189 replies to this topic

[tk007b]

Hi mate,

If you have multiple hard drive, then go into the BIOS and make sure it's booting from the correct hard drive

Good luck

TK

 Dümpler, on Sep 25 2011, 08:05 PM, said:

Hey guys, I recently bought a Macbook Air and the HP N36L. So I'm not only new to the whole server thing but also to all the Mac OS X stuff. Please don't be mad about my nooby questions and my bad English

My problem is this part:
15. Once you have rebooted, you should be greeted with the standard 'green' Chameleon boot loader screen.

When it reboots it doesn't show me the 'green' Chameleon boot loader screen. Instead it says on a black screen:

boot0: GPT
boot0: test
boot0: test
boot0: error_

Does anyone has an suggestion what I did wrong and how to fix it...?

[tk007b]

Anyone have a problem where the ethernet stops working.

Reinstalling the kext, repairing permissions and rebooting always cures it but it's happened a few times now on both the half and full duplex kexts

Cheers

TK

[antikus]

 tk007b, on Sep 27 2011, 11:54 AM, said:

Anyone have a problem where the ethernet stops working.

Reinstalling the kext, repairing permissions and rebooting always cures it but it's happened a few times now on both the half and full duplex kexts

Cheers

TK

Yes. I was getting that. Ethernet would just die under load. The Network panel interface in System Preference would claim that the network cable is disconnected. Unplugging/plugging the cable would not help and require a reboot. After reboot ethernet would work fine for web browsing and such, but would die again if I tried to copy a file to the microserver. I gave up and bought Intel's Ct NIC for $25. That one works with Apple's own kext.

I think the problem is that BCM5723 controller has a few bugs that a driver is supposed to take care off. The FreeBSD driver, the one that the kext os based on, has known problems with that controller (google "freebsd bge watchdog"). There is an official Broadcom driver for Linux, but I do not know how much of that code made it into the kext. The guy who made the kext has a different NIC, so I bet he didn't worry about support for 5723.

[tk007b]

ok thanks,

Good to know it's not just me.

Is this the one that works for you ?

http://h10010.www1.h...75-3769777.html

Cheers

TK

 antikus, on Sep 28 2011, 08:11 AM, said:

Yes. I was getting that. Ethernet would just die under load. The Network panel interface in System Preference would claim that the network cable is disconnected.

[antikus]

Yes, looks like the right one. I got it from superbiiz.com. It was $25 including tax and shipping:

http://www.superbiiz...d674c02b1d1cd56

You would need to tweak the ktext plist a bit:

http://tonymacx86.co...php?f=19&t=4057

 tk007b, on Sep 28 2011, 08:52 AM, said:

ok thanks,

Good to know it's not just me.

Is this the one that works for you ?

http://h10010.www1.h...75-3769777.html

Cheers

TK

[tk007b]

Cool - thanks,

Am in the UK but have family visiting from America in a few weeks so will get them to bring this over for me ! :-)

Happy Days

 antikus, on Sep 28 2011, 05:41 PM, said:

Yes, looks like the right one. I got it from superbiiz.com. It was $25 including tax and shipping:

[rtrtrtrt]

been a while since i updated on my end sorry - been distracted with outside distractions. from memory I was seeing some interesting behaviours.

i can get 1650x1080 with the internal graphics card but if i boot from an internal hdd it's hit and miss and will 50% boot to something like 1400x1080. if i boot from a usb hdd then it was much more consistent at 1680x1050. Pretty sure i tried a few diff versions of chameleon on the internal boot drive but didnt manage to fix this - usb boot is always more consistent.

also like some others i find the ethernet a little hit and miss. i never get a mac address but more often than not the network will come up straight away and as fdx 1G.

also iirc noted that file transfers across the network could be very slow < 10MB/s and other times could be >50MBs - wondered if it might be disc postion related but didnt have a chance to test properly yet. Also wondering if it's related to the internal ethernet/kext or maybe the bios configuration. i updated to the russian bios.

