I put it all in the TV, and unfortunately the bodies of the connectors are not insulated from the connections. The TV noticed this and made a horrible screech upon power-up, and shut itself down. I removed the back of the TV again and removed the connectors from it, whereupon it worked just fine. I'll need to insulate them, I guess. For now, I've left the back off. Proper speakers help a lot.
I then got out the Pioneer DVD recorder, which is (as before) going to be used to convert the S-video from the home theater system to something the TV can eat. I hooked it all up and then Daniel and I watched a movie. Sweet. I also put a DVD in the recorder and played it there, thus using the TV's own downwards-firing speakers for sound instead of the big boys. It worked better than the TV upstairs did, probably because there is more space beneath the TV at this time for sound to escape. (This may change once there is a couch under there.) The speaker design of this series of Panasonic TV's is very poor, I don't think they expect you to actually use them.
As a final step I got out the big roll of garage-sale RG-6 and ran a long wire to the computer room's CATV distribution amplifier. (I re-used the hole in the wall where the Ethernet cable to the old computer cluster used to come through. In fact the cable was still there and routed around the room and back through the door of the computer room, so I re-routed this through the wall between the two wiring closets, along with the new RG-6, much neatening things up.) The new used die-crimper for RG connectors worked very much better to put the ends on the cable than the plier type I was using before. This new antenna wire was routed with the rest of the home theater wiring (three front channel speakers and the S-video cable) underneath the throw rug to prevent tripping. With the antenna now hooked up I ran the TV's channel training cycle and found all the channels we get upstairs. After removing the duplicates and dross we now have two fully-functional flat-panel plasma TV's in the house. (This new installation is a bit smaller than upstairs, but we also sit closer. The one-generation-older screen technology isn't as bright and is more reflective, but the room is generally darker. Vertical resolution is only 720, not 1080, but it's a rare bit of source material that can exploit this. [We have exactly one over-the-air channel in the higher resolution.] I'd say they're effectively equivalent, except that the downstairs TV doesn't have the internet connection and so can't do Netflix and YouTube. There is no doubt, however, that this new installation represents a better value, and any randomly-chosen computer could tie it to the Internet.) To celebrate I watched a bit of NASCAR in the new location, it was working well. The TV's own speakers are a bit on the puny side, but we're stuck with that unless I want to get a long optical cable and tie the TV's sound back into the home theater (HT) system. Not today!
Taking her non-functional house charger, at her suggestion, I cut the plug off of it and grafted it onto the car charger, using heat-shrink tubing to secure the joint. It seems to work, I put her phone on charge since she had depleted it. Oddly enough, the 'non-functional' charger supplied power on its wires, and the connector also had continuity. I suspect the problem may have been that the phone draws about 280 mA (from the 12 V supply) while charging, yet the house charger was rated at only 180 mA at 5 V! The voltage may have been insufficient to actually charge the phone if it was overloaded, it looks like the charger might have been the wrong one. (Perhaps she's inadvertently swapped it with one of the myriad of other rechargeable phone-type devices she's gone through over the years? [Yes, she must have. This adapter was branded Plantronics, which is a phone accessories outfit. Oops, let's hope it's not for her current gear!])
I also used a dot of Shoe Goo to secure a white paper chad over the wretched laser-bright blue power LED on the charger, said LED having been a sore point between us on several car trips. (I hate blue LED's, and overbright ones in particular. The blue receptors in our eyes are by far the weakest, and blue point sources always appear to be fuzzy and out of focus.)
As a joke I wrapped a Band-aid around the repair. I don't know how many more times I can resurrect this thing...
The original plan was to put the screen on a small behind-the-couch table, or perhaps a shelf equivalent, so that it was completely out of sight when not in use, but I just don't see that happening anytime soon. Today's approach has the major advantage of being done, and functioning well enough. Just not quite as aesthetic. Maybe. It's certainly a lot more secure and out of the way like this, though not as stealthy, which was one of the big advantages of the projector as we had originally envisioned it.
I spent some time re-setting-up the projector, getting the lens adjustments just right. It's not quite as impressive as it was when we got it, I think there are a couple of factors at work:
The BBC collection came today, so I had something to test with besides regular DVD's. It was able to play them, but the picture quality I was seeing on my tiny little yellow-plug test monitor was so bad I needed to prove it out on the big TV. When nobody was around I took the BD35 upstairs and plugged it in to the big plasma. I must say that the control integration worked well, putting in a disc and hitting play switches the TV to the Blu-ray player HDMI input, etc. I got the settings all dialed in and watched some of the program, it looked great. I expect no problems Christmas morning, so I put it all away 'til then.
Jill pointed out that her Pismo's screen hinges seem to be broken, the screen now flops down. I ordered some used but good ones on eBay, $10, but I suspect that we're going to be upgrading this machine soon anyway. (The natives are restless...)
Now that the screen is free, pry out/off the four rubber bumpers and two screw covers, all on the face. Remove the screws thereby revealed. Carefully pry the back cover away from the front cover, there are a lot of snap clips. With that off you can see the exposed hinges. Remove the four screws holding the hinges to the front cover. Lift the screen slightly and remove the four screws that hold the hinge brackets to the screen. Snap off the black plastic wire retaining cap on the one hinge, the one that is easy to replace. Replace that hinge and reverse its de-installation instructions. The other hinge is similar, but more involved. You have to remove the two screws on the screen bracket to release the Airport antenna, and you have to peel loose the tape that's holding the wrapped flexible circuit (that connects to the screen) to the hinge. Get that all loose so that the hinge bracket is released, then remove the bad hinge and replace it with the good one. Do this hinge last so that you best remember how to re-install the flex circuit and the wiring. Pay attention to where all the wires route so that nothing gets pinched or in the wrong place during reassembly.
Now reverse the above instructions to reassemble the computer.
In my case I had a lot of false starts, and ended up taking out many more screws than were necessary, but it worked out anyhow. The computer screen is now nice and tight. I wish Jill would quit slamming it shut! Of the four Pismos (and one Wallstreet) in our fleet this is the only one that has (so far) broken hinges. It's also the only one that gets slammed shut. Coincidence? I think not!
Jill says that she'd rather just have a new(-ish) laptop, but I think that the lure of a big screen might be hard to resist for her work. If she won't use it, I will!
This unit has the slower RAM bus of the G5 line's two, my plan is to use this for now while searching for an affordable faster quad, then keep this as backup.
It had nothing on the hard disk at all, so I did a fresh install of 10.4, using the firewire cable to upload everything (automatically) from the G5 dual. It took a few hours, but in the end we had two identically-configured computers. The quad is driving the 30" monitor perfectly, and the upgrade 7800GT video card will support Apple's Aperture program, should we wish to use it.
This thing doesn't have Bluetooth either, and its adapter is combined with the Airport card, which was only used in a couple of models and is relatively expensive for gear of this vintage. It's Apple's MA252G/A, selling (if you can find it) for $94.95 or so with all the necessary parts. (A.k.a. MA252FE/A? That might be the upgrade kit.) Another option might be a D-link DBT-120 dongle. (Which I already have, but have misplaced.) Bluetooth for the G5 dual is a lot less expensive, but you need both the card and an antenna, the quad has the antennae built into the case.
Assuming this all works as I envision it the Blu-ray's remote will be all Jill needs, at the TV side of the room and using the TV's own puny speakers. For louder sound the home theater system would have to be fired up, and set to source sound from the TV. The downside of this configuration is that Blu-ray or Netflix would not be usable on the projector, but we can forego that for now. It is likely that this player will only be used for streaming (or for regular DVD's) while Jill's treading. In a pinch we could move it across the room temporarily for streaming and/or Blu-rays on the projector. These things are potentially cheap enough that I could just get another one.
In the evening I took the new BD655 upstairs and connected it in place of the BD35 player, and moved the network connection from the TV to the BD655. It fired up OK and hit the network for a firmware update, which went from version 1.23 to 1.60! Unlike the BD35 the update went smoothly in one attempt (no need to make an updater disc), and after the upgrade everything seemed to work. We were able to register the device with Netflix, and we watched a show on it. No problems at all, though I couldn't find a way to turn off the BD655's annoying key ping. I restored the normal configuration, and we watched another show back on the TV's Netflix service, just to make sure nothing had gotten confused by the process. The BD655 is cleared for installation downstairs.
I also bought another piece of angle iron at the hardware store, I think the best long-term solution to the basement TV's HDMI access problem is to modify the mounting bracket to expose the jacks. I should just need to weld a dogleg bridge over the connector bay, then cut away the original bracket in that area.
I also ordered another BR50 battery for my RAZR phone from an online vendor, the phone's battery life has been degrading noticeably lately, I'm sure it's time for a replacement.
While I was on Amazon I checked again for the D-link DBT-120 Bluetooth USB dongle. (One of which I already have, but have misplaced. Accept no substitutes, this is the only one that works without driver games on our older PPC Macs.) They had a used one for about $20 (shipped). I ordered it, since it can be left semi-permanently in the G5 quad, besides using it on my Pismo to transfer photos etc. from my RAZR phone. (Which I need to do before I can ditch the pink phone for the gray one I picked up a while ago.) I had been resisting buying another DBT-120, but this has been blocking me long enough. The dongle is a lot cheaper than the official stuff for the G5, when you can find one.
/===\ shape, long enough to span the connector panel on
the TV, and welded the cuts closed. I ground the beads off the side
that is to contact the TV itself, but the other side I left pretty
rough. I made a few mistakes that meant that I essentially started
over on one end, fortunately the exact length of the final part was
not critical. This all took long enough that I did not go further in
this session, but it should be ready to weld to the bracket.
When it was connected, though, the two remotes were able to control each others' devices, so that is good. A couple of cables and I guess we're done.
Huh.
I peeled open one of the packs. The 'charged' battery had a good voltage, but probably had high internal resistance. I rigged a 10-ohm resistor across one of the cells to discharge it. It took more than 12 hours to drop to a half a volt or so. All cells exhibited this behavior. Plenty of capacity, but no peak handling ability. The cells would bounce back substantially when left alone. I then charged the pack some on the bench, to get it out of the hole before putting it back in the 'phone for testing and formal charging. At this point there was no improvement in behavior. As an experiment I soldered a 22µF tantalum capacitor from the junkbox across the pack. (This being small enough to fit into the battery compartment with the battery, and a type known to have low internal resistance.) Success! The 'phone could now act normally, with the battery providing the average current and the capacitor fielding the peaks. We shall see how long this helps.
These replacements are obviously crap batteries, ones that have a high (and rapidly worsening) internal resistance, which is a known failure mode of NiMh batteries. Not too sure what to do about it, price is no sure indication of quality when dealing with the current Asian market. For now, capacitors.
The battery was totally comatose, I ordered a new one for $40. The computer had sat in storage for a couple of years before the PO's heirs sold it. The signal strength on the Wi-Fi is lower than the Pismo, but I understand that is normal due the metal case.
The lowered asking price was due to a non-functioning DVD drive, but I opened up the computer and extracted a stuck (and gummy) teach-yourself-Spanish CD. After that it worked fine, at least while all opened up. Later, case fully reassembled, I couldn't get it to keep a disc in.
The same scrap raid netted an HP 2100TN printer, with extra paper tray. (Both full.) If nothing else we just got some toner and paper for the other HP printer.
Once communications were established I blew out and wiped out the insides as best I could, there was a lot of dust. (The printer has nearly 300,000 pages through it.) This included washing off the selenium drum in the toner cartridge with alcohol and a soft cloth. That really helped clean things up, before that the print quality was dreadful: smudgy and poor.
After much thrashing around, with target disk mode attempts (both ways!) and various boot DVD's, etc., the light finally went on: This stock Sawtooth G4 can install Leopard, but only if the G4's firmware is fully up-to-date! To do that you have to install MACOS 9.1+ and download Apple's 4.2.8 firmware updater. I did this, on the empty drive, and the firmware was indeed out of date. Once I upgraded that I was, after using LeopardAssist to lie about the CPU's clock rate, able to boot the install DVD and proceed normally, putting it onto the no-longer-empty drive. The new firmware also fixes up the target disk mode and lets it boot from Firewire.
Also of note, Apple's built-in Screen Sharing application works fine to control the G4 from the G5's. (I didn't need to scare up a compatible Vine server and fight Chicken to gain access, like I did with the G3, just turn on Screen Sharing on the G4.) I gave the G4 a fixed IP address, suitable for its duty as a household file server, and made a Dock-able script so that it can be administered after only one click on a client machine. I pieced together the following shell commands from Google-mining to create this 'application':
(Replace "1.2.3.4" above with the IP address of the server.) After executing this you can click on the resulting G4Server application, and/or drag it to the Dock. Instant window to the server.#!/bin/sh NAME=G4Server ADDR=1.2.3.4 P=~/Applications/$NAME.app/Contents/MacOS mkdir -m 0755 -p $P cat >$P/$NAME <<-"EOF" #!/bin/sh open $0.vncloc exit 0 EOF cat >$P/$NAME.vncloc <<-EOF <plist version=1.0> <dict> <key>URL</key> <string>vnc://$ADDR</string> </dict> </plist> EOF chmod +x $P/$NAME $P/$NAME.vncloc
Next up is to get a big SATA RAID hooked up. Ideally I could force a cheap PC PCI/SATA controller to work rather than buying one of the few remaining Mac-compatible cards, and which tend to be a bit on the expensive side. Possible links of interest:
open command can do URL's directly. We
shouldn't need the plist file at all. Take 2:
This seems to work equally well.#!/bin/sh NAME=G4Server ADDR=1.2.3.4 P=~/Applications/$NAME.app/Contents/MacOS mkdir -m 0755 -p $P cat >$P/$NAME <<-EOF #!/bin/sh open vnc://$ADDR exit 0 EOF chmod +x $P/$NAME
Today's lucky winner: 69.28.35.103:62261
I don't need a fancy domain name to call my own, nor do I need 24×7 availability or world-wide connectivity or high bandwidth. All I want is static site contents, reasonably available at modest bandwidth, for me and a few fellow enthusiasts that may wish to consult this information. Oh, and I do want standard search engines to have access to and to be able to index the site. (Else the content will never be found, as there is no custom domain name.)
One strategy to do this is to set up a link on any friendly site, one that is already indexed and crawl-able, that points back down to G4Server. If my transient IP address is in fact fairly stable, this link could be maintained by hand. (Or rather, by a friendly-site CGI script triggered periodically from G4Server, either automatically or by hand, that would check and rewrite the link as necessary.) With my firewall opened up to incoming HTTP connections, redirected to G4Server, that ought to do it.
So, the steps in this zero-cost strategy are:
Sites folders. The secret to getting
those indexed is to change the
/Library/Webserver/Documents/index.html file, give that a
new top-level index page that points to the various home-directory
sites you want to expose.
Here are the GPUs that are supposed to exhibit full functionality with Leopard:
Of course, few of these are probably suitable for this machine. I'm thinking that the NVIDIA 6200 is one of the more likely candidates.
The holder of our preferred domain name, formicapeak.com, who created it for us as part of the sale price of Jill's SL in 2007, but for which no content ever showed up, consented to release the domain name to us. (He was still holding it, probably inadvertently.) We now own it, but will of course have to pay now to keep it hereafter. It's not hooked up to anything yet, though.
The card had a sticker "SATA RAID" over the flash chip. I peeled it off and found it to be an AMD 29F010-120. (1 Megabit, aka 128 KB.)
Unfortunately the 3112 flashing utility does not recognize the card. I knew there was a pretty good risk of this when I started. Do I need to edit the AppleVIAATA.kext file? Is there even such a file on a G4? The PCI Device ID is 0x1095:0x3112/0x1095:0x6112.
Here is a very interesting discussion: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/13557-sil3112-flashing-sata It tells me to retrieve Wiebetech's utility from a web archive, now that the parent company has killed that kind of support. The wayback link is: http://web.archive.org/web/20081205192504/http://www.wiebetech.com/download.php/id=120 Also interesting from this thread is the fact that the firmware file has a few bytes at the end, which the 3112 chip reads into its PCI registers.
Anyway, when I ran the utility it rejected the card, it's the 0x6112 (vs another 0x3112) in the PCI ID that seems to be the problem.
I made a copy of the Wiebetech .kext driver, and used emacs to change everything 3112 in it to 6112. The kextload utility liked it, and the System Profiler says that the card then had a driver, but nothing else of note happened, and there certainly weren't any more drives available.
I burned a copy of Wary Puppy 5.5 Linux onto a CD and booted the nasty PC with it. It wasn't too happy with only the 128 MB of RAM in it, so I put in another stick to bring it up to 256 MB, that seemed to help a lot.
The best/simplest info I have on converting this to a Mac card is here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1690231. Those are the instructions I followed, and it just worked. (The logistics of actually doing this, given what I have to work with, was a mess. One of the most tricky bits was actually finding a blank floppy disk that still would work.) The short answer was that I used Virtual PC to build a floppy disk image that contained both DOS and the flash updater, and I then used the Puppy to dd this image from a USB stick onto a real floppy. Once I had that it was a simple matter of booting this floppy and flashing the card, which was itself pretty uneventful.
I put the flashed card back into the G4, and it worked, and found the two new 2T drives, which I then put into a Mirrored RAID.
With the video card removed, the unit seems to settle down to 39W quiescent power draw. Not too bad for three hard disks, plus the computer. The two extra disks and the controller card only added 9W of power draw. (The internal modem was also removed.)
I think now, though, that I was very wrong when I thought this machine would be a good file server. I discovered the problem when I set the first G5 to try to back up to it. It's slow. Deadly slow, and the G4 goes almost comatose while it's taking the data. It stops serving web pages, and you can't even administer it. The Time Machine throughput is only around 100 MB/hour. If you put the sender to sleep the G4 eventually recovers and acts normally, but at this rate the initial backup, of just one of the four intended clients, will take about a month. (It's around 88 GB.) The network traffic pattern is bursty, comb teeth in the Activity Monitor, with big chunks of idle time about as long as the toothy burst time. I believe the G4 is CPU-bound, because of what its Activity Monitor shows. (It's hard to be sure, the machine is so unresponsive. You get a bit of screen update every minute or so.) There's no way that this strategy is going to work.
Plan B? Yank the big terabyte drives and put one in each of the two main G5's and unleash their Time Machines to back up the entire system? (That's not what we're doing at the moment, their second drives are too small.) There's no backup redundancy that way, though. I think I'm going to have to conduct some experiments, perhaps put one of the drives in the third G5 and see how well it functions as a backup server. I wonder how low I could get the power draw on one of those. Maybe start with an air-cooled dual and remove one of the CPUs? (Were there singles?) There's a lot less room in a G5 case than this G4, and the power supply situation is less friendly. To get the necessary minimum of three drives in one would require a SATA controller card, and I don't think the one I just worked up will be suitable. Sigh...
I could try narrowing this down a bit by purchasing a second SATA card to see if putting one drive on each card helped, and also seeing if I could find a different on-card SIL3112 driver. That'd narrow down some options, as would finding and trying a faster G4 machine. Not too attractive, any of these.
Still, the purpose of the exercise was to get redundant Time Machine backups of all of our other machines. Mirroring was merely the most obvious way to gain redundancy. Nearly as good would be to back up everything using TM to one of the 2T drives, and use the G4's own TM backup software to back itself (including the first 2T drive) up to the other 2T drive. A little more confusing and potentially amenable to disruption, and with the potential loss of any backup set that hadn't yet been relayed to the second drive, but probably pretty acceptable in the end.
With the RAID broken apart I tried the G5 backup again, and it seems to be able to sustain about 7 MB/second over the long haul which, if not stellar, is at least reasonable.
I experimented a bit, and if you're trying to use both SATA drives at once the machine chokes. (Copying files from one to the other, etc.) I'm guessing it's not the mirroring function in the driver, anyway. Also, using the G4's TM to copy between the two 2T drives is a pipe dream, because on a networked drive, TM doesn't keep things as separate files, but rather in a sparsebundle container. Looks like the dream of RAID on the Time Machine backup store is not to be at this time. I removed one of the 2 2T drives and put it aside for now. With only the two disk drives in it the unit seems to settle down to 32W quiescent power draw.
I tried the 733 MHz CPU card I bought cheap, but it doesn't fit at all. The card is larger and runs into the second IDE connector, and the existing heat sink interferes with some power supply toroids on the new card. Not a chance, at least it was cheap! (It was for a Quicksilver, not a Sawtooth, and apparently that makes a difference.) The original card bears an MPC7400 CPU, the proposed replacement has a 7450. After a bunch more digging, it appears that you can put a Quicksilver CPU into a Sawtooth, but you have to remove the second IDE connector from the motherboard, and run a +12V line to the fourth mounting screw hole of the CPU card. Messy! (The extra power line is no problem, but I don't really want to lose the optical drive.) Apparently only Sawtooth and Gigabit Ethernet CPUs (and, of course, the appropriate aftermarket upgrades) fit that space without modification. Also, the more detailed reading suggests that the 733 MHz CPU will only be running at 551 MHz (733×100/133) because of the slower memory bus of the Sawtooth. (Presumably it could be up-clocked back to near normality.) During the operation it became clear that the existing heat sink would not be of any use on a dual CPU card (assuming that one would even work in this particular Sawtooth), it only has one heat riser boss. Before I get too carried away I must remind myself that the purpose of a faster CPU was to make mirroring usable, and if a second SATA card is going to do the job then I don't need to pursue this anyway.
