The Linux Benchmarking Test Farm Is Down For A Few Days

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 12 March 2016 at 07:19 PM EST. 9 Comments
PHORONIX
Our 60+ Linux test systems will be down for a few days due to aforementioned plans for hopefully increasing the cooling efficiency of the basement server room, etc.

I've been brainstorming further cooling improvements to the server setup ahead of the warmer summer months and ended up deciding to tile the floor with glazed porcelain tiles to replace the existing laminate tile I installed last year when I turned my basement into a big server room.


The laminate flooring I went with in the first place wasn't the best, so was happy to rip it out and replace it with this superior flooring.


Construction work continues to be my main form of entertainment/relaxation and closest to having a holiday while still working daily... Plus keeps costs low and now our fourth time laying porcelain tile.


The room already looks much brighter too with the new flooring compared to the old.


A few weeks back I did a test setup of this particular porcelain tile and FlexBond mortar in the server storage room, that was detailed within Making More Storage For The Benchmarking Room & More. The tiles in there are holding up great and the weight of the metal cabinets, etc, haven't caused any problems nor have any other issues come about.


With this weekend being rather warm where I'm not freezing outside using a wet saw cutting the tile, I started on the main server room.


Thus for the next few days all of those benchmarking systems are offline in order to tile the room.


The tiling has to be done in sections, but hope to be able to have at least most of the systems back online by early next week. Thus until then it will be a bit lighter on the Phoronix article benchmarks and mainly no new data being reported to LinuxBenchmarking.com. This downtime also impacts new content from Anzwix, but all web services should work fine since those servers are at a data center in Florida. All OpenBenchmarking.org services will operate as normal through this period. Hopefully the mortar will be set by Sunday night so I can get onto grouting this section. (For anyone trying to critique things or curious, most of the moulding was left up since it's high enough from the old underlayment + laminate floor that there is sufficient clearance and it's still in great shape due to having installed it just last year and being some nice, tall MDF moulding. Will just add some three-quarter inch quarter moulding around the tile to finish it off.)


I'm still a bit concerned about the weight of the server racks with the pressure placed upon the casters against the tiles. However, my wife is doing a great job with her patience to ensure the mortar is evenly spread, this FlexBond is supposed to have some crack-preventive feature, etc. The casters on the StarTech server racks are quite wide, so I think they may be fine. If anyone has any other opinions on the matter, feel free to let me know!


More details next week and when everything is hopefully restored to normal operation. Having all the systems down at least allows for some thorough "spring cleaning" to all of the systems, etc. Still brainstorming -- and welcome suggestions -- for other improvements to improve the thermal efficiency and other factors of our open-source/Linux benchmarking farm.

If you want to compare the before and after (so far) flooring, see my big write-up last year about reconstructing this room for massive benchmarking and A Six Month Redux After Building A 60+ System Basement Server/Computer Room.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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