Have an Asus U3S6 card installed and interestingly the SATA ports are seen as native - ie Disc utility shows same icon as the onboard sata ports. Useful as you can get full SMART info on discs attached to those ports. This isn't the case witha 2 port SI3132 card i tried - iirc they showed up as SCSI drives and provided no SMART info. USB3.0 ports worked fine with the hacked kext from elsewhere on the site.

will update once i find some time to test again.

[splonk]

 rtrtrtrt, on Oct 9 2011, 08:16 PM, said:

Have an Asus U3S6 card installed and interestingly the SATA ports are seen as native

Curious as to how you did this. This is not a low-profile card, although it should fit, but it only comes with a standard size bracket. At least mine did.

[rtrtrtrt]

 splonk, on Oct 15 2011, 07:11 PM, said:

Curious as to how you did this. This is not a low-profile card, although it should fit, but it only comes with a standard size bracket. At least mine did.

Yep mine too - contacted Asus but they weren't able to help witha low profile bracket.

At the moment it's installed with the bracket removed.

The sata cable on top is a90 degree one and required a little bit of twisting to fit - nothing that would cause me too much concern and has the added advantage of touching the case above and providing a little bit of stability. I installed the USB cables before reseating the card and powering on - minimise risk of disturbing the card with power on.

It's a temporary situation - as I hope to borrow a friends dremel and cut the full size bracket and then bend to fit. I've not done it before so no idea how it will go - but there are a number of refs on the net of people doing similar things that make me think it's worth a go. Might practice on an old non working card first! It doesn't have to look good - just lock the card in place so I can remove the small risk of disturbing the card.

[Langoo]

Any news about the SMBIOS.plist that can make everything much easier?

I'm also wondering if anyone have got PureFTPd running?

[splonk]

 rtrtrtrt, on Oct 16 2011, 06:37 PM, said:

Yep mine too - contacted Asus but they weren't able to help witha low profile bracket.
It's a temporary situation - as I hope to borrow a friends dremel and cut the full size bracket and then bend to fit.

Let us know how you got on. I have tried this sort of thing before and it is less straightforward than you might think. The bracket on my card looks too solid for the relatively weak motor in Dremels to cut notches through. I have tried in the past by creating a temporary backplate out of PC board and heavy card. Neither really worked too well, particularly if you have to plug/unplug items.

[rtrtrtrt]

 splonk, on Oct 17 2011, 11:27 AM, said:

Let us know how you got on. I have tried this sort of thing before and it is less straightforward than you might think. The bracket on my card looks too solid for the relatively weak motor in Dremels to cut notches through. I have tried in the past by creating a temporary backplate out of PC board and heavy card. Neither really worked too well, particularly if you have to plug/unplug items.

thanks for the heads up splonk - appreciate it.  

think if the modifying the plate plan doesn't work, i'll find a way to cable tie the usb 3 cables, so that when i plug/unplug external drives the card doesn't move.

will post here and let you know how it goes.
----------------
Taken a while sorry Splonk- a few problems with the dremel cutting wheel last week but all sorted now.

Managed to modify the bracket today - practiced on an old bracket first. It's far from pretty -especially since i've not cut off the additional 2-3cm, as I wanted to leave the option of using it in a full height slot in the future.

So that part is sticking out parallel to the desk - not a problem because you cant see it and I would never want to push the server too close to a wall for ventilation reasons anyway.

Also noticed in sys profiler that the superspeed usb shows a maximum of 480Mb/s when i expected it to show 5Gb/s. Tested the port with the 250G drive and a 1TB Samsung internally - measured transfer speeds with iStat and saw a peak of 92MB/s so the port isn't limited to 480Mb/s no matter what SP says.

[splonk]

Ta for the update. Could you bung up a pic of the bracket if you have the time? I might give it a bash myself and was considering taking this approach myself so I could have the option of using the card in a standard machine later should I need to. If you don't want to dismantle your machine again, I'll understand. It is a bit of a faff getting the motherboard in and out.

With regard to the USB 3.0 port, I have a Startech card in mine at the moment and get full USB 3 goodness, so I wonder which kext you used. As far as I know, the Asus card is not known as problematical for USB 3.