I fooled around with OSX's "diskutil" program for a while, based on some online information, and finally got it to turn the two 2T drives into a RAID1 without reformatting. The GUI utility was able to trigger the necessary rebuild, estimated at 27 hours to complete. That's slower than I'd like, of course, but for the moment acceptable. (The offsite backup strategy is to periodically swap out the mirror, so this rebuild time will be a factor in that policy. It is clear that the mirroring is done at the driver level, rather than in the filesystem as in DNIX, because it appears to be copying the entire 2TB between drives rather than only the [at the moment] relatively minuscule amount that is actively in use.) The updating process appears to be CPU-bound, so the faster CPU may yet enter the picture.
I looked at a couple of PPC data sheets, and the power draw goes up pretty rapidly with clock speed when the CPU is fully busy. I'll want to think carefully about whether to move up in the CPU department on this one.
PPC Power CPU MHz W 7400 400 5 7450 533 12 7450 667 15
Of course, the significant value here would be the quiescent power draw, not the peak load, and that's not so easy to determine from a data sheet.
Yesterday I took apart my G5's "Mighty Mouse" to try to clean the roller ball on top so that it would work again. (It wouldn't scroll up, but was OK in all other directions.) I had quite a time of it, and ended up breaking off the lower trim ring permanently. Eventually I got the roller disassembled, and removed an amazing amount of gunk. During reassembly, I lost one of the magnetic rollers for a while, but eventually found it in the carpet. After all that it was a lot cleaner, but didn't really work any better. I did some surfing, and it was recommended that you spray cleaner into the ball and then vigorously roll the ball against a sheet of paper on the desk. I did this today, using Deoxit Fader spray, and it worked!
I also have decided that I really don't like the flat chiclet keyboard that came with my G5, and I tried a spare keyboard that I bought some time ago at the thrift shop. It was horribly dirty, and the keys were all intermittent. The lucite case was gross, and full of choads. I took it apart and put it in the dishwasher, and it really cleaned up nicely. I blew dry what little circuitry it had, then disassembled the keyswitch array to dry it out too. It has three printed-circuit mylar sheets underneath the silicone rubber dome array that trapped a lot of moisture between them. I spread it all apart and mopped it, and left it to dry overnight.
I reassembled the G5's new (?) keyboard. It mostly seemed to work, but eight keys are inoperative: space bar, caps lock, escape, backtick, right control, left option, tab, right arrow. Not good! I put it away for now.
I was able to log into the 3911 without incident. Now I need to look up how to configure it to be an unmanaged switch../load.sh ... screen /dev/tty.PL2303-091
I rearranged the area and removed the old hub, and put the 3911 in place of the little NetGear. The NetGear was still required to pick up a couple of the (currently unused) ports. I checked, and the G5 is able to connect at 1Gbps. Unfortunately we have nothing else that can talk at 1Gbps, so that's not doing much good. It would be nice if the G4 file server could do so, but it's slow enough that I doubt it would do any good even if it could use 1Gbps.port set port 9-10 acceptable-frame-type all config save
The main secret is that the Default VLAN is not good enough for the remote interface, so switching everything over to the Mgmt VLAN is the easiest way to allow the remote interface to be configured. The remote interface must be working before we can upgrade the firmware on the 3911.port set port 9-10 acceptable-frame-type all port set port 1-8 pvid 127 vlan add vlan 127 port 1-8 dhcp client disable interface remote set ip 192.168.1.3 subnet 255.255.255.0 interface set gateway 192.168.1.1 config save
To upgrade the firmware on the 3911 we have to get TFTP working
somewhere accessible. On G4Server I copied the firmware
to /private/tftpboot, and then used the shareware TftpServer
utility to turn on the server. (It can be done by hand, but I gather
that it's a bit of a pain.) The upgrade itself is straightforward:
and then wait. It takes quite a while, in fact, and service is down for a fair number of minutes. 6.10.2 is the final version of software for this particular product. (Codename: Artamir. It's based on the Broadcom Raven switch chip, and uses Linux as an OS on the 300 MHz MIPS CPU that is embedded within the Raven. The unit is designed for extended temperature range operation.)software upgrade server 192.168.1.2 package saos-6.10.2 package-path saos-6.10.2 service-disruption allow
I then installed Wireshark on G4Server, I want to try to figure out
why the linkstation is no longer accessible. Sniffing its MAC address
(dug out of the 3911's flow mac show report) shows not
much going on, and it was still using its 192.168.11.150 default
address. As an experiment I moved the Mikrotik and the linkstation to
the unmanaged switch, and after that it was again accessible as a
storage volume on the originally-assigned 192.168.1.113 address, even
after I moved things back to their normal ports. After a power-cycle
on the linkstation, it again disappeared, presumably moving back to
its default IP address.
So it appears that the 3911 is somehow interfering with the initial discovery process, possibly with DHCP.
I also enabled PostFix on G4Server and aimed the Xerox Phaser printer's email notifications directly at it instead of to one of our public addresses.ip address add address=192.168.11.1/24 interface=bridge
My problems with floppies have been greatly eased by first bulk-erasing them, then formatting them in the destination machine. Most, if not all, of the disk errors were eliminated by this. I theorize that the newer drives have very narrow heads when compared to the step pitch, so leftover out-of-track magnetic fields on the medium wreaks havoc. Bulk erasure gets rid of all that.
The business with the serial port probably never would have worked, I don't think the crash reports can come out there.
After that it still booted into OS 9.2.2, but attempts to boot into OSX crashed with a panic screen this time. Still no joy!
A kind soul has offered me a berth on his domain and server, and I am exploring the possibilities. An SSH socket relay looks like the least disruptive path right now:
Seems to be the basic magic incantation, executed on my server. This initiates a connection from inside my network, which means it will be allowed by fucking-Ptera, telling the more-publicly-available remote server to forward all port 8448 traffic to my server's (web) port 80. Now all I have to do is convince the remote server to forward all formicapeak subdomain traffic to its port 8448, and we're all done except for changing the formicapeak.com A-record! ... And it looks like mine host has already set up the Apache stuff. The heart of it is:ssh -R 8448:127.0.0.1:80 name@address -nNTx
$ cat /etc/apache2/sites-available/formicapeak.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName formicapeak.com:80
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8448/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8448/
<VirtualHost>
$
One little A-record redirect at the formicapeak.com host and it looks
like we're back online! Thank you very much, Tim, and fuck you very
much, Ptera.
while :; do ssh -R 8448:127.0.0.1:80 name@address -nNTx sleep 600 done
Googling for instructions I found how to remove the CPU assembly from the computer. This is not easy, I didn't have the correct long Allen screwdrivers. I managed to make do with some shorter ones, a long Torx screwdriver, some SAE Allen bits, and a 1/4" socket wrench set. That was a pain. Once I had the assembly out I looked it over and blew out the dust bunnies. It looked pretty good, no sign of leaks. It's got a second-generation Delphi/Cooligy cooling system. Not ideal, but so far so good.
That was the hard part. Turning the CPU unit over exposes 15 Allen screws to remove the heat sink from a CPU card. The paste between the two looked thin and dry, I wiped it off and replaced it with new. Repeat ×2 for both CPUs. Reassembly was in the reverse order, the most fiddly bit was getting the CPU assembly seated to the motherboard. Once assembled far enough to function I powered it on (but with the disks disconnected) long enough to hear the 'bong' that indicated functional CPUs, then I powered off and finished the reassembly. I replaced it in Jill's office and fired it up.
It came up just fine, and the fans did ramp up a bit while working harder during the boot, but then they got quiet again. That's new! Time will tell whether this is fixed, but so far I believe it to have been a, ahem, 'roaring' success!
Yes, I was able to save and reuse the anti-tamper pin that locks the cosmetic panel in place, and yes, I did drop a screw down into the works and had to do the dance with the machine held over my head, complete with appropriate incantations!
Research showed that the effective drive limit for this system was 128 GB or so, due to the 48-bit LBA business. While there is a commercial driver for the G4, it wasn't worth the investment. Anything larger than 20GB will do, really.
So, rummaging found an 80GB WD800 that looked nice enough, and had a lower power rating than the bigger drives. I put it on, and WTF? It only showed around 30GB. While 30GB is in fact big enough to make a substantial difference, I wanted all 80GB. I did some cursory research, and found mention of the Host Protected Area (HPA). Huh, I guess this old drive had been used with an HPA in its former life. Thus began a round of trying to find out how to turn this off, culminating in my resurrecting one of the PCs I'd use to flash SATA and Video cards for G4Server, and getting Linux working on it again. After downloading both the C development kit (for Wary Puppy 5.5) and the hdparm sources I finally prevailed, only to have hdparm tell me that the HPA was not in use. Crap, there goes a day... Linux also told me that there was a fixed 32GB partition on the 80G drive that I could not enlarge. After even more flailing around and research, I finally found out that this particular drive (the WD800) has a lovely 'feature' where if you have both a CS and a Master/Slave jumper it'll automatically cap the size to 32GB! Crap! So I removed the CS jumper and the drive started working perfectly, both on Linux and on OSX.
Next I was able to format it in the Mac, and then, after a bunch of flailing around getting it booted from an optical disc (the burnable copy I have doesn't really work on its DVD-ROM drive, but the scratched pressed master I have, which won't complete an Install, worked fine to do disk repairs and restores) I was able to do a full system restore from the Time Machine backups.
So now it boots! Somehow, though, the RAID array managed to lose sync, so it wants a days-long repair. That'll wait. What I found was that while it seemed to come up OK the web server wasn't working. After a lot of flailing around I finally figured out, from examining the Console log and some surfing, that Apache wasn't starting up because it didn't have a log directory. This fixed it:
# sudo mkdir -m 0755 /private/var/log/apache2After that we were back in business. All that remains is to manually transfer the bulky stuff that's not part of the Time Machine backup, get the RAID and Time Machine back online, and button things up. The system claims, at this time, that it'll take about 29 hours to bring the RAID back up.
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/myvolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.appYes, the MBP can boot from it, using the Lexar Firewire CF reader. I got the drives swapped, and tried an install. The installer is unable to access the network for a Time Machine Restore, so I went with a fresh install for now. But, it didn't work. The process failed, and after that the SSD disk had disappeared from the system. A reset didn't bring it back, only a power-cycle would do so, and it's not got anything usable on it. Total waste of time. I did this more than once, it was perfectly repeatable.
mkdir /Volumes/Backups mount -t afp afp://adminname:password@serveripaddress/Backups /Volumes/Backups hdid /Volumes/Backups/nameofyoursparsebundleAfter that the Installer could see it. It estimates 3+ hours to do a full restore. I am skeptical, the problem was always at the end of the procedure, but we shall see.
...and it worked! Sort of. The thing got stuck at the end, and the log showed some kind of disk queue timeout during the 'bless' operation. But I rebooted it and it came up on the SSD anyway. It looked completely normal at that point.
Next was to restore the 10.6 partition, which worked about the same. I had to jigger the partition sizes a bit to get the TM Restore to start, but that worked too. Afterwords the machine could boot up either OS, and it is a lot faster in operation. With the additional RAM we can again have all three user accounts active at once, and work normally on any one of them. The machine seems entirely satisfactory again.
Anyway, it seemed like such a good idea that I bought one too. (Jill's G5 quad is adequate, but the whole browser situation is not that good, and getting worse by the year.) I bought it on eBay a week ago, $300, and it came today. Perhaps less of a good deal, perhaps not. This one is a second-generation eight-core unit, complete with 16GB of RAM and an upgraded ATI HD 4870 video card with a noisy fan. The idea is that I can pre-flight all the necessary work for my brother's computer on this one, and just deliver to him a new SSD with El Capitan on it and a video card all ready to go. (I've already upgraded his RAM and put a 2TB Time Machine backup drive in it.) Both machines are running 10.7.5 Lion, the last OS that is officially supported by the first two generation Mac Pros. (Everything subsequent can run the latest OS without any fuss.)
I bought a Wi-Fi card for it, and it works fine. (If it's properly installed, the two antennae are very fiddly to get connected right.) The very first thing I did was to drill a hole in the video card's fan hub and drip some oil on the bearings. That helped a lot! The hideous shrieking and groaning is all gone. If this video card is good enough for El Capitan I'll replace the fan. If not, I won't waste my time and money on it.
Step 2 was to use target disk mode and the laptop, our only official El-Capitan-capable machine, to actually install both Yosemite and El Capitan on these partitions. That was a giant pain, it's a slow process to begin with, and there were a lot of false starts and crashes. Eventually I prevailed, the main problem was that the 320GB drive was bad! (This was not easy to determine, at first, but it eventually got enough worse that it became clear that the disk was junk.) A friend supplied a 250GB SATA unit that he didn't want back. Once I switched to that everything went smoothly. (I didn't want to buy an HD for this temporary use, and I didn't want to buy the SSD's if this wasn't going to work out.) I ran Software Update repeatedly on both OSs until both installations were completely up-to-date.
Step 3 was to replace the two boot.efi files (per partition) with the magic ones that let the old Mac Pro's work. (Kudos to 'Tiamo' et al.) This is actually quite easy, running from a root shell in Lion. El Capitan then booted and worked fine, Yosemite never did. (We don't need Yosemite, it was just a backup plan in case El Capitan didn't work out.)
- boot_black.efi Replacement boot.efi, black background
- boot_grey.efi Replacement boot.efi, grey background
- yoscapPatch Patching script
At this point we have a fully-usable early Mac Pro running El Capitan. The experiment is a success.
From El Capitan I then used Migration Assistant to copy up the applications and system settings from Lion, but not the user accounts. I then created user accounts manually, and used the option-click to change the UID's and home directory paths to point to the Lion HD. Thus we have two different OSs that use the same exact user accounts and data. You can option-boot into either one, your choice. It all worked smoothly.
I got to wondering if the missing power cable (one of two) for the video card was significant? The system nags about it every time it boots, and there are odd video anomalies at times. I couldn't find a cable in town, or at work, but then I remembered that Jill's G5 quad had one of these cables in it. I borrowed it, and found that the HD4870 then worked perfectly. The 30" monitor works, you can log in multiple accounts, the DVD player works... And Unigine's Valley demo program will knock your socks off. Why the hell was this system, which came with this video card, missing this cable? I ordered one, immediately.
The next step is to find a second 4870 for my brother. Since I have an offical Apple unit, we should be able to make do with a cheap PC unit and some flashing utilities to clone the firmware.
It works well, and is quiet. I did need to use one washer to keep a screw from dragging on the fan, its mounting base is a little thinner than the original.
You'll need the iMac Graphics Update 1.0.2 and Pacifist.First, use Pacifist to open the graphics update image. Extract two files: ATIROMFlasher.kext and ATIFacelessFlash.app.
After extracting them we make sure the kernel extension is able to load:
chown -R root:wheel ATIROMFlasher.kext chmod -R 0644 ATIROMFlasher.kext kextutil -nt ATIROMFlasher.kextStrip everything out of the firmware updater and replace it with the image intended for the 4870:
rm -f ATIFacelessFlash.app/Contents/Resources/*IMG cp 4870.ROM ATIFacelessFlash.app/Contents/Resources/Finally, flash the card:
The app should appear in your Dock, wait for it to complete. Then:kextload ATIROMFlasher.kext open ATIFacelessFlash.appkextunload ATIROMFlasher.kextAt the next reboot the 4870 should be working normally.
The other free DP-only video card, the ATI 3470, was non-functional.
Eminently upgradeable, and the broken battery holder doesn't matter if the thing is kept plugged in to a UPS.
Work had discarded a bunch of suitable ECC RAM that I grabbed, I pawed through what I had left (after upgrading the other Mac Pro) and gave it another 9GB of RAM, filling all the slots and bringing it up to 11GB. Should be plenty! Jill's will have 24GB, mine will have 11GB.
I hate Intel, but these 10-year-old machines are fast, capable, up-to-date, and affordable. Gotta go with it, I guess.
Daniel will continue to use the G5 Dual, mostly because its Studio display only hooks to a video card that won't go into one of the Quads.
Details from the various labels on the card:
HD-487A-ZH HD-487A-ZHFC VA.5 HD 4870 750M 1GB DDR5 DUAL DVI TV PCI-E S/N K7H045438 Advanced Micro Devices Model b507 109-B50731-10PA
The "ZHFC" card is one that has been known to work in a Mac.
After that, the card seems to be working perfectly, boot screens, fans, and all. On OS 10.6, 10.7, and 10.11, boot CD's and DVD's, fake 'DOS', etc. Here is the script I made to build the composite ROM image:
# Start with a copy of the file taken from the card via atiflash: cp -p HD48702.ROM pc4870.rom # Extract the Apple EFI from the official 4870 card image: dd if=HD4870.ROM of=efi.part bs=1 skip=63488 count=49152 # Copy the EFI into the new card image (this destroys second MCuC section): blocknum=`printf %d "'\`dd if=pc4870.rom bs=1 skip=2 count=1 2>/dev/null\`"` size=$(($blocknum * 512)) dd if=efi.part of=pc4870.rom bs=$size seek=1 conv=notrunc rm efi.part # Copy the second MCuC section from original image to its new home: dd if=HD48702.ROM of=pc4870.rom conv=notrunc bs=1 iseek=112640 oseek=113152 count=17920 # HACK! The second MCuC is now in a different place (0x1BA00 vs 0x1B800) # so we have to patch the address near the first MCuC to match. Easiest way # is to just copy some random 0xBA I found over the now-incorrect 0xB8. Ugh. dd if=pc4870.rom of=pc4870.rom conv=notrunc bs=1 count=1 iseek=1467 oseek=48220 # Now fix up the headers, etc. python fixrom.py pc4870.rom pc4870.rom # This reporting tool should be happy with the result. ./efirom -d pc4870.rom
NB: This script cannot be used unmodified for your card! It was hand-tuned for my card.
At this point I used a DOS-ish boot CD to get to where I could use a
standard ATI flash utility. I have temporarily mounted a FAT-32 IDE
disk in the MP's second optical drive bay, 'C:', which holds the
flashing utilities and the flash image made above. Tedious, but
straightforward. Essentially you are booting into DOS and using
a correct-vintage "atiflash" utility: atiflash -p 0 pc4870.rom.
I also used the Disk Utility to 'restore' the running El Capitan HD to the new SSD, and sucked over the user accounts and files from the main G5 quad, while running Lion. I then ran the upgrade to 10.11.5 on the SSD, re-patched the boot.efi files, and set up the 2-disk boot environment for El Capitan and its Admin account on the SSD, and another Admin account and the remaining user accounts on the 1T 10.7 disk. So it's dual-boot, 10.7.5 and 10.11.5, same user accounts on both. Seems to be working fine.
Actually, it's triple-boot. I made a 20GB partition on the 1T drive for 10.6, so that Rosetta would be available if ever needed.
...After kayaking I finished up. The CPUs were easy to swap, a little bit of isopropyl alcohol and a paper towel removed the old heat-sink grease. The ZIF sockets were easy to manipulate, and the new CPUs dropped right in. I used new Arctic Silver heat sink grease, and smeared a thin layer on each CPU and its mating heat sink surface, then put a thin bead down the middle of each CPU and put on the sinks. I then tightened them down, and put the unit together far enough (sans disks) to hear the normal power-up 'bong'. I put it the rest of the way together, and found that it wouldn't boot. Blinking file folder time. Crap! I took it back apart, and found that the SATA data plug wasn't quite seated all the way to the logic board, so all the HDs were dead. After that was dealt with the unit worked perfectly, and identified itself as a MacPro 2,1 with 8 3GHz cores. Success!
It's time to retire the G5 quads. I prepped them for moving to storage. I stole the superdrive from the flakey one and put it in the second MP as its second optical drive. (The other one has a Region 2 DVD-ROM drive in there, which works but is not well integrated with the GUI.)
After work, I plugged it in place, and the system seems fine now.
I set it to making its first full backup, that'll take a while.
While I was at it I decommissioned my Pismo. I rarely use it, as its browsers are effectively useless now. Now that we have two newer laptops the older one will take the Pismo's place, and Daniel will timeshare on it for homework.
For the evening, it worked well enough to get by. But we want a changer, for programming an evening's music. I'm not ready to do the modern music-server thing yet.
