAP to Discoverer over GE wire
PXE/FTP: 0m50sec // QNAP to Discoverer over GE wire
PXE/FTP: 0m50sec // QNAP to Discoverer over GE wire
WGET: 0m27sec // QNAP to notebook, over 802.11ac wireless
Maybe it's not a huge issue since we only use PXE to boot installers, but its annoying. Switching to ftp speed-up multiple times!
Looks like my "brand new" shiny idea of installing everything over the network just blew up. I believe it is fixable but probably image-by-image. Here's a good example for best linux distribution ever. pxegrub.0? Sounds promising. Maybe next time...
Anyway, do you remember this little nasty thing that our hard drives vendors do to us? Normally in computer word we use binary counting, which effectively means that kilo=1024 and mega=1024*kilo=1024*1024=1 048 576. Hell, not for HDD manufacturers. They use this little cheat on us and count kilo as 1 000 and mega as 1 000 000. What is practical value of this? Real capacity of HDD is smaller than declared by vendor. It wasn't a big deal in '90 when biggest HDDs was like 20GB. Even now when you buy 0,5TB or 1TB HDD and it turns out to be 10% smaller it's something we just used to agree.
But I just bought 2x4.0TB drives and guess what? 4.0TB (Declared) == 3725MB (Real). I was cheated by 275GB on each drive! Thats insane!
Anyway, do you remember this little nasty thing that our hard drives vendors do to us? Normally in computer word we use binary counting, which effectively means that kilo=1024 and mega=1024*kilo=1024*1024=1 048 576. Hell, not for HDD manufacturers. They use this little cheat on us and count kilo as 1 000 and mega as 1 000 000. What is practical value of this? Real capacity of HDD is smaller than declared by vendor. It wasn't a big deal in '90 when biggest HDDs was like 20GB. Even now when you buy 0,5TB or 1TB HDD and it turns out to be 10% smaller it's something we just used to agree.
But I just bought 2x4.0TB drives and guess what? 4.0TB (Declared) == 3725MB (Real). I was cheated by 275GB on each drive! Thats insane!
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