[rtrtrtrt]

 splonk, on Nov 1 2011, 03:30 PM, said:

Ta for the update. Could you bung up a pic of the bracket if you have the time? I might give it a bash myself and was considering taking this approach myself so I could have the option of using the card in a standard machine later should I need to. If you don't want to dismantle your machine again, I'll understand. It is a bit of a faff getting the motherboard in and out.

With regard to the USB 3.0 port, I have a Startech card in mine at the moment and get full USB 3 goodness, so I wonder which kext you used. As far as I know, the Asus card is not known as problematical for USB 3.

will take some pics and post np - hopefully in next day or 2. will take them of the asus card in situ initially - as you say - pain in backside dismantling.

but also have the esata card i practiced on - out of the machine, so you can see what that looks like too. it's been straightened out again to full height & is also not pretty.

both are fine examples of a bodge it approach!

When I take the pics - if it's not clear enough what i've done will dismantle - but will need to wait till weekend.

re the kext - thats a very good point. iirc when i had it installed in my Mac Pro i used the Lacie standard and the modbin modified from here. dont remember any major probs as you say.

When I installed it in the HP at weekend, this site seemed to be down so I used google to track down the files - so may have used wrong/different kexts - will need to look into that at weekend too.

One last update from me - i've now been trying to use it as a server proper rather than as a 2nd desktop to play and I'm finding that it's locking up overnight.
Lockup = no ability to share screen, use apple remote desktop, click on icon in other macs finder sidebar and login - these all fail.
When i hook up a vga display, the desktop or whatever app is displayed, but no response from the kb or mouse.
Tried pressing power switch to see if that helped - no change so had to press and hold to power down.
On reboot there's nothing obvious in the console just some regular events from the torrent client which stop - presumably when the lockup occurs.
Will pay some more attention to console next time it happens.

Anyone else experiencing this? i'd say it happens regularly - often within 24hrs and definitely within 48 of a boot.

[rtrtrtrt]

Pics below - bberry but better than i expected tbh

1st one shows asus card in situ. you can see i've removed the black metal cover/door - this was easy - just eased it off it's hinge with a fingernail.
See how far down you have to go with the dremel - halfway thro the top mounting tab.
Also you can see how when i bent it to 90 degrees it didnt work perfectly - ie the lhs of the bracket is a little higher than the rhs so it's at a bit of an angle - but still good enough to tighten the screw and hold it in place.
The problem is that the tab is just about a cm higher up than ideal.

 IMG00025_20111102_1910.jpg   176.13K   22 downloads

2nd one is a closeup and probably shows the dremel cutting a bit better.

 IMG00026_20111102_1910.jpg   193.78K   16 downloads

3rd one shows the esata card after cutting, bending, installing and then removing and straightening again.
Good enough to go back in a full height slot i think.
The line across the bracket is a line i scored in the metal with the dremel - an attempt to make the bracket easier to bend - not sure it made any difference.

 IMG00027_20111102_1911.jpg   237.28K   14 downloads

4th one you can see that the esata bracket is not fully straight afterwards.

 IMG00028_20111102_1912.jpg   156.73K   16 downloads

[splonk]

Thanks for that. I'm impressed the Dremel made it through the metal. I didn't think it had it in it. I might give it a go and sacrifice the end of the bracket. If I need it to go into a full sized machine I can always beg Asus for another bracket.

With regard to the lockup, I had something similar the other day on a full sized Proliant I had running all day. This is on SL server 10.6.8. I tried screensharing into it and couldn't connect.  I found an old copy of Remote Desktop and threw it on. Still didn't get anywhere, although I could still log into my Proliant and mount shares via Finder. Not sure what is going on, but I disabled any sort of sleep via prefs in all my servers as HP doesn't support S3 in them.

Try this kext for your USB 3 and see if it helps

 PXHCD.kext.zip   209.55K   5 downloads

[tk007b]

Hi,

Finally got and installed the superbiiz Intel ethernet card. However, struggling with the tonymac instructions on these bits:-

1. Can't edit this (see next line) beyond the Plugin bit. I installed the IONetworkFamily.kext from the guide (page 1)  /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/Intel82574L.kext/Contents/Info.plist

2. Also guide asks me to enter my vendor code but only tells me how to find out in windows (but i've only got OSX on this box)

Can anyone help .. ?