After again getting the system restored and rebooted, around 6 or so hours, I again found that Apache wasn't starting up because it didn't have a log directory. This fixed it (again):
# sudo mkdir -m 0755 /private/var/log/apache2What a pain! I also have its Time Machine backups turned off, because I want it to adopt the old set, the old drive is gone never to return. Newer OSs have a simple command to do this, but 10.5 requires an elaborate dance.
I also found that Mailserve Pro wasn't starting up correctly, and it turns out that it also was missing a directory:
# sudo mkdir -m 0755 /private/var/spool/postfixStrange that these weren't part of a 'full' backup.
The only problem is that I can't get it to hook up to Time Machine, it purely refuses to see the G4 file server's disks. (You can ping it, and use the Screen Share application, so it's not something simple.)
... The repaired RAID set dropped back into G4Server with no drama.
Reading some different web pages, it turns out that somebody has actually measured idle power of various CPUs in the MacPro, and the SLAG9 5160 is a 3GHz dual that idles at only 8W, substantially lower than anything else measured. And, they're cheap. I ordered one, about $2.50 with shipping included. Its TDP is not any lower than the 65W SLABM 5150 that's in there, but the SLABM idles at 24W, 3× the power of the SLAG9. (Each, there's usually two.)
Unfortunately for the end goal of the project, it appears that the raw power draw of the power supply and motherboard is substantially above that of the G4 that I'm hoping to replace. It's looking like I can only cut about 40W out by removing one CPU altogether and replacing the 5150 with a 5160, which isn't that much out of the 200W the whole thing uses. Still, for $2.50 it's worth getting a definitive answer.
Meanwhile I can put one of the 5150's back and keep tinkering, knowing that I can only pull out maybe 16W with the final CPU swap. Sigh. Stripped, only 1 5150 SLABM CPU and headless with no optical drive, with only the minimum of 1GB of RAM installed, the power draw is 111W. So, the 'final' solution will only idle at maybe just under 100W, a far cry from the 35W or so of the G4Server. Adding back the other 1GB of RAM it's 115W, with the optical drive it's 117W, with the 7300 video card it's 136W, with keyboard and mouse it's 137W, with the monitor too it's back to 'normal', and 164W.
It's a pity, the greater ease of drive swapping in the new chassis would be nice, as would the higher network speed, and gaining the actual ability to use Time Machine on the server to access its own backup set. (The G4 lacks a sufficiently powerful video card, and I was never able to find one that would definitely work for cheap enough.) Also, the newer OSs support some additional Time Machine features that would be nice to have. C'est la vie.
It looks like it's game-over time, unless I can figure out a way to down-clock the Northbridge and RAM.
Doing it this way, though, means that the MP would only be the backup server, and not a file or web server of any sort. Which means the G4 server could not be retired. Annoying, but not necessarily a dealbreaker. The real question, now that this seems to work, is just how much additional power running both servers will cost. I've had a Kill-A-Watt on the MP server for some time, and the numbers are: 11.7kWH over 1357 hours. That works out to about 76kWH a year, or $4.21 a year at our 5.5¢ per kWH rate. Not too unreasonable, really. I think this might just work!
The trickiest bit was finding out how to get the keyboard out! Where the later Pismo has two slide latches on top, the Wallstreet has two slide latches inside the two bays. Everything else was just screwdriver work.
If I can find a 2014 Mac Mini (Macmini 7,1) for a reasonable price I can replace the trusty G4 server with the MP server and the MM; while the MP draws a lot more power, it shouldn't be on that much of the time, and the newer MM has only a 6W draw at idle (substantially less than the G4), for a net power savings since it'll be running 24x7. And, the pair of them will be easier to administer since they'll both be running newer software.
I have, leftover from the TC-42PX24, its TBLX0134 stand, with the TBLA3685 and TBLA3686 poles. While the stand is too small the poles seem to fit well enough, and the bare metal feet (TBLA3822/TBLA3823) come out of the plastic base easily. I found the correct TBLX0158 online, but it's $100. A bit dear, considering the price of the TV itself. I think I'm going to see how it works with just the bare feet. In the worst case I can enlarge them with extensions of some sort. I need some mounting screws, though.
My son and I got a chance in the evening, and swapped TV's. The 58" TV is enough wider, and heavier, that you really can't reach around the back easily anymore. Oh well! It took some fiddling to get all the sources hooked back up and labeled, channels programmed, etc., but I eventually got there. It has the same connector set as the smaller one, though it does have one more HDMI input, so there was no lasting trauma.
I tried out the 3D, and it works.
I think the DI-524 might be band-flipping or something, causing a periodic drop in service. I saw, using option-click on the Wi-Fi menubar icon, that it seemed to flip between 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.
At that point I downloaded Canon's print driver for the unit and installed it on most of the machines. It printed fine. I lost the entire evening to Apple's failings in this area, it was nearly 1 AM when I finished.
I wasted a lot of time trying to recover the system, the dead drive was still partially alive and there were vestiges of backup data tucked here and there, but it was pretty much a loss. Maintaining this log also stopped, because the G3 was the site master, and until I gave up on it I didn't want to move to mastering directly on the server. That took... a while to resolve.
The G3 is alive again, with a replacement hard disk, but it's not the same.
I also moved MPServer to the other side of the room, next to MacPro2, so that the KVM switch can reach it, too. I had to run some Ethernet cables across the room directly from the main switch, the little hub at the desk was very old, and limited to 10MB! (I need to keep it, as it's the coax Ethernet (a.k.a. thinwire, a.k.a. cheapernet) converter, which the older gear needs.)
The final change, besides cleaning the room back into usability, was to put the Silverwood computer on as the KVM switch's third machine. It doesn't have a DVI plug, but does have HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA. I have an HDMI-to-DVI cable, but you can't drive the full resolution of the monitor this way. I have an Apple mini-DisplayPort to DL-DVI converter meant for driving this exact monitor, but I need to get a DisplayPort-to-mini-DisplayPort adapter cable first. Once I've done that, the 30" monitor can be used at full resolution on all three computers, via the KVM switch.
A significant delay was that the MBP, necessary for programming the second Airport Extreme, crashed and seemed to have corrupted the file system on its SSD. After much fooling around I resorted to the recovery disk mode, and restored from the latest Time Machine backup. It took a while, but worked again afterwards. Hey, the system works! Nice to know.
The daily wakeup is to get around a persistent system bug, where the distributed sleep proxy logic loses track of MPServer. If MPServer wakes up on its own, the proxy server(s) will re-discover it even if they lost track of it. (The sleep proxy system is not terribly well-designed, because the proxy pings the target only once shortly before timing out. Proxies only remember targets for a few hours, and ping their targets before forgetting about them. If the target wakes up and responds, and the proxy sees the response, then the target remains available via proxy. One lost packet either way, though, and the target is lost to all its clients until it is woken for some other reason. Hence the daily auto-wakeup as a fail-safe.) I have replaced the problematic Ciena 3911 with a simple Netgear switch, which I think is doing a better job of not losing packets, and we now have two Apple TV's and two Airport Extreme units, all of which run sleep proxy services. Backups seem to be happening more reliably now.
While G4Server has been a stalwart workhorse, and in fact is still operating as the 24×7 web server, MPServer is a far better Time Machine backup server. (Once I can find the right deal on the right Mac Mini [2014, 7,1] to be the web server, which will have even lower net power consumption than G4Server, the G4 can be honorably retired. With the death of the G3, mail relay service is no longer needed.)
The slower G4's have an excellent reliability record, but really don't want to run 10.5, necessary for Time Machine. Faster G4's are available, and could better host 10.5, SATA drives, and Gigabit Ethernet, but they are much hotter, louder, and less reliable. At that point a Mac Pro 2,1 is a better choice, because it will run 10.7, supports more RAM, and it has those nice drive sleds. And, the power draw can be mitigated as described above, and they're getting pretty cheap due to their age and inability to run the newest software.
I also procured a fourth 2TB drive, for two independent offline slices. All four drives thus never need be physically co-located, thus improving overall system reliability. (A fire on slice rotation day still leaves one intact drive, elsewhere, from which to recover.) In fact, there is no point to all the drives ever being physically present together, because there are only three open drive bays for the RAID in MPServer.
Trying to make a 4-slice RAID, though, in a unit that has only 3 open drive bays is tricky. Apple's RAID GUI has enough bugs that you can't do it that way, but fortunately the CLI can get the job done. You can use the GUI to build the basic 2-drive mirroring RAID and get things all set up and working, then install a blank (matching) drive and:
I've done this twice, now. ("disk3" is the new blank disk, and disk4 is the virtual drive that is the RAID, to which you are adding a new slice. Make sure these are the correct names for your situation!) The system will add the slice, and start copying all the mirror data to it. Once it is rebuilt you can pull it and store it off-site. The RAID will always think it is in a degraded condition, because all the slices will never be present together, but this seems harmless. I believe that swapping out one online slice with one of these offline slices will result in an automatic RAID rebuild on the newly inserted slice. If not, you can always get it done manually, via diskutil. (The intent is to do this rotation quarterly.)diskutil list diskutil appleraid list diskutil appleraid add member disk3 disk4
These are the salient features of MPServer and its 2/4-drive mirroring RAID:
On another topic, Jill has not been happy with the printer situation, especially color. Today on Craigslist was an HP CP2025dn, $50 and claimed to be working fine. At that price I bit. At lunchtime I went out and bought it, and lunch.
I installed the CP2025dn in place of the failing (feed problems) 2200dn, and cabled it directly to the house network instead of off the second Ethernet port on MacPro, so it can be easily shared. It worked perfectly.
On a roll, Daniel and I cleaned out two holes in my office and moved the big black and white (HP) and color (Xerox Phaser) printers into it, out of the family room. (A move Jill has been lobbying for forever.) The HP is happy there, and seems to work. It'll be a real pain when it jams, though, because it has to be pulled out to open any side doors. Oh well.
I've been reading, and apparently every time you exit power saver mode it burns ink. I've set it to 4 hours to enter that mode, the longest available time. I had thought that power-saver mode prevented ink burn, but it does not, and the firmware upgrade offered no relief. If only the ink were cheaper!
As always, the hardest part is disassembly/reassembly. I got the logic board out, and found that a pop rivet from the junk box was a perfect fit to one of the central mounting holes. I slipped it in that, and clamped the stem of the rivet in some all-metal vise grips, which served as a heavy base. This sat nicely on a cookie sheet, with the BGA devices up.
After baking and letting it cool to the touch in the oven with the door open, so as not to jostle the hot solder, I put it together far enough to try testing. Success! It came back on. Unfortunately I was ham-handed in removing the little connectors, and broke some of them, so while the operation was a success the patient died anyway. (Those tiny connectors pry up off the board, they don't slide out like the older, bigger connectors they resemble. I tried to recover things, but it really didn't work out. The machine worked well enough to prove the concept, but was essentially ruined.)
tmutil inheritbackup
..." step, because to the rest of the world it looked like I
had put in a replacement logic board, which is in fact exactly what I
had done. This is in order to allow the backup set to continue on
from where it left off, rather than starting over.
Had I been more careful, both laptops would have been fully resurrected. Oh well!
# Gain privilege: su admin sudo sh # Get to the problematic sparsebundle: cd /Volumes/Backups # Remove the 'bad' marking that TM has put there. chflags -R nouchg {name}.sparsebundle # Mount the bundle as a virtual disk volume. Note the device name # of the HFS partition, reported as something like /dev/disk9s2. hdiutil attach -nomount -noverify -noautofsck {name}.sparsebundle # If it didn't already start auto-repairing (it shouldn't), fix it. Patience! fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/disk9s2 # Unmount the virtual volume, post-repair. hdiutil detach /dev/disk9s2You're not done yet. Now we have to tell TM it's OK to use it again. You need to edit a plist file within the sparsebundle that records the state of the backup. At the top level of the sparsebundle directory find a file calledcom.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist. Edit it and remove these two XML nodes:Finally, you want to change:<key>RecoveryBackupDeclinedDate</key> <date>{whatever-the-date}</date>to:<key>VerificationState</key> <integer>2</integer><key>VerificationState</key> <integer>0</integer># Fix Time Machine status. Apply the edits specified above. emacs -nw {name}.sparsebundle/com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist
Sadly, all this effort did not work out. (Perhaps I missed a step? Regardless, I'm tired of fooling with it.) The next backup on the laptop offered to adopt one of the other laptops' backup sets, or start from scratch. Scratch it is, then. On the plus side, that freed up some space.
Memo to self: stop buying used laser gear!
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf, enable
mod_userdir.so (Line 178)
httpd_userdir.conf (Line 511)
/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf, enable
*.conf (Line 16)
~/Sites/ directories and their
contents.
/Library/WebServer/Documents/index.html
file for the root of the site. (Taken from G4 and modified.)
apachectl configtest to make sure all changes are OK.
sudo launchctl load -w
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist
to enable the server.
brew
install inetutils, brew install pure-ftpd,
and sudo brew services start pure-ftpd. Google for it.
After messing with this I found that ftpd wasn't all that
easy to get running, so I punted and just switched to using ssh tools
instead.
I decommissioned the faithful G4 Server (RIP!) and put the MM in its place. After tweaking its network and startup options appropriately, it seems to be functioning as our Web server, just as the G4 did. The amusing thing is that after all this the fanage in the office isn't all that less obnoxious. That's because the G4's fan was actually well-designed, and though not exactly quiet it was a dull roar that was not too bothersome. The higher-pitched, more-annoying fan in that corner is in the Netgear JGS524 switch. I searched for fanless equivalents, and came up with a $40 (used) Netgear GS324 switch. I ordered it off eBay, we'll see if that resolves the issue when it comes. Though 24 ports is barely enough, the 48-port big brothers are stupid expensive, and not common.
Dad's laptop has been unable to install OS updates since I got it, I think Dad crapped it up pretty good during his decline. Having just installed a new OS from the network on the 2014 Mini, and with the Park in a semi-stable position, I felt more confident doing this now on the laptop. There was a significant setback, though, as whatever Dad (or perhaps I) had done with the machine had caused the loss of the recovery partition, so it couldn't self-host its own recovery.
Being the Clever Dick that I am, however, I decided that with the help of the 2011 Mac Mini I'd bought as a spare workstation I can still get the job done myself without resorting to a trip to the Apple store. (I can't do it with the 2014 Mini as it has neither Firewire, nor Thunderbolt 3.) Steps:
A fun (re-)discovery was the HDMI⇆DVI adapter stored in the 2011 Mini's box. Exactly what I needed on the 2014 Mini to talk to the 20" Apple Cinema display that is there for use on that machine, on the rare occasions where that sort of thing is necessary.
There was a delay, however, as the recovery software insisted that it needed an update first... Having done that it wants to do it again. And again. Something is wrong with this process.
That took quite some time, there were failures in the middle and I had to re-start (resume) to get it going again. I copied the installer to the 2TB drive, and also ran it and installed the OS on the 2TB drive so it is bootable too.
With that done, the laptop could be booted from the 2TB drive... Not. The laptop's default 'T2' security chip setting is to refuse to boot from external devices. The only way to change that setting is to use recovery mode, which does not work. Catch-22!
It turns out, though, that the Internet Recovery mode did work. By holding down CMD-ALT-R I was able to (eventually) get to the Mojave (!) utility that lets you turn down the security settings to the traditional level. This allowed booting from the external drive, except that the laptop still refused! It would, however, tolerate booting from the Mac Mini via its target disk mode, but that refused to install the 'older' (a lie) High Sierra on the laptop, and suggested I use Recovery mode. That, however, still refuses to boot without an update, and I'm not falling for that again. Trying to use Internet Recovery itself to install an OS only offers me Mojave, which I do not want.
Total frustration, a solid day wasted, and still no repaired laptop.
I took a break, and then came back at it. I tried partitioning the 2TB drive so that I could copy everything off the laptop to it, prior to a wipe and clean install of the laptop. That didn't go well, and in frustration I tried CMD-R again. It worked! I don't know what exactly in all the thrashing around I did that 'repaired' the recovery partition, but I'll take it. It's offering to re-install High Sierra on the laptop's own HD, which is all I really wanted in the first place. It claims it'll need 2+ hours, which I'm prepared to give it at this point.
It was a lot longer than estimated, and there were some updates afterwards, but it looks like I've finally got a clean OS on the laptop. The stupid system apparently will only use wi-fi, and not the cabled Ethernet, I'm sure that cost some time.
Also, at the moment, my 2TB work drive is solidly crapped up with partitions and such that I do not want.
The 2011 Mini, though, will boot from the 2TB drive. I did so, to the recovery partition, and re-installed the OS on that drive, and then updated it. It took forever, but I wasn't there to watch it so it didn't matter.
find", looking for "*CleanMy*"
and "*macpaw*" files and directories. There were a lot.
That gives the restoring laptop access to the remote backup set. I went back into July for the restore point. You must leave the Restore session alone for a while before the restore data set will become visible on its own; don't be impatient!mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine mount -t afp afp://user:password@MPServer.local/Backups /Volumes/TimeMachine hdid /Volumes/TimeMachine/MacPro2.sparsebundle exit
As part of the crash diagnostic procedure, involving removing memory, etc., I had replaced the 4870 video card with the 5770 I had scored earlier. (The machine continued to crash with the 5770 in place.) I kept the 5770, it's lower power and seems to be quieter fan-wise, and it was more work to swap it back which didn't seem necessary. It doesn't have the second DVI connector I was using for an auxiliary non-KVM-switched monitor, so I've ordered a cheap mDP→DVI adapter. For the laptop I also ordered another USB-C converter, and an older 10-port OWC dock.
The recently-ordered Maccessories have arrived. The third USB adapter for the MBP4 laptop seems to work ($7.08, eBay), as does the mDP/DVI adapter ($6.52, also eBay) for the 5770 video now in MacPro2. (This cheap adapter is only for smaller, single-link DVI monitors, like the second one on the MacPro.) Three USB adapters means that all four Thunderbolt 3 ports on MBP4 can be in use when dock-less on the road, etc. The additional laptop dock ($28.80, eBay) also came, but there was no time to check it out.
The HDMI⇆DVI cable came, I tried it out in the mobile rig. It all seems to work just fine. If it holds up, it looks like the cheap dock will be a success.
In desperation, so that I could get some work done, I spun it up in Target Disk Mode, and mounted its disks on MBP4. That seems to work fairly well, but is not viable for the long-term and runs fairly warm.
I think I'm going to have to replace MacPro2. Ideally, with a 3,1 (or newer) that can run El Capitan natively. (I know I missed a shot at one on Craigslist fairly recently.) Now that the cheese graters all have been abandoned by the latest OS, prices should come down some more. Other than the flakiness, I've been very happy with it, I think getting another is still a reasonable thing to do; El Capitan has only been superseded for three years. I don't want to commit to using only the laptop, that leaves me too vulnerable.
I stopped by the shop and had a little discussion. One 'new' fact surfaced: The AT&T fallback is not blanket, it's negotiated on a tower-by-tower basis, and is only available where AT&T chooses to allow it. Clearly not available in Long Beach. Also, their coverage maps don't show all frequencies, just the new ones that my 4S can't use. So, I had zero coverage my last trip down there.
Unlike the VMWare Fusion VM's, all of which I have pointed to the external Silverwood disk for storage, for this one I use the laptop's own SSD. That's because it's for supporting our own older Airport hardware, some of which can't be configured using anything newer. (Fusion is Silverwood's, and that's what I use it for.)mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine mount -t afp afp://user:password@MPServer.local/Backups /Volumes/TimeMachine hdid /Volumes/TimeMachine/MBP.sparsebundle
I then ran all the necessary Software Update cycles, and used this 10.6 VM to update the firmware on our Airport Extremes (2) to 7.8.1, the very latest. Worked slick.
Daniel brought home an older Dell laptop, an Inspiron 1520, running a lightweight Linux (MX Linux, Xfce). (A toy, basically, and a gift from a friend. Might be worth $50 on the open market, and pretty comparable to the MacBook Pro he's been using.) Naturally it doesn't have Apple's parental controls on it, but if Daniel thinks he can now surf in the middle of the night he's got a surprise in store. I can enable the MAC-address filtering on the Wi-Fi routers...
The Dell's Wi-Fi MAC address is 00:1E:4C:26:34:39, which I gleaned from the Mikrotik's DHCP Server report. I taught the cathey3 Wi-Fi (Airport Extreme) this address, and put it on a timer so that it's not available between 9PM and 6AM. Daniel doesn't know the key for cathey2, it's really hard to remember, and to type, so that's automatically pretty safe. (We don't need it anymore, it was a failed attempt at extending our in-house Wi-Fi later satisfied by cathey3. I'd remove cathey2 altogether, except that we're using the switch part of it for the TV stack.) The original cathey network is unprotected, but the mikrotik (host for cathey) has a basic access list mechanism, so I just told it (interface: local-ap) to never talk to the Dell—for the Dell it's cathey3 or nothing, and cathey3 is timed. Problem solved.
