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Comment by buserror | Hacker News Reader

Having had a play with both Supermicro and ASRock Rack boards for workstations (admittedly, only H12's so not the "most recent" but from my cursory glance and newer boards, nothing has changed that much), SuperMicro board feels like they were made in 2005, not 2024. It is ridiculous in fact.

* No support for ACPI sleep. In 2024. Seriously. * No support for 4 and 3 pins fans. 3 pins are 100% speed all the time. * IPMI web interface straight out of 2010. * NVME placement prevents you from using heatsinks. * Tons of opaque jumpers on the board, with no board labelling.

The ASRock Rack equivalent board is amazing in comparison.

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If you think the latest SuperMicro IPMI webinterface is from 2010 you haven't seen their 2010 interfaces. Would you like to download the Java Web Start file to start your Remote Console? Use a Java Applet to see just the screenshot of the VGA output? How about getting RAID controllers with a (PS/2) mouse based GUI inside the OptionROM (looking at you LSI) only to find out the damn RAID controller manual lied about having a HBA passthrough mode. It just creates a single RAID volume per disk, but still stores controller specific metadata on the disks.

If ASRock Rack got the SSH serial console redirection latency down from ~1 second to the low milliseconds like the other vendors (SuperMicro, Dell, HP, etc.) it would actually be useable without taking Valium before logging in.

</rant>

ASRock IPMI, at least on X570D4U Ryzen 5000, is unusable. You can't turn on the firewall allow only specific IPs, it blocks everything. They said they have a beta firmware (> 01.39.00) to solve this, but it doesn't. Had to purchase a Spyder to add to the machine.

Supermicro's BMC UI on X11 does feel like 2004, but it is decently reliable. On the H13 series is even more stable and doesn't feel outdated.

> No support for ACPI sleep.

To be fair, these are meant for datacenter applications where it would be absolutely normal for these to be either fully on or off all of the time. You could make an argument for warm spare servers, but there's other ways to accomplish it than ACPI sleep, and I'd probably consider warm spares a relatively niche need, considering I'd rather leave them hot-but-outside-production for system monitoring purposes. Would be more annoying to wake a sleeping system and find it has a failing drive/RAM/NIC, bad switchport config, etc.

> No support for 4 and 3 pins fans. 3 pins are 100% speed all the time.

To be fair, these are meant for datacenter applications where it would be absolutely normal to run your fans at full speed all of the time.

> IPMI web interface straight out of 2010

Does it have HTML5 remote console, and basic component diagnostics? If so what else would you like? I've been a datacenter tech, a linux sysadmin, and a devops engineer, depending on the company for a decade now, and really only ever used IPMI for those two things so I'm curious where the other use cases are. I've also used Dell PowerEdge and HPE servers, which have slightly nicer looking UIs but perform the exact same functions more or less.

> To be fair, these are meant for datacenter applications where it would be absolutely normal to run your fans at full speed all of the time.

Case fans for rack mount chassis are very powerful, and also can take up a significant amount of energy when running full-bore (not to mention the mechanical wear).

I haven't used a server chassis in over a decade where the fans were running at full beyond a few brief seconds at startup. I'm not sure if they used a four-pin header or some other mechanism, but fan speed control is a normal and expected feature in server hardware.

> Does it have HTML5 remote console, and basic component diagnostics? If so what else would you like?

IPMI specifically is meant to be a standardized remote management interface. It (mostly) works for basic things, but more advanced functionality is hit-or-miss, or absent entirely, leaving you at the mercy of proprietary tools. Redfish is supposed to be better, although I personally haven't used it.

Web interfaces can be hit-or-miss in terms of functionality and UX. Additionally, I've often found these web interfaces to be unstable -- either being very slow or not loading at all, to certain features of the UI not loading data or hanging the interface.

> and also can take up a significant amount of energy when running full-bore (not to mention the mechanical wear).

In datacenters, colocation datacenters like Digital Realty, you often pay a set amount per month for power out of a rack. Doesn't matter if you use 1kWh or 3000kWh, you paid $X for electricity for each of Y number of server racks for the billing period. So this is another case where their ideal customer just frankly doesn't care how much electricity the fans consume. Supermicro just doesn't care about homelabbers because that's not the people they tend to do business with. Datacenters buy Supermicro servers and sell their old ones on Craigslist to homelabbers.

> It (mostly) works for basic things, but more advanced functionality is hit-or-miss, or absent entirely, leaving you at the mercy of proprietary tools.

You didn't really say anything that you're missing from IPMI specifically here. I was really looking for like a specific feature that you found missing, because customers often think they want more when something is "simple" but don't really even have a use case for more. And even more often, there are times where the desired solution a customer is looking for isn't the best solution.

So this completely removes it as an option for all the SMB out there that host on prem.

I don’t at all see how you’re getting a take-away that it completely removes it as an option. And I work at a company of ~60 that hosts Supermicro servers on prem. We just don’t run them like underneath our desks where it sounds like you’re expecting them to go.

Word. I borrowed a circa 2005 – 2010 server and the fan roared on start-up. I would not want that on full-time for reasons of noise, power and wear.

I've had 40%+ (8 out of 20) RMA rate with ASrock boards (from pcie drives dropping to weird gremlins), while I have replaced two out of over 300 super micro boards, all of them running 10y+

The IPMI interface sure is nicer though

Every vendor has their quirks. I have a pair of ASRock Rack ROMED8-2T/BCM boards, but my M.2 NVME boot drive is no longer detected if I update the BIOS past v3.50. Unfortunately, that means no support for resizable BAR in my configuration.

I have a pair of Supermicro H12SSL-NT boards to use for my next couple builds. I might be trading one set of issues for another, but I'm optimistic they'll work well for my purposes.

Agreed. If nothing else, the IPMI web on supermicro randomly deciding you need to re-login constantly definitely feels very 2004.

It's been this way for at least a decade, too. It's like it just forgets all its session variables sometimes.

My iDRAC 8s do that too.

I agree! I love my ASRock Rack board (X570si). I had written off ASRock as "budget" but it's been rock solid and had loads of features like you said.

I don't want ACPI sleep on a server.

Why not? Assuming your servers are not all at or near full load at all times, you can put some to sleep as warm spares.

Asking myself the same question, but IME Linux support for sleep states is (was?) generally horrible due to absolute lack of standard enforcement, and that's with laptops where it's a priority. I've only had one laptop (my most recent one) work 100% with sleep states, and only after replacing the NVMe that froze roughly 33% of the wake ups due to some obscure bug (but worked fine otherwise)

Maybe lucky, but haven’t had trouble with Linux and sleep for about 15 years. Dell and Framework.

I have a Dell latitude and dell precision laptops. Both have awful support for sleep. The latitude I had to use an LTS kernel to make it work 90% of the time, the other 10% it just wakes up randomly after closing the lid. The precision will wake itself up instantly after putting it into sleep due to a bug with the dedicated NVIDEA GPU

I bought the “developer” edition, that may have helped.

They support wake on lan (most likely) and you could power up from IPMI REST API

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