Thanks

TK

 antikus, on Sep 28 2011, 04:41 PM, said:

Yes, looks like the right one. I got it from superbiiz.com. It was $25 including tax and shipping:

http://www.superbiiz...d674c02b1d1cd56

You would need to tweak the ktext plist a bit:

http://tonymacx86.co...php?f=19&t=4057

[tk007b]

Edit'ed the IONetworkingFamily text file in Windows and changed the contents to look like this :-
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>Intel82574L</string>
<key>IOPCIMatch</key>
<string>0x10D38086 0x104b8086 0x10f68086</string>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>IOPCIDevice</string>
<key>IOResourceMatch</key>
<string>IOKit</string>

Installed with Kext installer and repaired permissions and rebooted, but no en1 and no joy.

Really stuck now

:-(

 tk007b, on Nov 3 2011, 11:22 PM, said:

Hi,

Finally got and installed the superbiiz Intel ethernet card. However, struggling with the tonymac instructions on these bits:-

1. Can't edit this (see next line) beyond the Plugin bit. I installed the IONetworkFamily.kext from the guide (page 1)  /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/Intel82574L.kext/Contents/Info.plist

2. Also guide asks me to enter my vendor code but only tells me how to find out in windows (but i've only got OSX on this box)

Can anyone help .. ?

Thanks

TK

[tk007b]

Looks like I've got it sorted !

IONetworkFamily.kext file needed to come from a Snow Leopard Image and not from a Lion one.

As soon as I changed, and installed it, EN1 became available

Cheers all

TK

PS - What's up with this forum, I can only see two pages when I go to the front page ??!!

 tk007b, on Nov 4 2011, 12:09 AM, said:

Edit'ed the IONetworkingFamily text file in Windows and changed the contents to look like this :-
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>Intel82574L</string>
<key>IOPCIMatch</key>
<string>0x10D38086 0x104b8086 0x10f68086</string>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>IOPCIDevice</string>
<key>IOResourceMatch</key>
<string>IOKit</string>

Installed with Kext installer and repaired permissions and rebooted, but no en1 and no joy.

Really stuck now

:-(

[rtrtrtrt]

 splonk, on Nov 3 2011, 02:57 PM, said:

Thanks for that. I'm impressed the Dremel made it through the metal. I didn't think it had it in it. I might give it a go and sacrifice the end of the bracket. If I need it to go into a full sized machine I can always beg Asus for another bracket.

With regard to the lockup, I had something similar the other day on a full sized Proliant I had running all day. This is on SL server 10.6.8. I tried screensharing into it and couldn't connect.  I found an old copy of Remote Desktop and threw it on. Still didn't get anywhere, although I could still log into my Proliant and mount shares via Finder. Not sure what is going on, but I disabled any sort of sleep via prefs in all my servers as HP doesn't support S3 in them.

Try this kext for your USB 3 and see if it helps

PXHCD.kext.zip

Sorry not replied sooner Splonk.

Not had a chance to try the USB 3 kext you attached yet - a little distracted but also wanted to try something else re the lockup problem. Realised that i was still booting from usb 2 - i'd installed a 2.5 hdd into the bay below the optical area and cabled it to the internal usb 2 port.

Also remembered that earlier in this thread someone had mentioned that they thought usb still wasn't very stable on this build. Anyway changed my set up so am still using the same 2.5 drive, but connected it to the 5th on board sata port - next to the usb 2 port. it's been up now for 2 1/2 days with no issues. will leave it till the weekend before doing anything on usb 3.

Picking up on tk007b posts about his ethernet - i'm still on the baseboard ethernet and think i've narrowed down the performance issues i was seeing before. Now dont think the performance problems are related to the choice of destination disks in the HP - it seems to be very slow when the source is external and writing to any disk in the HP, but better when copying from the HP to an external Mac/PC.

If i was to look at a replacement Ethernet card - what are the advantages of the Intel being used by a few here? Seems you still have to modify kexts with the Intel - so why not use a low cost card like the TP link below for example?

http://www.amazon.co..._cp_computers_2