MBP3 (Daniel's) seems to be dead. It doesn't beep, and the activity LED only comes on dimly. Did we not even make it a year since I repaired it? It's not looking good.
/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/. There were a bunch,
no particular pattern to them. All were either General Protection
(13) or Page (14) faults, the error code for all was 0's. The
fingered applications varied, indicating a general memory-type
problem. Getting curious and knowing that Jill was away for the week,
I took the memory cards from MacPro and put them in. We'll see if it
can survive better using these. Maybe this is just bad memory? Most
of it is not the official stuff with the giant heat sinks.
I ordered 8GB of the official heat-sinky RAM, $21 with shipping off eBay.
I ordered a replacement for MBP3, same early-2008 vintage. No HD or battery, but I can re-use our existing parts. $94, shipped, also from eBay.
On a roll, I also swapped the HD from MBP3 into the replacement. The 'new' one has a 2.6GHz CPU (vs the 2.4GHz of the dead one), and a glossy screen. Of concern was that not only was the HD missing, the HD cable was torn in half, and part was missing. Fortunately we can just move that from the dead machine too. Everything came up OK, even the DVD drive works.
I took a shot at making a VirtualBox installation of Lion, so I could run DxO without rebooting, but I was unable to get VBox to map an unused SATA drive to be the disk for that OS. Using dtruss to investigate, this is the relevant error:
...
open("/dev/disk0", 0x1000000, 0x180) = 7 0
fstat64(0x7, 0x7FFF59979218, 0x180) = 0 0
ioctl(0x7, 0x40086419, 0x7FFF59979210) = 0 0
ioctl(0x7, 0x40046418, 0x7FFF5997920C) = 0 0
close(0x7) = 0 0
...
open("/Users/jimc/VMLion.vmdk", 0x1000A02, 0x180) = 8 0
open("/dev/disk0", 0x1000002, 0x180) = -1 Err#16
...
The open/ioctl/close sequence on the raw drive apparently causes the
next open of the drive to fail:
VBoxManage: error: VMDK: could not open raw disk file '/dev/disk0' VBoxManage: error: Error code VERR_RESOURCE_BUSY at .../Storage/VMDK.cpp(3426) in function int vmdkCreateRawImage(PVMDKIMAGE, const PVDISKRAW, uint64_t) VBoxManage: error: Cannot create the raw disk VMDK: VERR_RESOURCE_BUSY VBoxManage: error: The raw disk vmdk file was not created
cured the problem. Thus I issued the following commands:diskutil unmountDisk disk0 chmod 666 /dev/disk0
I then created a new VM, and told it to use this .vmdk disk control file. I mounted the optical drive to the VM, and inserted the Lion install disc. Then, Start.VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /Users/jimc/VirtualBox\ VMs/VMLion.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 chmod 666 /Users/jimc/VirtualBox\ VMs/VMLion.vmdk
So far I've learned a lot, but nothing particularly useful.
But besides the inconvenience of rebooting to Lion to run DxO, the real problem was that running Lion against the same user directories as El Capitan caused it to mess up saved application state. However, if I keep the additional HD I put in for VM Lion, and just boot to it instead of the normal Lion/El Capitan disk, I should avoid that part of the problem. (The inconvenience remains, but is lessened considerably.) I would just buy DxO, but they won't sell me a version that will run on this machine... Near as I can tell, in their history they never would sell me a version that would run on any of my always-slightly-dated machines. They seem to operate only at the bleeding edge, those of us with trailing-edge budgets are always SOL.
Nothing, with computers, is ever as easy as it should be.
I took half the RAM out and put it in MacPro2. I took the 4 2GB RAM sticks out of MacPro2 and put them in MPServer, and took the 2GB (2 half-good 2GB sticks) from MPServer and put them in this new machine. The final RAM yields are: 32GB (up from 24) in MacPro2, 8GB (up from 2) in MPServer, and 18GB (down from 32) in Steve's.
I ordered a drive sled adapter (SSD) for $16, and I'm looking for a gently used SSD of modest size and price. One of Silverwood's cast-off 2TB drives should do for the Time Machine backup.
During this I noticed that the RAM bus speed was 553 MHz, not 667. This was due to the presence of the half-good 2GB sticks, which I promptly removed and put back in MPServer. 16GB is enough, and gaining bus speed on a general purpose computer is far more significant than the loss of 2GB of RAM.
I ordered 3 expansion slot covers, to plug the mouse doorways on the machine; $10. I'm picking up a 250GB SSD ($20) today, too. When I'm done with it this machine will essentially be exactly what I'm using (MacPro2) today, happily, except with only 4 cores, not 8. (This should not matter to Steve, and barely does to me; only photo processing sessions remotely tax the machine, and that is a rare occurrance.)
A very nice compendium of Mac Pro upgrades is here.
I managed to damage the OS while trying to re-map the user accounts, so most of the day was spent re-loading fresh High Sierras onto both drives.
Of continuing concern is the tremendous delay the 5,1 has coming out of sleep. (That's what prompted the video card experiment in the first place, and putting bootable OSs on both drives.) My existing 2,1 is notably fast at this, and part of what drove my decision to upgrade it rather than move over entirely to the laptop instead. OTOH, if I'm using the 5,1 all day it won't be going to sleep that much. (Unlike today's usage pattern, where the 2,1 is mostly only for personal use.) Still, this'll be quite the irritant if it can't be alleviated.
I got MacPro3 installed in place of MacPro2, and all software and files transferred over. After all this I find that the Nehalem CPUs in this thing, Intel X5570's, are not supported by VMWare Fusion 11, the whole point of the exercise; I guess I will have to upgrade from an 8- to a 12-core system. (At least I haven't seemed to have lost anything, except money if this doesn't eventually work out.) The CPUs in MacPro3 are newer than what is in MacPro2, as the CPUs' 'new' hyperthreading feature results in 16 CPU usage graphs (in an 8-core system) in the Activity Monitor, though not new enough for VMWare. So, earlier than I had intended, I ordered 2× Intel Westmere-EP X5690 CPUs; $148 from eBay.
Sigh.
I drove out and picked up the $20 250GB SSD, and slipped it into a SATA connector in Steve's machine. (Because it's so small and light I don't need a drive sled for temporary use, so long as I can lie the machine on its side.) I used the machine's target disk mode and Daniel's laptop in recovery mode to 'restore' Jill's machine onto the SSD, which was the easiest way to get the patched but clean El Capitan OS onto it. (Three-machine hat trick?) This operation brought a goodly number of applications with it. I still have to do some tidying up of accounts, etc., but this can wait until I have the full planned complement of drives and sleds.
CTRL-UP key sequence does not bring up the
Mission Control screen, unlike on the laptop. Both machines are
running High Sierra.
Further investigation of the former shows, in the logs (reformatted):
$ pmset -g log | fgrep "Delays to Wake"
2020-03-12 08:41:22 -0700 Kernel Client Acks Delays to Wake notifications: [NVDATesla driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(370 ms)]
[en0 driver is slow(msg: DidChangeState to 1)(421 ms)]
[en1 driver is slow(msg: DidChangeState to 1)(421 ms)]
[PRT4 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(738 ms)]
[PRT0 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(1211 ms)]
[PRT2 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(1211 ms)]
[PRT5 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(1211 ms)]
[IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType05 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 4)(1254 ms)]
[PRT3 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(11776 ms)]
2020-03-12 08:41:37 -0700 Kernel Client Acks Delays to Wake notifications: [AppleHDADriver driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(1481 ms)]
$
Summing the reported delays adds up to a suspiciously large amount of
time—roughly 16 seconds in the PRTN drivers alone,
whatever they are.
And now for something completely different: A little bit of research shows that DxO appears to support the MacPro3 machine, albeit at the very trailing edge of their current system requirements. So, I sprung for it: $199 for the Elite edition of PhotoLab 3. (I've been using a pirated down-rev copy for years because they simply would not sell me a copy that actually ran on the hardware I had.) After downloading it and applying the activation code it appears to run. Unfortunately, most of my camera/lens combinations are on the old side, and are not directly supported. I put in some requests, though I doubt anything will happen. (Many of these combinations were supported by older versions of their software.)
For DxO's sake I put the GT 120 away and stole the HD 5770 video card from MacPro2, putting the flashed HD 4870 card back in it. This gets me 20–30 FPS frame rate (vs 2–3) on the 30" monitor, using Unigen's Valley demo as a benchmark.
I ordered a second SATA optical drive for MacPro, a used SATA DVD superdrive for about $12. Having two drives makes copying discs easier, should the need occur. The one already in MacPro3 claims to be Blu-ray capable, but duping those is not something I'm likely to do, so a cheaper DVD drive is just fine.
The PCI cover plates and the SSD mounting adapter came today. I
installed them in Steve's machine, and re-mapped the user accounts to
be suitable for him. The machine can be option-booted to either
drive, or CMD-R booted to the recovery partition on the
SSD. (There is no recovery partition on the HDD, no doubt due to
whatever the PO did to get El Capitan onto this system.) All the
machine needs now is a drive for Time Machine.
I checked online prices, and it looks like 3TB drives are the new bigger-than-2TB lowest-cost option, $40–50 each, though the price-per-gigabyte sweet spot is probably the 4TB drives at around $70 each. Still a little expensive considering I'd need to buy four new drives.
Which means I need to look into trimming down the existing backups somehow.
$ pmset -g log | fgrep "Delays to Wake"
2020-03-15 06:15:35 -0700 Kernel Client Acks Delays to Wake notifications: [en1 driver is slow(msg: DidChangeState to 1)(420 ms)]
[en0 driver is slow(msg: DidChangeState to 1)(420 ms)]
[PRT4 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(745 ms)]
[PRT5 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(1208 ms)]
[PRT2 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(1211 ms)]
[PRT0 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(1212 ms)]
[PRT3 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 2)(11831 ms)]
2020-03-15 06:15:59 -0700 Kernel Client Acks Delays to Wake notifications: [AppleHDAHDMI_DPDriver driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(402 ms)]
[AppleHDADriver driver is slow(msg: SetState to 1)(1479 ms)]
$
The backup system is nearly full, and I don't think I'm quite ready to spring for 4TB drives. 3TB drives just aren't that much bigger than 2TB, so I'm going to look into trimming the backup sets.
First up is the fact that MPServer's own local backup directory reads as 9TB used. On a 2TB RAID that's completely ludicrous. Because there's nothing critical (as in: can't be re-made from scratch) on MPServer's own disk, Step 1 is to turn off TM on it, entirely delete its backup, and start over. Trying a simplistic:
did not work, there were lots of errors. I then used "sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Backups/Backups.db
tmutil" to remove the backup sets one at a time:
cd /Volumes/Backups
for bs in Backups.backupdb/MPServer/*; do
sudo tmutil delete $bs
done
rm -rf Backups.backupdb
This took a fair amount of time and almost worked, but the
"Latest" link choked things, and at that point nothing I
did could get rid of those last empty (?) directories. After a lot of
flailing around, including booting the recovery system and booting
into single-user, and trying various fsck, diskutil, and chgflags
commands, all to no avail, I finally decided to just rename this
crummy thing and ignore it thereafter. After the rename, though,
I could delete it. Clearly something was stuck in
its craw, and the renaming cleared it up.
Deleting the server's own backup made free space go from about 20GB to about 140GB. Trying to turn on the backup again, though, claimed to need even more space than that. WTF? I waded through the home directories, and found many leftovers, files which were in use (and backed up) on other, primary, machines. These got deleted, and after that and a bit more tidying up the backup only claimed to need 60GB. So, the net recovery was about 60GB. [In fact it only consumed about 34GB once it had finished.]
Not enough. The G5 Quad, which used to be Jill's primary machine (and is now Daniel's game machine; she's now using MacPro) has backups going back to mid-2014, which we do not need. Its backup set consumed some 232GB, and removing all of 2014–2017 and compacting:
cd /Volumes/Backups
hdiutil attach G5Q*.sparsebundle
cd /Volumes/Time*
for bs in Backups.backupdb/G5Q/201[4-7]*; do
sudo tmutil delete $bs
done
cd -
hdiutil detach ../Time*
hdiutil compact G5Q*.sparsebundle
reclaimed 93GB. (Because of the hard links to directories it's
difficult to predict how much space each backup takes.) Now we're
talking. I did the same thing to MBP2, and got back 57GB there.
With some 356GB of free space now claimed on the Backups RAID I enabled backups on MacPro3, the point of all this activity.
...And, the RAM, drive sleds, firewire converter cable, and DVD drive all came today.
I broke down and ordered a Mac Pro 4,1 1-CPU card that's already got a 2.66GHz 6-core X5650 in it; $87.12 including shipping. This gives me something (that will run VMware) to use while I upgrade the dual CPU card with X5690's, and gives me something to fall back on if the upgrade process fails or completion is delayed, or in case of later hardware failure. I don't really want to have to fall back to MacPro2; I'm already spoiled, and I'm not even close to finishing the upgrade.
It's possible that next year they'd have enough surplus 4TB drives that I could upgrade my backup server using cast-offs.
The problem with MPServer's not being able to go to sleep turned out to be the old Temperature Monitor package. I quit that and MPServer's sleep problems are gone. Because of this, and because it kept having problems losing connection to sensors and re-creating its windows, I also quit the newer Hardware Monitor (the equivalent tool for High Sierra) that I'd been running on MacPro3. If I'm ever curious about heat I can just run it on demand.
For maximum confidence in this upgrade process I should test all three new CPUs before I start de-lidding. (I'd want to be able to return any faulty processors, and I couldn't if I'd already cut into it.) Supposedly the single-CPU tray uses lidded processors, so I'd need to use it as a test mule for all three new CPUs, before I even get started upgrading. This, of course, puts my current hardware at some risk. Still, fortune favors the bold...
Upgrade plan:
The problem with MacPro3's waking up in a timely fashion seems to be due to the (High Sierra) Hardware Monitor, which I was using to monitor temperatures. Looks like this is a bad-news tool all around, and should only be run when specifically looking for problems.
For the record, MacPro3 currently has 24GB in it and I've got it pretty well loaded up with processes. In use it generally feels snappy, and is largely fast enough at everything I've tried so far. According to the Activity Monitor it is compressing memory, and has used some swap space—both to the tune of about ½GB; the eventual target of 48GB RAM should be plenty, and there's always the easy less-performant 64GB option from there if I should need it. (Or even more, with significant expense for larger-than-8GB memory modules, all of which [at that level] must match in size.)
The laptop (MBP4) would periodically go into high-fan activity, especially when running Windows in a VM, but MacPro3 has so far never even breathed the slightest bit hard while working. The tower upgrade has been a lot of work and a fair amount of expense, but so far I'm liking the move off the laptop.
hdiutil attach ~/Desktop/SL.dmg -shadow
cp /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist
hdiutil eject /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/
hdiutil convert -format UDRO -o ~/Desktop/SLserver.dmg ~/Desktop/SL.dmg -shadow
cpuid.1.eax = "0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0101"
mkdir -p /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/CoreServices/ && touch /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist ~/Desktop/ServerVersion.plist(Otherwise you will receive a "VMWare Tools can't be installed on this disk. VMWare Tools requires Mac OS X version 10.5 or higher." error.)
sudo mv ~/Desktop/ServerVersion.plist /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist ~/Desktop/ServerVersion.plist
sudo mv ~/Desktop/ServerVersion.plist /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist
sudo cp /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist
cpuid.1.eax = "0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0101"from the vmx file.
sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio"
It is vital that you never reboot the VM (the Guest OS) with
the ServerVersion.plist not in place, else VMware will
refuse to run it. I don't think there's a recovery plan if you should
screw this up.
The 10.6.8 combo update attempt via Software Update fails every time,
and takes a long time to do so. Dr. Google says that directly downloading
the
combo update .dmg works much better, so I did this. Yes,
that did the trick. (You attach the .dmg as VMware's CD image
and run it from there.)
I downloaded the Xcode 3.2.6 .dmg file from Apple and
installed it in the 10.6 VM.
I seem to have a fully-functional, fully equipped 10.6 virtual system, for using Rosetta if I should ever need to. Finally!
I can also confirm, definitively, that the single-CPU Mac Pro 4,1 processor trays use normal CPUs, with integrated heat spreaders (a.k.a. protective lids). The single-CPU heat sink, though, is 50% larger than the heat sinks on the dual-CPU card. Supposedly this is the reason for using lidless CPUs on the dual: there simply wasn't room for two of the correct (larger) sinks and so the protective CPU lids had to go in order to improve the efficacy of the smaller sinks.
The first step was to test all the new CPUs before surgery, which had to be done in the single-CPU card. (You can't return a defective CPU after you remove the lid, so you have to test them unmodified!) All passed, then I restored the card to its original state.
(At this point one could consider upgrading the single-CPU card to its ultimate extreme: the 4.4 GHz X5698, but that's not a good idea for several reasons:Basically this is just a dumb idea all around.)
- You can't find one, they were only ever made in limited quantities;
- Even if you could find one, they are extremely expensive, like $1,500! (Versus $20,000 new; what a deal.)
- They are only 2-core, and are intended for applications where single-process throughput is paramount, and/or for bragging rights. I don't have anything like that.
- They don't do any clock throttling, even when idle, and so run fairly hot all the time. These are for the cost-is-no-object crowd.
- Apparently it has already been tried, and does not work.
Next was to prove that the dual-CPU card would function with only one CPU in it. I removed CPU B, the forward one, and found it to be, as expected, an X5570 (SLBFX) device. Yes, with one CPU missing the fans eventually spun up, but otherwise the system was still usable.
Now it starts getting harder.
The first lid removal, of the $6 X5650, went smoothly at first, but it turned bad fast. I used a razor blade to cut through the glue around the edges, which went well. I then worked four razor blades in around the edges, to serve as a heat shield and to provide some spring pressure to cause the lid to pop off when the heat was applied. I used some wide-opening needlenose vise grips to gently grip the body of the CPU at the edges, similarly to how you would hold the CPU by hand, so that I could freehand everything (while I was outside) for better heat control. I then aimed the lid towards the ground and applied heat with a propane torch until the lid popped off. There were two problems:
Of course it did not work; there goes $6.
Moving on, I took up one of the X5690's and de-lidded it. Learning from the MCF of the first one I used a small wooden screw clamp to grip the CPU's PCB by the edges, to avoid point stresses. I wrapped the jaws in aluminum foil to protect the wood from the heat. I then de-lidded the CPU using the torch. When the solder lets loose the noise and cascade to the ground of the (now) hot spring-loaded lid, molten metal, and hot razor blades is quite disturbing. (Watch your feet!) The heavy lid came off cleanly, and cleanup of the soft solder remaining on the die was easy. (I used one of the razor blades, once it had cooled a bit.) I installed the CPU and fired up the system.
It worked! All 6 cores showed up, and all 3 RAM modules. (There's no point in putting CPU B's RAM in yet as this is NUMA, and without the second CPU the second set of RAM modules isn't connected to anything.) The system identified at the expected speed: 3.46 GHz. With the second CPU missing eventually the fans went on high alert, but otherwise the system seemed OK.
I then de-lidded the second CPU, using exactly the same technique as before. It also went smoothly, nothing abby-normal to report. I installed CPU B, moved the RAM back to the dual-CPU card, and fired it up.
It still worked! All 12 cores (24 hyperthreads) showed up, and all 6 (48GB) RAM modules. The system identified at the expected speeds: 3.46 GHz (CPU) and 1,333 MHz (RAM). It took a lot longer to 'bong' at boot due to the large amount of RAM, which was a bit alarming at first. This system is now as fast and capable as it's ever going to get.
It turns out that buying the $6 practice CPU was a very good idea. Making identifiable (correctable) mistakes on that one was the key to a successful operation at the projected cost.
https://support.logi.com/hc/en-in/articles/360024693154-Downloads-Webcam-C930eIt looks like they have versions that include El Capitan, as well as High Sierra. The societal response to COVID-19 has resulted in the supply of webcams drying up, good thing I've already got mine.
I ordered a Cloudlifter CL-1 ribbon microphone (+25dB) pre-amp, and cable. $154, this is nearly what I spent on the Tascam US-2x2 audio interface last year! (With integral 57dB preamp.) But, the Nady RSM-4 (cheap) ribbon microphone isn't really useful without additional gain. I set up the now-surplus MacPro2 downstairs as a sound station, using a spare monitor and keyboard/mouse, and put the Tascam US-2x2 on it. I ordered a 50' TOSlink cable (from Monoprice: $19 with shipping) to hook MacPro2 to the home theater system, it still has one optical input left open. (The tape loop.)
Having a robust regular microphone on hand also sounds like a good idea.
