Comment by thequux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thequux | Hacker News Reader

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I'm running a server motherboard (Supermicro H12DSi-N6), and while the processing power is wonderful, the tradeoffs were a bit surprising:

* I can't disable the BMC video card, which means that when I'm running Windows, there's a 800x600 monitor that will never go away and windows occasionally decide to open on it. This is solvable by opening the BMC on the machine itself and using the IKVM webapp to drag it onto my main screen; this takes a very careful flick of the mouse. * There's no built-in audio; in order to listen to Spotify, I use a USB audio card. * The board only has 6 USB ports, only 2 of which are USB-3. Thus, I get to use a lot of hubs. * It takes a long time to boot past the firmware; generally 3-4 minutes to warm boot and 6-8 cold. * While it can be used as a single-socket board (which I do, because I don't have the funds for a second CPU just yet), I lose a bunch of PCIe slots doing so; half the PCIe lanes for the first CPU are direct wired to the second socket for the inter-CPU link.

Bridge jumper JPVGA1 directly on the motherboard and it will disable the onboard VGA. Switch BMC priority from onboard (default) to offboard, I don't think this is necessary if you bridge JPVGA1.

Get yourself a nice Highpoint USB 3.0 card with quad controllers on each port. 20Gbps of bandwidth in aggregate.

I believe there is a jumper on the motherboard that will bridge the missing PCIe slots in single CPU configuration.

If the 800x600 is on the right and a window opens in it, you can alt-tab to it or click it on the taskbar, then just hit win+leftarrow until it appears on the correct monitor. Same for win+rightarrow if other way around. Should not need to IKVM

On all Windows operating systems I have used, this workaround (winkey+left/right) unfortunately does not work for moving modal pop-ups.

For example, when starting KeePass by opening a .kdbx password safe file, KeePass will first open the master password input modal pop-up.

If that happens on a turned-off screen (IMHO it opens on the screen on which the KeePass main window was placed before the process exited on the previous run), you'll be lost.

Very frustrating, e.g. for multi-screen home theater setups.

Anyone please share your solutions to this problem.

Moving a window: Alt-Space, M, arrow keys

If you Alt-Space, M, and press one of the arrow keys, the windows will 'stick' to your mouse cursor so you can just wiggle your mouse after they key combo to bring it to you.

I was inspired by nostalgia to do the research via archive.org: This shortcut goes back to Windows 2.0, almost 35 years ago. I remembered it from the 3.1 days.

The old CUA, Windows 3.0 corner square has an oblong rectangle that represents the space bar (at least in my mind). Unless the window is a child window, in which case the shortcut is Alt-Hyphen[1], and I haven't used that shortcut in many years. The fashion for tabs has probably made that useless.

[1] http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/win3x.html

Win + Shift + arrow works better with modals because it doesn't try and resize/pin the window but just blips it to the next screen over preserving size and location. I use it a lot when I move from my laptop to a multi-mon setup to sort windows to different screens quickly.

If that's the only other monitor, you can set your actual display as primary then select primary display only in Win+P menu

| * It takes a long time to boot past the firmware; generally 3-4 minutes to warm boot and 6-8 cold.

^^ why is that? is it just the firmware being buggy, or is there any legit reasons why they need to self-check _for minutes_?

Server hardware operates remote and headless, so it performs much more exhaustive memory checks and will try to proactively report failures. Good datacenters will catch these and open a ticket to replace failing hardware.

Beyond that, lots of servers will then enumerate all of the network interfaces and try to initiate a net boot, and only then fall back to the hard drive. Some tweaking in the bios can usually disable these features and gain a bunch of time, but again in a headless remote context this default behavior is incredibly useful for recovery purposes. We like to avoid actually running out with a physical crash cart if we can help it :)

In case helpful, select the app on the task bar and use Shift+Win+Left/Right arrow key to move it between monitors without needing to do the IKVM dance

You could likely use autohotkey and winmove to place the modal windows where you want, I'm not at my desk now, but I'll update this post with the script I use (or a reply to it).

Can you disable the video driver in the system control panel if you don't want Windows to use it?

Other stuff seems normal for a server board though.

Damn, respect, your mainboard alone is probably worth more than my entire workstation.

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