...No, that didn't do it, the machine again crashed hard. I tried removing the extra 16GB RAM I'd bought and that made no difference. I put that RAM in the single-CPU card and installed it so that I could get back online while I think about this.
The only kernel panic (/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Kernel*) report is from yesterday:
*** Panic Report *** Panic(CPU 17, time 942606945259): NMIPI for spinlock acquisition timeout...
I put the single-CPU card back in, I'm off furlough and I need reliable/usable more than fast. Its CPU temperature is lower than A's on the dual card, idling at about 100°F. Not surprising, given the much lower clock rate and the 50% bigger heat sink.
So, is the problem the CPU, or the site? I suppose I need to swap the CPU B chip into the A site, and run the dual card with no CPU B (and with earmuffs) for long enough to indicate whether that X5690 is good or not. Ugh.
At the end of the day I installed the second CPU and brought the system up. Temperatures on the two CPUs are much more plausible than last time, 97 & 88°F at idle, we'll see if it's stable. It's certainly a lot quieter!
The backup server is full, again. Time Machine for MacPro3 is only able to go back one day, it's throwing away backups now. All that earlier effort to reclaim space was basically for naught. The 2TB backup RAID simply is not big enough for all nine machines (!) that are using it.
MacPro3 crashed again, after several hours of use. I put the single-CPU tray back in, with 24GB of RAM.
The kernel panic (/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Kernel_2020-05-02-100448_MacPro3.panic) is:
Anonymous UUID: F70C1737-3BB2-9EA0-349F-EAFD3A0D6458
Sat May 2 10:04:48 2020
*** Panic Report ***
Panic(CPU 20, time 30731630401745): NMIPI for unresponsive processor: TLB flush timeout, TLB state:0x0
RAX: 0x00000000004f0000, RBX: 0xffffff8062f20f00, RCX: 0x00000000034f0000, RDX: 0xffffff805f7d5130
RSP: 0xffffff9d9644b7c0, RBP: 0xffffff9d9644b7c0, RSI: 0xffffff7f874b5d80, RDI: 0xffffff805f7d5130
R8: 0xffffff7f86fa2504, R9: 0x0000000000000000, R10: 0xffffff7f8718db98, R11: 0x0000000000000000
R12: 0x000000000046ab8f, R13: 0x0000000000000000, R14: 0xffffff9d9644b898, R15: 0xffffff8062ce7770
RFL: 0x0000000000000246, RIP: 0xffffff800401d8ac, CS: 0x0000000000000008, SS: 0x0000000000000010
Backtrace (CPU 20), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff8559704f70 : 0xffffff8004187df4
0xffffff8559704fd0 : 0xffffff800401f016
0xffffff9d9644b7c0 : 0xffffff7f86f9825b
0xffffff9d9644b860 : 0xffffff7f86fa7cea
0xffffff9d9644b880 : 0xffffff7f86f54e10
0xffffff9d9644b950 : 0xffffff7f86eab08f
0xffffff9d9644b990 : 0xffffff7f86f85808
0xffffff9d9644b9c0 : 0xffffff7f86eaf4bd
0xffffff9d9644b9f0 : 0xffffff7f86eb598a
0xffffff9d9644ba30 : 0xffffff7f86eacf6d
0xffffff9d9644bac0 : 0xffffff80046c41a9
0xffffff9d9644bb20 : 0xffffff80046c2330
0xffffff9d9644bb70 : 0xffffff80046cad97
0xffffff9d9644bcb0 : 0xffffff8004143794
0xffffff9d9644bdc0 : 0xffffff8004072360
0xffffff9d9644be10 : 0xffffff800404f6cd
0xffffff9d9644be60 : 0xffffff80040621db
0xffffff9d9644bef0 : 0xffffff80041722ed
0xffffff9d9644bfa0 : 0xffffff800401f666
Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily2(378.28)[D342FE41-0457-3586-ABB0-38E8E3947C4F]@0xffffff7f86ea7000->0xffffff7f86f3ffff
dependency: com.apple.driver.AppleMobileFileIntegrity(1.0.5)[044A9927-2EC2-34C1-8ED8-67D68C4F6B8E]@0xffffff7f84faf000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOSurface(211.15)[37BCC686-AF99-3381-AC4F-E54A347E0F40]@0xffffff7f86b04000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.9)[FA4F25DF-5808-3E01-9E69-72D9BDE59FE9]@0xffffff7f84894000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(519.23)[81D774E8-DD11-3866-B90A-E855215EDB60]@0xffffff7f84ff0000
com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX3000(1.6.8)[64FB1795-BE76-3185-89CA-9B000690E5AA]@0xffffff7f86f50000->0xffffff7f874b7fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOSurface(211.15)[37BCC686-AF99-3381-AC4F-E54A347E0F40]@0xffffff7f86b04000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.9)[FA4F25DF-5808-3E01-9E69-72D9BDE59FE9]@0xffffff7f84894000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(519.23)[81D774E8-DD11-3866-B90A-E855215EDB60]@0xffffff7f84ff0000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily2(378.28)[D342FE41-0457-3586-ABB0-38E8E3947C4F]@0xffffff7f86ea7000
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: com.apple.WebKit
Mac OS version:
17G12034
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 17.7.0: Tue Feb 18 22:51:29 PST 2020; root:xnu-4570.71.73~1/RELEASE_X86_64
Kernel UUID: F9494C59-371A-38C9-BA91-8A8AA7582B96
Kernel slide: 0x0000000003e00000
Kernel text base: 0xffffff8004000000
__HIB text base: 0xffffff8003f00000
System model name: MacPro5,1 (Mac-F221BEC8)
System uptime in nanoseconds: 30731630555588
last loaded kext at 30723947320850: com.apple.driver.usb.cdc 5.0.0 (addr 0xffffff7f876dc000, size 28672)
last unloaded kext at 29861394508552: com.apple.driver.AppleXsanScheme 3 (addr 0xffffff7f87781000, size 32768)
loaded kexts:
com.vmware.kext.vmioplug.18.7.0 18.7.0
com.vmware.kext.vmx86 1587.03.45
com.vmware.kext.vmnet 1587.03.45
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetAdp 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetFlt 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxUSB 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv 6.0.18
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs 11.1
com.apple.nke.asp-tcp 8.0.2
com.apple.driver.AppleTyMCEDriver 1.0.3d2
com.apple.driver.AGPM 110.23.37
com.apple.filesystems.autofs 3.0
com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyHIDDriver 131
com.apple.driver.AppleHDA 281.52
com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyDriver 281.52
com.apple.AGDCPluginDisplayMetrics 3.20.18
com.apple.driver.AppleUpstreamUserClient 3.6.5
com.apple.driver.AppleMCCSControl 1.5.5
com.apple.driver.AppleHV 1
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacyFramebuffer 1.6.8
com.apple.iokit.IOUserEthernet 1.0.1
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager 6.0.7f18
com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX3000 1.6.8
com.apple.driver.pmtelemetry 1
com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X 7.0.0
com.apple.kext.AMD5000Controller 1.6.8
com.apple.driver.AppleLPC 3.1
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelSlowAdaptiveClocking 4.0.0
com.apple.driver.AppleOSXWatchdog 1
com.apple.driver.AudioAUUC 1.70
com.apple.driver.ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin 1.0.0
com.apple.iokit.SCSITaskUserClient 404.30.3
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBDisplays 380
com.apple.filesystems.hfs.kext 407.50.6
com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless 1.0.0d1
com.apple.BootCache 40
com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib 1.0.0
com.apple.AppleSystemPolicy 1.0
com.apple.filesystems.apfs 748.51.0
com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI 5.5.9
com.apple.driver.AirPort.Atheros40 700.74.5
com.apple.driver.Intel82574LEthernet 2.7.2
com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort 329.50.2
com.apple.driver.AppleRTC 2.0
com.apple.driver.AppleHPET 1.8
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIButtons 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBIOS 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIEC 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleAPIC 1.7
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient 220.50.1
com.apple.nke.applicationfirewall 186
com.apple.security.TMSafetyNet 8
com.apple.security.quarantine 3
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement 220.50.1
com.apple.driver.usb.cdc 5.0.0
com.apple.security.SecureRemotePassword 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBUserClient 900.4.1
com.apple.kext.triggers 1.0
com.apple.driver.DspFuncLib 281.52
com.apple.kext.OSvKernDSPLib 526
com.apple.iokit.IOAVBFamily 683.1
com.apple.plugin.IOgPTPPlugin 680.15
com.apple.iokit.IOEthernetAVBController 1.1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleSSE 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport 519.21
com.apple.iokit.IOSerialFamily 11
com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily2 378.28
com.apple.iokit.IOSurface 211.15
com.apple.AppleGPUWrangler 3.20.18
com.apple.AppleGraphicsDeviceControl 3.20.18
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusController 1.0.18d1
com.apple.driver.AppleHDAController 281.52
com.apple.iokit.IOHDAFamily 281.52
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusPCI 1.0.14d1
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacySupport 1.6.8
com.apple.iokit.IOSlowAdaptiveClockingFamily 1.0.0
com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily 519.23
com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireIP 2.2.9
com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginLegacy 1.0.0
com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginFamily 6.0.0d8
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIMultimediaCommandsDevice 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOBDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.IODVDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.IOCDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothFamily 6.0.7f18
com.apple.driver.usb.IOUSBHostHIDDevice 1.2
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBAudio 312.6
com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily 206.5
com.apple.vecLib.kext 1.2.0
com.apple.driver.usb.networking 5.0.0
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostCompositeDevice 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHub 1.2
com.apple.filesystems.hfs.encodings.kext 1
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIBlockStorage 301.40.2
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCISerialATAPI 267.50.1
com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily 4.7.2
com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family 1200.12.2
com.apple.driver.corecapture 1.0.4
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIFamily 288
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCIPCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCIPCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostPacketFilter 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily 900.4.1
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBHostMergeProperties 1.2
com.apple.driver.AppleEFINVRAM 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleEFIRuntime 2.1
com.apple.iokit.IOSMBusFamily 1.1
com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily 2.0.0
com.apple.security.sandbox 300.0
com.apple.kext.AppleMatch 1.0.0d1
com.apple.driver.DiskImages 480.60.3
com.apple.driver.AppleFDEKeyStore 28.30
com.apple.driver.AppleEffaceableStorage 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleKeyStore 2
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTDM 439.70.3
com.apple.driver.AppleMobileFileIntegrity 1.0.5
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageDriver 140.70.2
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIBlockCommandsDevice 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleCredentialManager 1.0
com.apple.driver.KernelRelayHost 1
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHostFamily 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBCommon 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleBusPowerController 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleSEPManager 1.0.1
com.apple.driver.IOSlaveProcessor 1
com.apple.iokit.IOReportFamily 31
com.apple.iokit.IOTimeSyncFamily 680.15
com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily 3.4
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIPlatform 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleSMC 3.1.9
com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily 2.9
com.apple.iokit.IOACPIFamily 1.4
com.apple.kec.pthread 1
com.apple.kec.Libm 1
com.apple.kec.corecrypto 1.0
Panic(CPU 21, time 30731630403040): NMIPI for unresponsive processor: TLB flush timeout, TLB state:0x0
RAX: 0x0000000000000020, RBX: 0xffffff805f5c4e00, RCX: 0x0000000000000001, RDX: 0x0000000000000000
RSP: 0xffffff9d96443d60, RBP: 0xffffff9d96443d90, RSI: 0x0000000000000006, RDI: 0xffffff805fa60000
R8: 0xffffff805f54f300, R9: 0x00001bf2d5a472b2, R10: 0x0000000000000000, R11: 0x00000000e0000000
R12: 0xffffff7f868ccb80, R13: 0xffffff805f407a80, R14: 0x00000000000007b0, R15: 0x0000000000000006
RFL: 0x0000000000000046, RIP: 0xffffff7f868b07b7, CS: 0x0000000000000008, SS: 0x0000000000000010
Backtrace (CPU 21), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff8559734f70 : 0xffffff8004187df4
0xffffff8559734fd0 : 0xffffff800401f016
0xffffff9d96443d90 : 0xffffff7f868a8d8f
0xffffff9d96443e60 : 0xffffff7f868a7fe9
0xffffff9d96443f10 : 0xffffff800418a40c
0xffffff9d96443f30 : 0xffffff800408b322
0xffffff9d96443f80 : 0xffffff800408b8f0
0xffffff9d96443fa0 : 0xffffff800401e557
Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement(220.50.1)[019EF903-793F-381A-955A-3EFC215C44F9]@0xffffff7f868a6000->0xffffff7f868cffff
Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement(220.50.1)[019EF903-793F-381A-955A-3EFC215C44F9]@0xffffff7f868a6000->0xffffff7f868cffff
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task
Panic(CPU 9, time 30731630407199): NMIPI for unresponsive processor: TLB flush timeout, TLB state:0x0
RAX: 0x0000000000000020, RBX: 0xffffff805f5c1380, RCX: 0x0000000000000001, RDX: 0x0000000000000000
RSP: 0xffffff9d7004bd60, RBP: 0xffffff9d7004bd90, RSI: 0x0000000000000006, RDI: 0xffffff805fba83e0
R8: 0xffffff805fbac700, R9: 0x00001bf2d8dad509, R10: 0x0000000000000000, R11: 0x00000000e0000000
R12: 0xffffff7f868ccb80, R13: 0xffffff805f407180, R14: 0x00000000000007b0, R15: 0x0000000000000006
RFL: 0x0000000000000046, RIP: 0xffffff7f868b07b7, CS: 0x0000000000000008, SS: 0x0000000000000010
Backtrace (CPU 9), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff8559730f70 : 0xffffff8004187df4
0xffffff8559730fd0 : 0xffffff800401f016
0xffffff9d7004bd90 : 0xffffff7f868a8d8f
0xffffff9d7004be60 : 0xffffff7f868a7fe9
0xffffff9d7004bf10 : 0xffffff800418a40c
0xffffff9d7004bf30 : 0xffffff800
Recalling a multiprocessor compatibility issue in a former life, I
chased down Intel's MacCPUID (v3.1) utility. Running it, however,
does not show separate information for the two CPUs:
It is likely OK, though, as running it on the single CPU card returns identical results, except for the model and clock speed lines:MacCPUID v3.1 Info CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5690 @ 3.47GHz Genuine? YES Architecture: Westmere - 1st Generation Intel Core Family: 6 (06h) Model: 44 (2Ch) Stepping: 2 (02h) Frequency: 3,450,000 (Hz) Invariant TSC? NO GPU Model(s): ATI Radeon HD 5770 Features ACPI Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[22] ADX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[19] AES Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[25] APIC Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[9] AVX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[28] AVX2 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[5] AVX512BW Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[30] AVX512CD Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[28] AVX512DQ Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[17] AVX512ER Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[27] AVX512F Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[16] AVX512IFMA Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[21] AVX512PF Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[26] AVX512VBMI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[1] AVX512VL Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[31] AVX512_4FMAPS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EDX[3] AVX512_4VNNIW Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EDX[2] AVX512_BITALG Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[12] AVX512_VBMI2 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[6] AVX512_VNNI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[11] AVX512_VPOPCNTDQ Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[14] BMI1 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[3] BMI2 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[8] CLDEMOTE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[25] CLFLUSHOPT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[23] CLFSH Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[19] CLWB Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[24] CMOV Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[15] CNXT_ID Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[10] CX16 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[13] CX8 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[8] DCA Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[18] DE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[2] DEPRECATE_FPU_CS_DS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[13] DS Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[21] DS_CPL Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[4] DTES64 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[2] EM64T Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[29] ERMS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[9] EST Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[7] FDP_EXCPTN_ONLY Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[6] FMA Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[12] FP16C Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[29] FPU Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[0] FSGSBASE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[0] FXSR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[24] Fast Short REP MOV Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EDX[4] GFNI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[8] HLE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[4] HTT Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[28] INVPCID Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[10] INVTSC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=80000007h, ECX=0):EDX[8] IPT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[25] LAHFSAHF Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):ECX[0] LZCNT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):ECX[5] MCA Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[14] MCE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[7] MMX Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[23] MONITOR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[3] MOVBE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[22] MOVDIR64B Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[28] MOVDIRI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[27] MPX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[14] MSR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[5] MTRR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[12] OSPKE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[4] OSXSAVE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[27] PAE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[6] PAGE1GB Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[26] PAT Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[16] PBE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[31] PCID Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[17] PCLMULQDQ Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[1] PDCM Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[15] PGE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[13] PKU Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[3] POPCNT Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[23] PREFETCHW Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):ECX[8] PREFETCHWT1 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[0] PSE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[3] PSE36 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[17] PSN Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[18] RDPID Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[22] RDRAND Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[30] RDSEED Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[18] RDTSCP Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[27] RDT_A Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[15] RDT_M Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[12] RTM Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[11] SDBG Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[11] SEP Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[11] SGX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[2] SGX_LC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[30] SHA Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[29] SMAP Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[20] SMEP Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[7] SMX Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[6] SS Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[27] SSE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[25] SSE2 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[26] SSE3 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[0] SSE4_1 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[19] SSE4_2 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[20] SSSE3 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[9] SYSCALLRET Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[11] TM Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[29] TM2 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[8] TSC Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[4] TSC_ADJUST Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[1] TSC_DEADLINE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[24] UMIP Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[2] VAES Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[9] VME Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[1] VMX Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[5] VPCLMULQDQ Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[10] WAITPKG Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[5] X2APIC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[21] XD Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[20] XG1 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[2] XSAVE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[26] XSAVEC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[1] XSAVEOPT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[0] XSS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[3] XTPR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[14] Cache Caches L1 Data Size: 32KB Associativity: 8 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 2 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: No Invalidates Lower Caches: Yes L1 Instruction Size: 32KB Associativity: 4 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 2 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: No Invalidates Lower Caches: Yes L2 Unified Size: 256KB Associativity: 8 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 2 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: No Invalidates Lower Caches: Yes L3 Unified Size: 12MB Associativity: 16 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 32 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: Yes Invalidates Lower Caches: No Cache Info Data TLB0: 2 MByte and 4 MByte pages, 4-way set associative, 32 entries Data TLB: 4 KByte Pages, 4-way set associative, 64 entries Instruction TLB: 2-MByte or 4-MByte pages, fully associative, 7 entries CPUID leaf 2 does not report cache descriptor information, use CPUID leaf 4 to query cache parameters Instruction TLB: 4 KByte Pages, 4-way set associative, 64 entries 64-Byte Prefetching Shared 2nd-Level TLB: 4 KByte pages, 4-way associative, 512 entries CLFLUSH Line Size: 64 Performance Version: 3 General-Purpose Counters Number: 4 Width (bits): 48 Fixed-Function Counters Number: 3 Width (bits): 48 Events Core Cycles Supported? YES Instructions Retired Supported? YES Reference Cycles Supported? NO Last-Level Cache Reference Supported? YES Last-Level Cache Misses Supported? YES Branch Instructions Retired Supported? YES Branch Mispredict Instructions Retired Supported? YES Misc Processor Threads Logical Processors per Package: 12 Cores per Physical Package: 6 Logical Processors per Core: 2 Monitor/MWait Leaf Smallest Line Size (Bytes): 64 Largest Line Size (Bytes): 64 Interrupts Treated as Break-Event: Yes Number of C0 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C1 Sub-States Supported: 2 Number of C2 Sub-States Supported: 1 Number of C3 Sub-States Supported: 1 Number of C4 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C5 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C6 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C7 Sub-States Supported: 0 Thermal & Power Management Leaf Intel Turbo Boost Technology: Yes APIC-Timer-Always-Running: Yes Power Limit Notification Controls: No Clock Modulation Duty Cycle Extension: No Package Thermal Management: No Hardware Performance States (HWP): No HWP Notification: No HWP Activity Window: No HWP Energy Performance Preference: No HWP Package Level Request: No Hardware Duty Cycling: No Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0: No Number of Interrupt Thresholds: 2 ACNT/MCNT Support: Yes Performance-Energy Bias Preference: No Address Sizes Physical Address (GB): 1024 Logical Address (GB): 262144
The X5690 SLBVX CPU packages (lids) were both marked identically, except for the serial numbers (3135B923 and 3141B105), so a mismatch is fairly unlikely.$ diff DualCPU SingleCPU 4c4 < CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5690 @ 3.47GHz --- > CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz 10c10 < Frequency: 3,450,000 (Hz) --- > Frequency: 2,666,666 (Hz)
The system crashed again after only a short time:
Anonymous UUID: F70C1737-3BB2-9EA0-349F-EAFD3A0D6458
Sat May 2 11:32:31 2020
*** Panic Report ***
Panic(CPU 14, time 341472918484): NMIPI for unresponsive processor: TLB flush timeout, TLB state:0x0
RAX: 0xffffff806f339098, RBX: 0xffffff8013c99698, RCX: 0x0000000000000076, RDX: 0x00000000670e7163
RSP: 0xffffff8579d2af00, RBP: 0xffffff8579d2af40, RSI: 0xffffff807128a000, RDI: 0xffffff8013c99698
R8: 0x0000000000000000, R9: 0x0000000000000000, R10: 0x0000000000000000, R11: 0x0000000000000000
R12: 0xffffff807128a000, R13: 0xffffff806f339098, R14: 0x0000000000000000, R15: 0x0000000000000000
RFL: 0x0000000000000097, RIP: 0xffffff801347bda0, CS: 0x0000000000000008, SS: 0x0000000000000010
Backtrace (CPU 14), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff8568af0f70 : 0xffffff8013587df4
0xffffff8568af0fd0 : 0xffffff801341f016
0xffffff8579d2af40 : 0xffffff801347beb4
0xffffff8579d2af70 : 0xffffff801357f5af
0xffffff8579d2afb0 : 0xffffff8013487abb
0xffffff8579d2b020 : 0xffffff80134874a6
0xffffff8579d2b070 : 0xffffff8013588349
0xffffff8579d2b0e0 : 0xffffff801341ee60
0xffffff8579d2b100 : 0xffffff801347bfc0
0xffffff8579d2b230 : 0xffffff7f954dd985
0xffffff8579d2b2b0 : 0xffffff7f93f80e30
0xffffff8579d2b310 : 0xffffff7f93f8370e
0xffffff8579d2b370 : 0xffffff7f93f89784
0xffffff8579d2b430 : 0xffffff7f94d8d10e
0xffffff8579d2b580 : 0xffffff80136d8854
0xffffff8579d2b5e0 : 0xffffff80136821b2
0xffffff8579d2b6a0 : 0xffffff8013684969
0xffffff8579d2b6f0 : 0xffffff8013685a07
0xffffff8579d2b710 : 0xffffff7f95fea6a7
0xffffff8579d2b7b0 : 0xffffff7f95feb6f8
0xffffff8579d2b7d0 : 0xffffff7f95fecdf5
0xffffff8579d2b8a0 : 0xffffff7f96028364
0xffffff8579d2bba0 : 0xffffff7f9602a4ba
0xffffff8579d2bbd0 : 0xffffff801367e9a0
0xffffff8579d2bf40 : 0xffffff8013a03f48
0xffffff8579d2bfa0 : 0xffffff801341f646
Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily(2.1)[F27A8A2A-6662-3608-83BD-415037509E01]@0xffffff7f93f7c000->0xffffff7f93fa3fff
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIBlockStorage(301.40.2)[0D9325A5-E989-39F7-B3CF-75FC51C60627]@0xffffff7f954d3000->0xffffff7f954f9fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIFamily(288)[50673EBC-47A0-329A-B58C-081A6EDF6BF4]@0xffffff7f954a9000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily(2.1)[F27A8A2A-6662-3608-83BD-415037509E01]@0xffffff7f93f7c000
com.apple.BootCache(40.0)[D4B1BD0D-E85C-3EAA-B921-F540E223A140]@0xffffff7f94d89000->0xffffff7f94d95fff
com.apple.filesystems.hfs.kext(407.50.6)[09445723-F283-31E5-B409-43D905BA81C6]@0xffffff7f95fdb000->0xffffff7f96041fff
dependency: com.apple.filesystems.hfs.encodings.kext(1)[F737F125-223E-3B67-B4FF-5AB56291D4FE]@0xffffff7f942f7000
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: mdworker
Mac OS version:
17G12034
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 17.7.0: Tue Feb 18 22:51:29 PST 2020; root:xnu-4570.71.73~1/RELEASE_X86_64
Kernel UUID: F9494C59-371A-38C9-BA91-8A8AA7582B96
Kernel slide: 0x0000000013200000
Kernel text base: 0xffffff8013400000
__HIB text base: 0xffffff8013300000
System model name: MacPro5,1 (Mac-F221BEC8)
System uptime in nanoseconds: 341472980902
last loaded kext at 252950042483: com.apple.filesystems.msdosfs 1.10 (addr 0xffffff7f96b7a000, size 69632)
last unloaded kext at 337199651191: com.apple.filesystems.msdosfs 1.10 (addr 0xffffff7f96b7a000, size 61440)
loaded kexts:
com.vmware.kext.vmioplug.18.7.0 18.7.0
com.vmware.kext.vmx86 1587.03.45
com.vmware.kext.vmnet 1587.03.45
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetAdp 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetFlt 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxUSB 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv 6.0.18
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs 11.1
com.apple.nke.asp-tcp 8.0.2
com.apple.driver.AppleTyMCEDriver 1.0.3d2
com.apple.driver.AGPM 110.23.37
com.apple.filesystems.autofs 3.0
com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyHIDDriver 131
com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyDriver 281.52
com.apple.driver.AppleUpstreamUserClient 3.6.5
com.apple.driver.AppleMCCSControl 1.5.5
com.apple.AGDCPluginDisplayMetrics 3.20.18
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacyFramebuffer 1.6.8
com.apple.driver.AppleHV 1
com.apple.iokit.IOUserEthernet 1.0.1
com.apple.driver.AppleHDA 281.52
com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX3000 1.6.8
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager 6.0.7f18
com.apple.driver.pmtelemetry 1
com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X 7.0.0
com.apple.kext.AMD5000Controller 1.6.8
com.apple.driver.AppleLPC 3.1
com.apple.driver.AppleOSXWatchdog 1
com.apple.driver.AudioAUUC 1.70
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelSlowAdaptiveClocking 4.0.0
com.apple.driver.ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin 1.0.0
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBDisplays 380
com.apple.filesystems.hfs.kext 407.50.6
com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless 1.0.0d1
com.apple.BootCache 40
com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib 1.0.0
com.apple.AppleSystemPolicy 1.0
com.apple.iokit.SCSITaskUserClient 404.30.3
com.apple.filesystems.apfs 748.51.0
com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI 5.5.9
com.apple.driver.Intel82574LEthernet 2.7.2
com.apple.driver.AirPort.Atheros40 700.74.5
com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort 329.50.2
com.apple.driver.AppleHPET 1.8
com.apple.driver.AppleRTC 2.0
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIButtons 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBIOS 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIEC 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleAPIC 1.7
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient 220.50.1
com.apple.nke.applicationfirewall 186
com.apple.security.TMSafetyNet 8
com.apple.security.quarantine 3
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement 220.50.1
com.apple.security.SecureRemotePassword 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBUserClient 900.4.1
com.apple.kext.triggers 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOAVBFamily 683.1
com.apple.plugin.IOgPTPPlugin 680.15
com.apple.iokit.IOEthernetAVBController 1.1.0
com.apple.driver.DspFuncLib 281.52
com.apple.kext.OSvKernDSPLib 526
com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport 519.21
com.apple.driver.AppleSSE 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily2 378.28
com.apple.iokit.IOSurface 211.15
com.apple.iokit.IOSerialFamily 11
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusController 1.0.18d1
com.apple.AppleGPUWrangler 3.20.18
com.apple.AppleGraphicsDeviceControl 3.20.18
com.apple.driver.AppleHDAController 281.52
com.apple.iokit.IOHDAFamily 281.52
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusPCI 1.0.14d1
com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireIP 2.2.9
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacySupport 1.6.8
com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily 519.23
com.apple.iokit.IOSlowAdaptiveClockingFamily 1.0.0
com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginLegacy 1.0.0
com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginFamily 6.0.0d8
com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothFamily 6.0.7f18
com.apple.driver.usb.IOUSBHostHIDDevice 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHub 1.2
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBAudio 312.6
com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily 206.5
com.apple.vecLib.kext 1.2.0
com.apple.driver.usb.networking 5.0.0
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostCompositeDevice 1.2
com.apple.filesystems.hfs.encodings.kext 1
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIMultimediaCommandsDevice 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOBDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.IODVDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.IOCDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIBlockStorage 301.40.2
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCISerialATAPI 267.50.1
com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily 4.7.2
com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family 1200.12.2
com.apple.driver.corecapture 1.0.4
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIFamily 288
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCIPCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCIPCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostPacketFilter 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily 900.4.1
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBHostMergeProperties 1.2
com.apple.driver.AppleEFINVRAM 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleEFIRuntime 2.1
com.apple.iokit.IOSMBusFamily 1.1
com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily 2.0.0
com.apple.security.sandbox 300.0
com.apple.kext.AppleMatch 1.0.0d1
com.apple.driver.DiskImages 480.60.3
com.apple.driver.AppleFDEKeyStore 28.30
com.apple.driver.AppleEffaceableStorage 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleKeyStore 2
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTDM 439.70.3
com.apple.driver.AppleMobileFileIntegrity 1.0.5
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageDriver 140.70.2
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIBlockCommandsDevice 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleCredentialManager 1.0
com.apple.driver.KernelRelayHost 1
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHostFamily 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBCommon 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleBusPowerController 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleSEPManager 1.0.1
com.apple.driver.IOSlaveProcessor 1
com.apple.iokit.IOReportFamily 31
com.apple.iokit.IOTimeSyncFamily 680.15
com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily 3.4
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIPlatform 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleSMC 3.1.9
com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily 2.9
com.apple.iokit.IOACPIFamily 1.4
com.apple.kec.pthread 1
com.apple.kec.Libm 1
com.apple.kec.corecrypto 1.0
panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff8013565ff1): "TLB invalidation IPI timeout, unresponsive CPU bitmap: 0x4000, NMIPI acks: 0x0, now: 0x1, deadline: 340733462353"@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-4570.71.73/osfmk/x86_64/pmap.c:2798
Backtrace (CPU 2), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff857af5b5a0 : 0xffffff801346ce56
0xffffff857af5b5f0 : 0xffffff8013596434
0xffffff857af5b630 : 0xffffff8013588604
0xffffff857af5b6a0 : 0xffffff801341ee60
0xffffff857af5b6c0 : 0xffffff801346c8cc
0xffffff857af5b7f0 : 0xffffff801346c68c
0xffffff857af5b850 : 0xffffff8013565ff1
0xffffff857af5b8f0 : 0xffffff801356c944
0xffffff857af5b9d0 : 0xffffff801356d914
0xffffff857af5ba30 : 0xffffff80134f7fff
0xffffff857af5bb70 : 0xffffff80134f77e2
0xffffff857af5bbb0 : 0xffffff8013502819
0xffffff857af5bcf0 : 0xffffff801347035d
0xffffff857af5bd90 : 0xffffff80134c3ce4
0xffffff857af5bdc0 : 0xffffff8013472360
0xffffff857af5be10 : 0xffffff801344f6cd
0xffffff857af5be60 : 0xffffff80134621db
0xffffff857af5bef0 : 0xffffff80135722ed
0xffffff857af5bfa0 : 0xffffff801341f666
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: Activity Monitor
Sadly, if I want to use MacPro3 it seems I have little choice for now except to revert to the slower single-CPU tray. I did so, though I put the maximum amount of RAM (32GB) in it. (This results in a slower memory interface since I'm using the 2-channel memory option, each channel handling two sticks. It's faster if you use only three sticks as all three memory control channels can be used, but I need more RAM than that in order to use VMware the way I want to.)
/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Kernel_2020-05-03-053154_MacPro3.panic):
Anonymous UUID: F70C1737-3BB2-9EA0-349F-EAFD3A0D6458
Sun May 3 05:31:54 2020
*** Panic Report ***
mp_kdp_enter(): 768, 22, 24 TIMED-OUT WAITING FOR NMI-ACK, PROCEEDING
panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff801ab65ff1): "TLB invalidation IPI timeout, unresponsive CPU bitmap: 0x100, NMIPI acks: 0x0, now: 0x0, deadline: 195824506282"@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-4570.71.73/osfmk/x86_64/pmap.c:2798
Backtrace (CPU 2), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff9d86ea3590 : 0xffffff801aa6ce56
0xffffff9d86ea35e0 : 0xffffff801ab96434
0xffffff9d86ea3620 : 0xffffff801ab88604
0xffffff9d86ea3690 : 0xffffff801aa1ee60
0xffffff9d86ea36b0 : 0xffffff801aa6c8cc
0xffffff9d86ea37e0 : 0xffffff801aa6c68c
0xffffff9d86ea3840 : 0xffffff801ab65ff1
0xffffff9d86ea38e0 : 0xffffff801ab6c944
0xffffff9d86ea39c0 : 0xffffff801ab6d914
0xffffff9d86ea3a20 : 0xffffff801aaf7fff
0xffffff9d86ea3b60 : 0xffffff801aaf77e2
0xffffff9d86ea3ba0 : 0xffffff801ab1ec8b
0xffffff9d86ea3be0 : 0xffffff801ace37f7
0xffffff9d86ea3ce0 : 0xffffff7f9bdb590c
0xffffff9d86ea3d60 : 0xffffff801accd93a
0xffffff9d86ea3dd0 : 0xffffff801acbfb4c
0xffffff9d86ea3e40 : 0xffffff801af46125
0xffffff9d86ea3ee0 : 0xffffff801af45ec3
0xffffff9d86ea3f40 : 0xffffff801b003f48
0xffffff9d86ea3fa0 : 0xffffff801aa1f646
Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.apple.filesystems.apfs(748.51)[9282203C-0581-3F3D-AD41-80C1E97124E0]@0xffffff7f9bd95000->0xffffff7f9be79fff
dependency: com.apple.kec.corecrypto(1.0)[5B97D05D-D661-3885-A71A-28388A981CED]@0xffffff7f9b8ff000
dependency: com.apple.driver.AppleEffaceableStorage(1.0)[CA2AB641-FF39-316A-BA4F-5AF561C66AC7]@0xffffff7f9bcf9000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily(2.1)[F27A8A2A-6662-3608-83BD-415037509E01]@0xffffff7f9b57c000
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: mdworker
Mac OS version:
17G12034
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 17.7.0: Tue Feb 18 22:51:29 PST 2020; root:xnu-4570.71.73~1/RELEASE_X86_64
Kernel UUID: F9494C59-371A-38C9-BA91-8A8AA7582B96
Kernel slide: 0x000000001a800000
Kernel text base: 0xffffff801aa00000
__HIB text base: 0xffffff801a900000
System model name: MacPro5,1 (Mac-F221BEC8)
System uptime in nanoseconds: 197328074138
last loaded kext at 57815392207: com.apple.filesystems.afpfs 11.1 (addr 0xffffff7f9e0fb000, size 352256)
last unloaded kext at 149862036493: com.apple.driver.AppleUSBMergeNub 900.4.1 (addr 0xffffff7f9c88b000, size 12288)
loaded kexts:
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetAdp 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetFlt 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxUSB 6.0.18
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv 6.0.18
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs 11.1
com.apple.nke.asp-tcp 8.0.2
com.apple.driver.AppleTyMCEDriver 1.0.3d2
com.apple.driver.AGPM 110.23.37
com.apple.filesystems.autofs 3.0
com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyHIDDriver 131
com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyDriver 281.52
com.apple.driver.AppleUpstreamUserClient 3.6.5
com.apple.driver.AppleMCCSControl 1.5.5
com.apple.AGDCPluginDisplayMetrics 3.20.18
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacyFramebuffer 1.6.8
com.apple.driver.AppleHDA 281.52
com.apple.driver.AppleHV 1
com.apple.iokit.IOUserEthernet 1.0.1
com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX3000 1.6.8
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager 6.0.7f18
com.apple.driver.pmtelemetry 1
com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X 7.0.0
com.apple.kext.AMD5000Controller 1.6.8
com.apple.driver.AppleLPC 3.1
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelSlowAdaptiveClocking 4.0.0
com.apple.driver.AudioAUUC 1.70
com.apple.driver.AppleOSXWatchdog 1
com.apple.driver.ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin 1.0.0
com.apple.iokit.SCSITaskUserClient 404.30.3
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBDisplays 380
com.apple.filesystems.hfs.kext 407.50.6
com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless 1.0.0d1
com.apple.BootCache 40
com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib 1.0.0
com.apple.AppleSystemPolicy 1.0
com.apple.filesystems.apfs 748.51.0
com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI 5.5.9
com.apple.driver.AirPort.Atheros40 700.74.5
com.apple.driver.Intel82574LEthernet 2.7.2
com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort 329.50.2
com.apple.driver.AppleRTC 2.0
com.apple.driver.AppleHPET 1.8
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIButtons 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBIOS 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIEC 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleAPIC 1.7
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient 220.50.1
com.apple.nke.applicationfirewall 186
com.apple.security.TMSafetyNet 8
com.apple.security.quarantine 3
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement 220.50.1
com.apple.security.SecureRemotePassword 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBUserClient 900.4.1
com.apple.kext.triggers 1.0
com.apple.driver.DspFuncLib 281.52
com.apple.kext.OSvKernDSPLib 526
com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport 519.21
com.apple.iokit.IOAVBFamily 683.1
com.apple.plugin.IOgPTPPlugin 680.15
com.apple.iokit.IOEthernetAVBController 1.1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleSSE 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily2 378.28
com.apple.iokit.IOSurface 211.15
com.apple.iokit.IOSerialFamily 11
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusController 1.0.18d1
com.apple.AppleGPUWrangler 3.20.18
com.apple.AppleGraphicsDeviceControl 3.20.18
com.apple.driver.AppleHDAController 281.52
com.apple.iokit.IOHDAFamily 281.52
com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusPCI 1.0.14d1
com.apple.kext.AMDLegacySupport 1.6.8
com.apple.iokit.IOSlowAdaptiveClockingFamily 1.0.0
com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireIP 2.2.9
com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily 519.23
com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginLegacy 1.0.0
com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginFamily 6.0.0d8
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIMultimediaCommandsDevice 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOBDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.IODVDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.IOCDStorageFamily 1.8
com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerTransport 6.0.7f18
com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothFamily 6.0.7f18
com.apple.driver.usb.IOUSBHostHIDDevice 1.2
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBAudio 312.6
com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily 206.5
com.apple.vecLib.kext 1.2.0
com.apple.driver.usb.networking 5.0.0
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostCompositeDevice 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHub 1.2
com.apple.filesystems.hfs.encodings.kext 1
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIBlockStorage 301.40.2
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCISerialATAPI 267.50.1
com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily 4.7.2
com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family 1200.12.2
com.apple.driver.corecapture 1.0.4
com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIFamily 288
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCIPCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCIPCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCI 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostPacketFilter 1.0
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily 900.4.1
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBHostMergeProperties 1.2
com.apple.driver.AppleEFINVRAM 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleEFIRuntime 2.1
com.apple.iokit.IOSMBusFamily 1.1
com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily 2.0.0
com.apple.security.sandbox 300.0
com.apple.kext.AppleMatch 1.0.0d1
com.apple.driver.DiskImages 480.60.3
com.apple.driver.AppleFDEKeyStore 28.30
com.apple.driver.AppleEffaceableStorage 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleKeyStore 2
com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTDM 439.70.3
com.apple.driver.AppleMobileFileIntegrity 1.0.5
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageDriver 140.70.2
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIBlockCommandsDevice 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily 404.30.3
com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily 2.1
com.apple.driver.AppleCredentialManager 1.0
com.apple.driver.KernelRelayHost 1
com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHostFamily 1.2
com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBCommon 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleBusPowerController 1.0
com.apple.driver.AppleSEPManager 1.0.1
com.apple.driver.IOSlaveProcessor 1
com.apple.iokit.IOReportFamily 31
com.apple.iokit.IOTimeSyncFamily 680.15
com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily 3.4
com.apple.driver.AppleACPIPlatform 6.1
com.apple.driver.AppleSMC 3.1.9
com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily 2.9
com.apple.iokit.IOACPIFamily 1.4
com.apple.kec.pthread 1
com.apple.kec.Libm 1
com.apple.kec.corecrypto 1.0
The MacCPUID report on the X5570s:
Differences between the X5570 and the X5690:MacCPUID v3.1 Info CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz Genuine? YES Architecture: Nehalem - 1st Generation Intel Core Family: 6 (06h) Model: 26 (1Ah) Stepping: 5 (05h) Frequency: 2,933,333 (Hz) Invariant TSC? NO GPU Model(s): ATI Radeon HD 5770 Features ACPI Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[22] ADX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[19] AES Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[25] APIC Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[9] AVX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[28] AVX2 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[5] AVX512BW Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[30] AVX512CD Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[28] AVX512DQ Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[17] AVX512ER Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[27] AVX512F Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[16] AVX512IFMA Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[21] AVX512PF Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[26] AVX512VBMI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[1] AVX512VL Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[31] AVX512_4FMAPS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EDX[3] AVX512_4VNNIW Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EDX[2] AVX512_BITALG Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[12] AVX512_VBMI2 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[6] AVX512_VNNI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[11] AVX512_VPOPCNTDQ Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[14] BMI1 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[3] BMI2 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[8] CLDEMOTE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[25] CLFLUSHOPT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[23] CLFSH Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[19] CLWB Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[24] CMOV Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[15] CNXT_ID Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[10] CX16 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[13] CX8 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[8] DCA Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[18] DE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[2] DEPRECATE_FPU_CS_DS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[13] DS Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[21] DS_CPL Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[4] DTES64 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[2] EM64T Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[29] ERMS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[9] EST Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[7] FDP_EXCPTN_ONLY Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[6] FMA Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[12] FP16C Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[29] FPU Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[0] FSGSBASE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[0] FXSR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[24] Fast Short REP MOV Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EDX[4] GFNI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[8] HLE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[4] HTT Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[28] INVPCID Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[10] INVTSC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=80000007h, ECX=0):EDX[8] IPT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[25] LAHFSAHF Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):ECX[0] LZCNT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):ECX[5] MCA Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[14] MCE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[7] MMX Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[23] MONITOR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[3] MOVBE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[22] MOVDIR64B Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[28] MOVDIRI Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[27] MPX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[14] MSR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[5] MTRR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[12] OSPKE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[4] OSXSAVE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[27] PAE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[6] PAGE1GB Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[26] PAT Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[16] PBE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[31] PCID Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[17] PCLMULQDQ Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[1] PDCM Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[15] PGE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[13] PKU Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[3] POPCNT Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[23] PREFETCHW Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):ECX[8] PREFETCHWT1 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[0] PSE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[3] PSE36 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[17] PSN Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[18] RDPID Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[22] RDRAND Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[30] RDSEED Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[18] RDTSCP Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[27] RDT_A Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[15] RDT_M Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[12] RTM Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[11] SDBG Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[11] SEP Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[11] SGX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[2] SGX_LC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[30] SHA Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[29] SMAP Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[20] SMEP Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[7] SMX Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[6] SS Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[27] SSE Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[25] SSE2 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[26] SSE3 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[0] SSE4_1 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[19] SSE4_2 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[20] SSSE3 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[9] SYSCALLRET Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[11] TM Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[29] TM2 Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[8] TSC Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[4] TSC_ADJUST Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):EBX[1] TSC_DEADLINE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[24] UMIP Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[2] VAES Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[9] VME Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):EDX[1] VMX Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[5] VPCLMULQDQ Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[10] WAITPKG Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=07h, ECX=0):ECX[5] X2APIC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[21] XD Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=80000001h, ECX=0):EDX[20] XG1 Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[2] XSAVE Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[26] XSAVEC Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[1] XSAVEOPT Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[0] XSS Supported? NO CPUID: (EAX=0dh, ECX=1):EAX[3] XTPR Supported? YES CPUID: (EAX=01h, ECX=0):ECX[14] Cache Caches L1 Data Size: 32KB Associativity: 8 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 2 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: No Invalidates Lower Caches: Yes L1 Instruction Size: 32KB Associativity: 4 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 2 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: No Invalidates Lower Caches: Yes L2 Unified Size: 256KB Associativity: 8 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 2 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: No Invalidates Lower Caches: Yes L3 Unified Size: 8MB Associativity: 16 Line Size: 64B Max Threads: 16 Mapping: Direct Inclusive: Yes Invalidates Lower Caches: No Cache Info Data TLB0: 2 MByte and 4 MByte pages, 4-way set associative, 32 entries Data TLB: 4 KByte Pages, 4-way set associative, 64 entries Instruction TLB: 2-MByte or 4-MByte pages, fully associative, 7 entries 3rd-level cache: 8 MByte, 16-way set associative, 64 byte line size Instruction TLB: 4 KByte Pages, 4-way set associative, 64 entries 64-Byte Prefetching 1st-level data cache: 32 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64 byte line size 2nd-level cache: 256 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64 byte line size Shared 2nd-Level TLB: 4 KByte pages, 4-way associative, 512 entries 1st-level instruction cache: 32 KBytes, 4-way set associative, 64 byte line size CLFLUSH Line Size: 64 Performance Version: 3 General-Purpose Counters Number: 4 Width (bits): 48 Fixed-Function Counters Number: 3 Width (bits): 48 Events Core Cycles Supported? YES Instructions Retired Supported? YES Reference Cycles Supported? NO Last-Level Cache Reference Supported? YES Last-Level Cache Misses Supported? YES Branch Instructions Retired Supported? YES Branch Mispredict Instructions Retired Supported? NO Misc Processor Threads Logical Processors per Package: 8 Cores per Physical Package: 4 Logical Processors per Core: 2 Monitor/MWait Leaf Smallest Line Size (Bytes): 64 Largest Line Size (Bytes): 64 Interrupts Treated as Break-Event: Yes Number of C0 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C1 Sub-States Supported: 2 Number of C2 Sub-States Supported: 1 Number of C3 Sub-States Supported: 1 Number of C4 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C5 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C6 Sub-States Supported: 0 Number of C7 Sub-States Supported: 0 Thermal & Power Management Leaf Intel Turbo Boost Technology: Yes APIC-Timer-Always-Running: No Power Limit Notification Controls: No Clock Modulation Duty Cycle Extension: No Package Thermal Management: No Hardware Performance States (HWP): No HWP Notification: No HWP Activity Window: No HWP Energy Performance Preference: No HWP Package Level Request: No Hardware Duty Cycling: No Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0: No Number of Interrupt Thresholds: 2 ACNT/MCNT Support: Yes Performance-Energy Bias Preference: No Address Sizes Physical Address (GB): 1024 Logical Address (GB): 262144
The system seems to be happy enough back in its original state, but of course this represents the loss of:$ diff DualX5570 DualX5690 4c4 < CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz --- > CPU Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5690 @ 3.47GHz 6c6 < Architecture: Nehalem - 1st Generation Intel Core --- > Architecture: Westmere - 1st Generation Intel Core 8,10c8,10 < Model: 26 (1Ah) < Stepping: 5 (05h) < Frequency: 2,933,333 (Hz) --- > Model: 44 (2Ch) > Stepping: 2 (02h) > Frequency: 3,450,000 (Hz) 22c22 < AES < Supported? NO --- > AES > Supported? YES 220c220 < PAGE1GB < Supported? NO --- > PAGE1GB > Supported? YES 229c229 < PCID < Supported? NO --- > PCID > Supported? YES 232c232 < PCLMULQDQ < Supported? NO --- > PCLMULQDQ > Supported? YES 304c304 < SMX < Supported? NO --- > SMX > Supported? YES 415c415 < L3 Unified < Size: 8MB --- > L3 Unified > Size: 12MB 418c418 < Max Threads: 16 --- > Max Threads: 32 426c426 < 3rd-level cache: 8 MByte, 16-way set associative, 64 byte line size --- > CPUID leaf 2 does not report cache descriptor information, use CPUID leaf 4 to query cache parameters 429,430d428 < 1st-level data cache: 32 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64 byte line size < 2nd-level cache: 256 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64 byte line size 432d429 < 1st-level instruction cache: 32 KBytes, 4-way set associative, 64 byte line size 457c454 < Branch Mispredict Instructions Retired < Supported? NO --- > Branch Mispredict Instructions Retired > Supported? YES 461,462c458,459 < Logical Processors per Package: 8 < Cores per Physical Package: 4 --- > Logical Processors per Package: 12 > Cores per Physical Package: 6 478c475 < APIC-Timer-Always-Running: No --- > APIC-Timer-Always-Running: Yes
At this point, assuming the machine is stable with its original CPUs, we have a few potential culprits:
#3 sucks, because the only way to prove it is to buy more X5675, X5679, X5680, X5687, or X5690 devices, and find that they also don't work. (There are no faster dual-CPU Nehalem processors than the X5570s, so I can't eliminate #3 directly.) This is, of course, not definitive, especially if I have to de-lid them. If things don't work the second time around, nothing is actually proven.
#4 sucks, because I can only prove this by buying more X5650, X5660, or X5670 CPUs and seeing if it fails. The only recourse then, if it should fail and I want full functionality, is to switch to the single-CPU card, which means I eat the cost of the dual-CPU premium, and the X5690s, and the next round of CPUs. I could buy a faster CPU for the single-CPU card, of course, which might be useful.
Realistically, the only thing I can do to salvage the dual-CPU card, assuming I want to run VMware, is to buy two more X5650, X5660, or X5670 CPUs, the choice of which probably depends upon price. (It's too bad that I can't find two more of those $6 X5650s; they might not be very fast but they'd be a cheap experiment to eliminate #4, and they're hexacore.)
It looks like two X5667 3 GHz quad CPUs can be had for about $13, which would basically (if they worked) give me more-or-less what I've got now with the X5570s, but with faster RAM and the ability to run VMware. Honestly this looks like the best choice at this point, though I still have to de-lid these. If this works, reliably, it will prove that #1, #2, and #4 are not an issue. Left for the future would be to try again with faster, and/or more core-ful, devices. (The baby-steps path at that point would be to try two X5670s, and then move through X5675, X5679, X5680, and finally X5690s, stopping and backing up when/if it was no longer reliable. Unlikely, as this would be quite a lot of trouble and expense for very marginal gains. The fastest CPUs Apple ever put in one of these machines were the X5675s)
I ordered the X5667s.
I have to keep reminding myself: at this point we're not in a hurry, the single-CPU card is entirely adequate. Though I'd like to be using the double, finding out if it works should be done first and as cheaply as possible, even if it takes longer. Only if the card is proven reliable, at the X5667 level, should I consider faster CPUs.
I also brought home 4 decomissioned 4TB disk drives, to upgrade our overstuffed backup RAID. Once home I laid MacPro4 on its side and slipped these drives into its four bays. (You can do this without using drive sleds, if you're very careful.) I shut down MPServer and removed its boot drive, and one of its 2TB RAID drives. I pulled the optical drive cage from MacPro4 and slipped MPServer's drives into the hole, and connected them to the two SATA ports there. (Thus completely filling the 5,1's six available SATA sites. MPServer itself has only four SATA sites, the machine's other two SATA ports have no cables. Still, I may look into what it takes to exploit these vestigial resources, for next time we need to do a wholesale RAID upgrade.) I also replaced the RX 560 video with my spare GT 120, as Lion won't work with the RX 560. MacPro4 could thus be booted into Lion, which has proven very reliable with RAID and HFS. (An earlier experiment using High Sierra resulted in a botched destination copy, partially converted to APFS [WTF!] and thus totally unusable. Apparently there are serious bugs in the High Sierra disk utilities, and it doesn't look like Apple's going to fix them.) I used Lion to build the replacement 4-drive RAID in one step, and then began restoring the now-decomissioned 2TB backup drive onto the new RAID. In short order it became apparent that one of the 'new' RAID drives was damaged, as it exhibited a lot of re-seeking retries; I cancelled the restore. Investigation showed that the faulty drive was functional, but very slow; it reported no errors. A timed-trial 'dd' showed this one drive to be much slower than the others. I re-built the RAID, but with only three drives, and again began the restore. (I'll swap the bad drive out for a better one later, I can always add a drive to the RAID set in a separate operation. I was just hoping to get it done in one shot using the sudden availability of MacPro4, which would have saved a lot of time.)
Once the 3 good 4TB drives were completely into RAID I put two of them into MPServer, and restored it to functionality. Backups are now resuming. The retired 2TB drives are going into storage, for now.
The de-lidded X5690s needn't go to waste even if they're NFG together in MacPro3, I could use something like Coolaboratory or LT-100 liquid metal (GaInSn alloy) to re-lid them for use in MacPro4, which is a real 5,1 machine. (And thus uses standard [lidded] CPUs in its dual-CPU configuration.) I ordered 3g of LT-100, $16.80 via eBay; it will come via slow boat. Much cheaper than another pair of unmolested X5690s, which in the worst case might also exhibit problems. (In the very worst case I could always use one of them in the single-CPU card, salvaging half the value.)
It's a pity that the Mac boot firmware apparently doesn't support high clock divider ratios, because the X5698 or X5687 processors are even faster than the X5690, though with less cores, and would really perk the ARM simulation up. Of course, an actual Raspberry Pi of the fastest variety is less than $100, and no doubt represents a far better investment of funds on that front...
I've done this three times, now. ("disk1" is the new blank disk, and disk4 is the virtual drive that is the RAID, to which you are adding a new mirrored slice. Make sure these are the correct names for your situation! That's what the first two commands are for, so make sure you look closely at the output.) The system will add the new slice, and start copying all the mirror data to it. I started at 6:05 AM, and the system predicted 11 hours for the rebuild; R/W rates claimed at around 80MB/s.diskutil list diskutil appleraid list diskutil appleraid add member disk1 disk4
The third X5667 also came yesterday, so I de-lidded and installed it today. Nothing. This CPU, though, did work by itself in the dual-CPU card, unlike the second one. So, #1 and #3 both work as the lone CPU in the dual-CPU card, but neither one works as the second CPU. When I'd pulled A again to see if #3 worked there, I found two bent pins in the CPU socket! Yikes! Careful straightening and alignment, using a dental pick, a loupe, and a razor blade put things back right. I'd thought this was the problem, but no. Neither combination of 2 X5667s in the card would work, but both CPUs were good alone in the A site. Thinking that perhaps I'd managed to damage the card I put back both of the original X5570s, and everything worked!
Is it as simple as the fact that X5667s might not be usable in a dual-CPU unit? All the Googling says that these are good in a 5,1 machine, but they don't necessarily break it down between the singles and the duals or the converted 4,1 vs true 5,1 machines, nor are they necessarily correct even if they did. I only went with the quads because they are cheap-cheap-cheap and approximately the same speed as the X5570s, but I'm sure most evidence is actually from people using the faster hexes. Maybe I'll have to spring for some X5670s or X5680s, devices to which people are actually interested in upgrading, and for which there is ample evidence of success. But, that's More Money.
I just couldn't help it, I ordered 2 X5670s for $38.89, shipped. These are exactly the same speed as the X5570s, the only difference is they are Westmere hex and not Nehelem quad devices. Honestly, except for the Pi simulator everything else I've ever done on these machines has been plenty fast enough, and I'm sure that the X5690's 17% speed improvement (over the X5670) isn't enough to really matter. The real reason for the upgrade is to pick up the Westmere features, primarily for VMware; any speed improvement is pure gravy.
I ordered another cable, this time a 3' dual right-angle, $5.
Now if I could just stop thinking about a nice pair of X5680s...
The LT-100 liquid metal (Gallium, Indium, and Tin alloy) heat sink compound came today. (I can't tell if I got the 3g I paid for, or only the 1.5g syringe.) At my leisure I can try re-lidding those X5690 processors, for use in MacPro4. (Or, if that doesn't work out, one could perhaps go into the single-CPU tray for MacPro3, salvaging half of the expense in that I'd have a higher-speed [though with less cores and memory] option then available to me. Not that I'd probably ever use it.)
For the record, the X5670s have been working perfectly since they were installed in MacPro3.
We'll know in a while.
I got MacPro4 set up to where I could connect the big monitor, temporarily replacing the laptop. Took a while to remember the password, but then I ran the MacCPUID utility. It identifies them as E5645, 2.4GHz units. The RX 560 video is quite a bit more capable than the HD 5770, according to the Unigine Valley demo on the 30" monitor. I installed the latest High Sierra OS updates before beginning to mess around, or rather: tried. It didn't actually install, I think there is damage. Great. To get the latest firmware on the motherboard you have to begin to install Mojave, which I did against one of our now-spare 2TB drives. It did a firmware update cycle, and says the firmware is 138.0.0.0.0, which is less than the 144.0.0.0.0 on MacPro3. This, in fact, is the final firmware version that goes with High Sierra.
The Mojave installer would not run after that, and claimed corruption. Googling suggested that the real problem is that some kind of certificate had expired. I deleted the installer and started a fresh download from Apple. It would chug for a while, then mysteriously just stop, with no indication of what was wrong. Quitting the App Store application and re-downoading would cause it to resume. For a while.
I then installed the re-lidded X5690s. I put in CPU A first, and the system booted and correctly identified the configuration. I put in the other one, and it booted and ran fine! I left it running while I went to update this log. While doing that it shut down and reset. It did not come back up, nor did it after power-cycling it. I removed CPU B and it was able to boot again. This is the crash report:
I put CPU B back, and it still wouldn't boot. Removed, and it booted again. I de-lidded B again to see if the liquid metal had shifted, it had not. There was too much glue, though, and it had gotten onto the other surface-mount components under the lid. I cleaned it out as best I could, and glued the lid back on more carefully. I don't hold out much hope for this. I installed the GTX 120 video card instead of the RX 560, so that I could see the low-level boot progress. The system is still able to boot into Mojave with this lesser video card, though I'm sure that some things would not work correctly. (I don't need them to, I just need to see if it'll boot, and if not, what it might have to say about it.) With the re-re-lidded B in the system it was again dead. I scraped up a thumb drive and installed the appropriate Apple Hardware Test onto it, and booted into it. It failed the system immediately with an SMC error, which is not surprising as the system's fans go on high alert with only one CPU installed. I removed both CPUs and put the B CPU in the A slot, and the system booted as expected. With the A CPU also in the B slot, again nothing. Basically the two X5690s act even worse in MacPro4 than they did in MacPro3. Either Apple's machines don't work with X5690s, which there is evidence against, or there's something wrong with these X5690s. If there is I'm stuck with them, they certainly can't be returned after all I've done to them.Tue Jun 16 09:16:11 2020 *** Panic Report *** Machine-check capabilities: 0x0000000000001c09 family: 6 model: 44 stepping: 2 microcode: 31 signature: 0x206c2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5690 @ 3.47GHz 9 error-reporting banks mp_kdp_enter() timed-out on cpu 6, NMI-ing mp_kdp_enter() NMI pending on cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 mp_kdp_enter() timed-out during locked wait after NMI;expected 24 acks but received 1 after 17129217 loops in 1728999779 ticks panic(cpu 6 caller 0xffffff80144dc51a): "Machine Check at 0xffffff801435b04c, registers:" "CR0: 0x0000000080010033, CR2: 0x000000010aba7000, CR3: 0x000000063d63f02f, CR4: 0x00000000000226e0" "RAX: 0x000000004a3bd4f0, RBX: 0x0000000000000001, RCX: 0x000000004a07ff02, RDX: 0x00000000000000a6" "RSP: 0xffffff82cf923ab8, RBP: 0xffffff82cf923ad0, RSI: 0x0000000000000002, RDI: 0xffffff8014c0dbb0" "R8: 0x0000000000000000, R9: 0x0000000000000000, R10: 0xffffff8014c149f8, R11: 0x0000002abbf007b7" "R12: 0xffffff8014b48d6e, R13: 0xffffff8014e4b6f0, R14: 0x0000000000000001, R15: 0x000000a5f9a07962" "RFL: 0x0000000000000202, RIP: 0xffffff801435b04c, CS: 0x0000000000000008, SS: 0x0000000000000010" "Error code: 0x0000000000000000" @/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-4903.271.2/osfmk/i386/trap_native.c:168 Backtrace (CPU 6), Frame : Return Address 0xffffff8014154330 : 0xffffff80143ae6ed 0xffffff8014154380 : 0xffffff80144ea185 0xffffff80141543c0 : 0xffffff80144db8ba 0xffffff8014154430 : 0xffffff801435bb40 0xffffff8014154450 : 0xffffff80143ae107 0xffffff8014154570 : 0xffffff80143adf53 0xffffff80141545e0 : 0xffffff80144dc51a 0xffffff80141546d0 : 0xffffff801435c39f 0xffffff82cf923ad0 : 0xffffff80144e65ce 0xffffff82cf923b20 : 0xffffff80144e62a7 0xffffff82cf923c00 : 0xffffff80144d58cf 0xffffff82cf923c40 : 0xffffff80143e249b 0xffffff82cf923c70 : 0xffffff801438a78b 0xffffff82cf923ce0 : 0xffffff801438a3cd 0xffffff82cf923d50 : 0xffffff801438c3c7 0xffffff82cf923dd0 : 0xffffff801438ecf1 0xffffff82cf923e50 : 0xffffff80143a33be 0xffffff82cf923ef0 : 0xffffff80144c17e7 0xffffff82cf923fa0 : 0xffffff801435c326 BSD process name corresponding to current thread: mds Mac OS version: 18G103 Kernel version: Darwin Kernel Version 18.7.0: Tue Aug 20 16:57:14 PDT 2019; root:xnu-4903.271.2~2/RELEASE_X86_64 Kernel UUID: C41337A1-0EC3-3896-A954-A1F85E849D53 Kernel slide: 0x0000000014000000 Kernel text base: 0xffffff8014200000 __HIB text base: 0xffffff8014100000 System model name: MacPro5,1 (Mac-F221BEC8) System uptime in nanoseconds: 185416577101 last loaded kext at 37505233218: com.apple.driver.AudioAUUC1.70 (addr 0xffffff7f97849000, size 32768) loaded kexts: com.apple.driver.AudioAUUC1.70 com.apple.driver.AppleUpstreamUserClient3.6.5 com.apple.driver.AppleMCCSControl1.5.9 com.apple.kext.AMDFramebuffer2.1.1 com.apple.fileutil20.036.15 com.apple.driver.AGPM110.25.11 com.apple.filesystems.autofs3.0 com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyHIDDriver131 com.apple.driver.AppleMikeyDriver282.54 com.apple.driver.AppleHDAHardwareConfigDriver282.54 com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX40002.1.1 com.apple.driver.AppleHDA282.54 com.apple.driver.AppleGraphicsDevicePolicy3.50.12 com.apple.AGDCPluginDisplayMetrics3.50.12 com.apple.driver.AppleHV1 com.apple.iokit.IOUserEthernet1.0.1 com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager6.0.14d3 com.apple.driver.pmtelemetry1 com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X7.0.0 com.apple.kext.AMD9500Controller2.1.1 com.apple.driver.AppleGFXHDA100.1.414 com.apple.driver.AppleLPC3.1 com.apple.driver.AppleFIVRDriver4.1.0 com.apple.driver.ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin1.0.0 com.apple.driver.AppleIntelSlowAdaptiveClocking4.0.0 com.apple.driver.AppleOSXWatchdog1 com.apple.filesystems.apfs945.275.7 com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothUSBDFU6.0.14d3 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBDisplays380 com.apple.driver.AppleFileSystemDriver3.0.1 com.apple.driver.AppleVirtIO2.1.3 com.apple.filesystems.hfs.kext407.200.4 com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless1.0.0d1 com.apple.BootCache40 com.apple.AppleFSCompression.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib1.0.0 com.apple.AppleSystemPolicy1.0 com.apple.iokit.SCSITaskUserClient408.250.3 com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI5.6.0 com.apple.driver.Intel82574LEthernet2.7.2 com.apple.driver.AirPort.Brcm4331800.21.31 com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort329.260.5 com.apple.private.KextAudit1.0 com.apple.driver.AppleHPET1.8 com.apple.driver.AppleRTC2.0 com.apple.driver.AppleACPIButtons6.1 com.apple.driver.AppleSMBIOS2.1 com.apple.driver.AppleACPIEC6.1 com.apple.driver.AppleAPIC1.7 com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient220.0.0 com.apple.nke.applicationfirewall201 com.apple.security.TMSafetyNet8 com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement220.0.0 com.apple.kext.triggers1.0 com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX4000HWLibs1.0 com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily2404.14 com.apple.kext.AMDRadeonX4000HWServices2.1.1 com.apple.driver.DspFuncLib282.54 com.apple.kext.OSvKernDSPLib528 com.apple.driver.AppleGraphicsControl3.50.12 com.apple.iokit.IOAVBFamily760.6 com.apple.plugin.IOgPTPPlugin740.2 com.apple.iokit.IOEthernetAVBController1.1.0 com.apple.iokit.IOSkywalkFamily1 com.apple.driver.AppleSSE1.0 com.apple.iokit.IOSurface255.6.1 com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusController1.0.18d1 com.apple.driver.AppleHDAController282.54 com.apple.iokit.IOHDAFamily282.54 com.apple.AppleGPUWrangler3.50.12 com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport530.51 com.apple.driver.AppleSMBusPCI1.0.14d1 com.apple.kext.AMDSupport2.1.1 com.apple.AppleGraphicsDeviceControl3.50.12 com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily530.66 com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginLegacy1.0.0 com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginFamily6.0.0d8 com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireIP2.3.0 com.apple.iokit.IOSlowAdaptiveClockingFamily1.0.0 com.apple.driver.AppleXsanScheme3 com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIBlockStorage301.270.1 com.apple.iokit.BroadcomBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport6.0.14d3 com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerUSBTransport6.0.14d3 com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothHostControllerTransport6.0.14d3 com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothFamily6.0.14d3 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBAudio315.6 com.apple.driver.usb.IOUSBHostHIDDevice1.2 com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily206.5 com.apple.vecLib.kext1.2.0 com.apple.driver.usb.cdc5.0.0 com.apple.driver.usb.networking5.0.0 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostCompositeDevice1.2 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHub1.2 com.apple.iokit.IOSerialFamily11 com.apple.filesystems.hfs.encodings.kext1 com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIMultimediaCommandsDevice408.250.3 com.apple.iokit.IOBDStorageFamily1.8 com.apple.iokit.IODVDStorageFamily1.8 com.apple.iokit.IOCDStorageFamily1.8 com.apple.iokit.IOAHCISerialATAPI267.50.1 com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily4.7.3 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBMergeNub900.4.2 com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family1200.12.2 com.apple.driver.corecapture1.0.4 com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIFamily288 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCIPCI1.2 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCIPCI1.2 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBUHCI1.2 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBEHCI1.2 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBHostPacketFilter1.0 com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily900.4.2 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBHostMergeProperties1.2 com.apple.driver.AppleEFINVRAM2.1 com.apple.driver.AppleEFIRuntime2.1 com.apple.iokit.IOSMBusFamily1.1 com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily2.0.0 com.apple.security.quarantine3 com.apple.security.sandbox300.0 com.apple.kext.AppleMatch1.0.0d1 com.apple.driver.DiskImages493.0.0 com.apple.driver.AppleFDEKeyStore28.30 com.apple.driver.AppleEffaceableStorage1.0 com.apple.driver.AppleKeyStore2 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTDM456.260.3 com.apple.driver.AppleMobileFileIntegrity1.0.5 com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageDriver145.200.2 com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIBlockCommandsDevice408.250.3 com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily408.250.3 com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily2.1 com.apple.kext.CoreTrust1 com.apple.driver.AppleCredentialManager1.0 com.apple.driver.KernelRelayHost1 com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHostFamily1.2 com.apple.driver.usb.AppleUSBCommon1.0 com.apple.driver.AppleBusPowerController1.0 com.apple.driver.AppleSEPManager1.0.1 com.apple.driver.IOSlaveProcessor1 com.apple.iokit.IOReportFamily47 com.apple.iokit.IOTimeSyncFamily740.2 com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily3.4 com.apple.driver.AppleACPIPlatform6.1 com.apple.driver.AppleSMC3.1.9 com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily2.9 com.apple.iokit.IOACPIFamily1.4 com.apple.kec.pthread1 com.apple.kec.Libm1 com.apple.kec.corecrypto1.0 EOF Model: MacPro5,1, BootROM 144.0.0.0.0, 6 processors, 6-Core Intel Xeon, 3.46 GHz, 12 GB, SMC 1.39f11 Graphics: Radeon RX 560, Radeon RX 560, spdisplays_pcie_device, 4 GB Memory Module: DIMM 1, 4 GB, DDR3 ECC, 1333 MHz, 0x80AD, 0x484D54333531553742465238432D48392020 Memory Module: DIMM 2, 4 GB, DDR3 ECC, 1333 MHz, 0x80AD, 0x484D54333531553742465238432D48392020 Memory Module: DIMM 3, 4 GB, DDR3 ECC, 1333 MHz, 0x80AD, 0x484D54333531553742465238432D48392020 AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x8E), Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.106.98.102.31) Bluetooth: Version 6.0.14d3, 3 services, 27 devices, 1 incoming serial ports Network Service: Wi-Fi, AirPort, en2 PCI Card: Radeon RX 560, Display Controller, Slot-1 PCI Card: pci1002,aae0, Audio Device, Slot-1 Serial ATA Device: HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GH80N Serial ATA Device: WDC WD20EZRX-00D8PB0, 2 TB USB Device: USB Bus USB Device: BRCM2046 Hub USB Device: Bluetooth USB Host Controller USB Device: USB Bus USB Device: USB Bus USB Device: USB Bus USB Device: USB Bus USB Device: USB Bus USB Device: USB 2.0 Bus USB Device: USB 2.0 Bus USB Device: Hub USB Device: PS2 to USB Converter USB Device: Hub USB Device: Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM) USB Device: Apple Cinema HD Display FireWire Device: built-in_hub, Up to 800 Mb/sec Thunderbolt Bus:
At this point all they seem to be good for is to put them in single-CPU 4,1 and 5,1 cards. So, not entirely without value, but of little to no value to me at this time. I put the two E5645s back in MacPro4 and started the AHT, on its long cycle. It passed.
I have spent far too much time and money on this whole process. My best bet, if I want to upgrade at all, is to just get some X5680s for MacPro4 and call it good.
I ordered a 250GB SSD from OWC, $54.04 with tax and shipping. Four new rubber feet were $2.69 via eBay. A Russian keyboard (in the US key pattern) was $18.37 via eBay. I decided against the more authentic keyboard (vertical Enter) because it'll be harder to type in English, and I'd have to procure a different top case cover, which isn't too easy (or cheap) to come by. This will be Good Enough. 16GB of RAM, from OWC, was $91.76 with tax and shipping. I splurged a bit here, bringing it up to current-day RAM levels, but I don't want to have to upgrade again during its expected service life.
So, assuming everything comes, and works, the total bill for the computer itself (ignoring any potential accessories like a backup drive, bag, etc.) is:
Close enough to my intended $500 budget.
Computer 337.27 RAM 91.76 SSD 54.04 Keyboard 18.37 Feet 2.69 Total: $504.13
Upon reflection, and as an anti-theft and personalization measure, I ordered some custom vinyl lettering from DIYLettering.com. For $11.48 I'm getting an inch-high letter strip, in blue, that says "2012 Low Miles One Owner". (This is much easier than trying to X-acto some blue masking tape into letters.) My intent is to cut this up and apply it to three corners of the lid face, making it look a bit like a low-end used car windshield, though presentable. Should make it easy to pick out of a crowd, while at the same advertising in an amusing way its (low) relative value among laptop computers.
Anyway, it seems to work fine, and has an auto-on/off power switch setting. This gear dates from the era when blue LEDs were new, and so everything and its dog was blue, whether it was a good idea. I happen to hate blue light, in particular blue LED light. This device has a big blue eye on it, which inspired me to pull the no doubt then-expensive blue LED and replace it with a cheap-ass red one, since I had it open anyway. Now it looks like HAL 9000, which I think is très cool. (The light is also a pushbutton, I think for a pre-Time Machine one-button backup, but I doubt it'll ever be connected to anything now. You have to install some sort of driver to make that button work anyway. It would be fun to have it spout random HAL 9000 quotes, or maybe sing A Bicycle Built for Two whenever you pushed that button.)
I ordered a pair of Firewire 800 cables through Amazon, $12.99 for both. This was the cheapest way to get one, and I can use another one of those elsewhere.
The blue label strip came today too, it looks intriguing. I won't put it on until the laptop is finished, though.
The OWC SSD, though, does not appear in the laptop. I put it in MacPro4 and used target disk mode, and it appears just fine, there. I installed Mountain Lion on it and it installed and booted that way. From there you are not allowed to download Catalina, so I tried to install El Capitan from the CF I have. It chugged for a while then died, leaving a mess.
There is talk about an OWC firmware updater for the SSD, so I began the lengthy process of downloading that. It's 1GB in size, and though it claims to be able to work from a USB stick, I was unable to make that work. I caved, and burned it to a DVD, as a CD is too small. Jacking the SSD into MacPro4 and booting the DVD, after a very lengthy process, which includes selecting the correct machine type from a long and sluggish list of choices, the utility says that no update is required.
The utility says that Device OW20042310064EB04 has S1231A0 firmware on it, for what it's worth. It claims 488,397,168 512-byte sectors, which matches the number printed on it.
I decided to re-install Mountain Lion on HAL (the backup drive) as that will give Daniel a fallback position, of sorts, should the SSD ever fail in service. (Assuming I can get it working to begin with.)
...That worked, but I was never able to get the SSD to work in MBP5, only in MacPro4 in target disk mode, and later in an external drive box. (Because the later OS installers now check for, and refuse to install against, target disk mode disks. Thanks bunches, Apple.) I spent a bunch of time pursuing getting the firmware in MBP5 updated, assuming it wasn't already, hoping that this would cure its inability to see the OWC SSD, but none of that ever ran. According to the lists I found it should already be up-to-date.
Even with the SSD in the external USB drive box you still can't install High Sierra, Mojave, or Catalina, because it claims there is a 'missing firmware partition'. This appears to be a wretched Catch-22 situation, where the OS can't install unless it's already running on APFS partition, which it can't do because you can't install an APFS-supporting OS! (This is possibly an SSD-only issue.) Apple has really gone downhill in their Engineering, it seems to me.
I started a download of Sierra, which is the last pre-APFS OS I'm aware of. This will take hours. In theory High Sierra can install over that. In theory.
...which apparently worked. No apparent firmware upgrades were noticed, I believe the reported numbers are the same. I then told it to install Catalina. While I waited I plugged in HAL and it offered to use it for backups. I said 'yes'. That was easy!
Catalina could never finish downloading, so I tried High Sierra. That seemed to download, and I did install it.
The new feet for the laptop came today. The only parts I'm waiting for now are the Russian keyboard, and the FW800 cable.
Eventually it was finished, and I made sure that the system was backed up at that moment. I then tried a couple of times to install it onto the SSD, located internally because that's the only way it will let you try, with no success at best it froze during the disk erase stage, 'waiting for partitions to activate'.
...and it finished. Seems happy enough, and the boot ROM ID is unchanged. One more round with trying to get the OWC SSD working in this laptop, and it's still NFG.
Time to order some other make of SSD for Daniel's laptop. $65.33, with tax, for a 480GB unit from Crucial. (I opted for 2× the size for an additional $20. SSDs do like to have lots of headroom.)
I put the new peel-and-stick 'rubber' feet on Daniel's laptop. I used isopropyl alcohol to clean the sites first.
The firewire cables came. All I'm waiting for now is the SSD, and the Russian keyboard. (I'm not looking forward to that job.)
I swapped keyboards. It's actually fairly straightforward, if tedious, but you do need to remove almost everything from the inside. Peeling the backlight loose is disturbing, and that exposes the 51 (!) tiny screws that hold the keyboard in place. Reverse to reassemble, there were no significant problems. It took about an hour and a half.
All that's left to do is the SSD, along with cleanup and labeling. (Oh, and fixing the charger cable.)
The new camera seems to work nicely.
The Crucial SSD came today, and behaved no better in the laptop than the OWC. I was able to install Catalina on it if it was in an external drive enclosure. Further research suggests that this can be caused by a failing disk cable, so I ordered another one. $9.62 from Amazon; it claims to be the 821-2049-A supercession of the original 821-1480-A, but there are reports of a lot of counterfeits out there. I guess we'll see. I'm just about completely fed up with this whole project. After playing with it a bit, now the HD no longer works inside either, so there's at least some indication that the cable has failed altogether.
It looks like most of the trouble I'd had all along was the @#$^!% cable, it just went perfectly smoothly this time.
This did end up exceeding the intended $500 budget a bit. We probably want a bag for it too, etc.
Computer 337.27 RAM 91.76 HD Cable 9.62 SSD 65.33 Keyboard 18.37 Feet 2.69 Lettering 11.48 Backup drive 43.43 Firewire cable 6.49 Total: $586.44
(Default behavior is claimed to benvram AutoBoot=%00
%03, though there was
no AutoBoot variable before.)
If I want it on, I'll damned well turn it on myself!
It is suggested that the following root certificate
(isrgrootx1.pem) be added to the System keychain on
affected systems:
This certificate is supposedly good to 2035. I installed it on Jill's MacPro and laptop (MBP2), and it seems to work. You have to explicitly mark it as 'Always Trust', else it doesn't seem to take effect. I then installed it on MacPro2 (recording studio), my old laptop (MBP), and Daniel's old laptop (MBP3).-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIFazCCA1OgAwIBAgIRAIIQz7DSQONZRGPgu2OCiwAwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQELBQAw TzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxKTAnBgNVBAoTIEludGVybmV0IFNlY3VyaXR5IFJlc2Vh cmNoIEdyb3VwMRUwEwYDVQQDEwxJU1JHIFJvb3QgWDEwHhcNMTUwNjA0MTEwNDM4 WhcNMzUwNjA0MTEwNDM4WjBPMQswCQYDVQQGEwJVUzEpMCcGA1UEChMgSW50ZXJu ZXQgU2VjdXJpdHkgUmVzZWFyY2ggR3JvdXAxFTATBgNVBAMTDElTUkcgUm9vdCBY MTCCAiIwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADggIPADCCAgoCggIBAK3oJHP0FDfzm54rVygc h77ct984kIxuPOZXoHj3dcKi/vVqbvYATyjb3miGbESTtrFj/RQSa78f0uoxmyF+ 0TM8ukj13Xnfs7j/EvEhmkvBioZxaUpmZmyPfjxwv60pIgbz5MDmgK7iS4+3mX6U A5/TR5d8mUgjU+g4rk8Kb4Mu0UlXjIB0ttov0DiNewNwIRt18jA8+o+u3dpjq+sW T8KOEUt+zwvo/7V3LvSye0rgTBIlDHCNAymg4VMk7BPZ7hm/ELNKjD+Jo2FR3qyH B5T0Y3HsLuJvW5iB4YlcNHlsdu87kGJ55tukmi8mxdAQ4Q7e2RCOFvu396j3x+UC B5iPNgiV5+I3lg02dZ77DnKxHZu8A/lJBdiB3QW0KtZB6awBdpUKD9jf1b0SHzUv KBds0pjBqAlkd25HN7rOrFleaJ1/ctaJxQZBKT5ZPt0m9STJEadao0xAH0ahmbWn OlFuhjuefXKnEgV4We0+UXgVCwOPjdAvBbI+e0ocS3MFEvzG6uBQE3xDk3SzynTn jh8BCNAw1FtxNrQHusEwMFxIt4I7mKZ9YIqioymCzLq9gwQbooMDQaHWBfEbwrbw qHyGO0aoSCqI3Haadr8faqU9GY/rOPNk3sgrDQoo//fb4hVC1CLQJ13hef4Y53CI rU7m2Ys6xt0nUW7/vGT1M0NPAgMBAAGjQjBAMA4GA1UdDwEB/wQEAwIBBjAPBgNV HRMBAf8EBTADAQH/MB0GA1UdDgQWBBR5tFnme7bl5AFzgAiIyBpY9umbbjANBgkq hkiG9w0BAQsFAAOCAgEAVR9YqbyyqFDQDLHYGmkgJykIrGF1XIpu+ILlaS/V9lZL ubhzEFnTIZd+50xx+7LSYK05qAvqFyFWhfFQDlnrzuBZ6brJFe+GnY+EgPbk6ZGQ 3BebYhtF8GaV0nxvwuo77x/Py9auJ/GpsMiu/X1+mvoiBOv/2X/qkSsisRcOj/KK NFtY2PwByVS5uCbMiogziUwthDyC3+6WVwW6LLv3xLfHTjuCvjHIInNzktHCgKQ5 ORAzI4JMPJ+GslWYHb4phowim57iaztXOoJwTdwJx4nLCgdNbOhdjsnvzqvHu7Ur TkXWStAmzOVyyghqpZXjFaH3pO3JLF+l+/+sKAIuvtd7u+Nxe5AW0wdeRlN8NwdC jNPElpzVmbUq4JUagEiuTDkHzsxHpFKVK7q4+63SM1N95R1NbdWhscdCb+ZAJzVc oyi3B43njTOQ5yOf+1CceWxG1bQVs5ZufpsMljq4Ui0/1lvh+wjChP4kqKOJ2qxq 4RgqsahDYVvTH9w7jXbyLeiNdd8XM2w9U/t7y0Ff/9yi0GE44Za4rF2LN9d11TPA mRGunUHBcnWEvgJBQl9nJEiU0Zsnvgc/ubhPgXRR4Xq37Z0j4r7g1SgEEzwxA57d emyPxgcYxn/eR44/KJ4EBs+lVDR3veyJm+kXQ99b21/+jh5Xos1AnX5iItreGCc= -----END CERTIFICATE-----
Catch-22: you can't download this certificate from the internet on any computer whose old certificate has already expired!
The OS for MBP2 allows one to set a preference for which GPU is used, but this preference is 'personal' and doesn't take effect until you log in, and I believe it auto-selects based on its own criteria anyway, using your selection only as bias. The theory is that it's only the hot GPU that's failing, as that is quite common. It seemed like there ought to be a way to tell the machine to ignore the hot GPU permanently, pretending it's like the 13" machines in the series that lack it altogether, but initial searches were fruitless. Jill's needs are modest, GPU performance isn't even remotely a factor.
Today I found this—to 'permanently' disable the 'external' (well, they're both external to the CPU) high(er)-performance GPU:
This 'fix' should last until/unless somebody resets the PRAM.<<First use Cmd-S to boot to single-user mode.>> # nvram gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00 # nvram boot-args="-v" # reboot
The source showed a lot of other nonsense involving making it overheat, booting from Linux CD's, using a second machine, and etc. But if you can get it to boot, briefly, the above is simple and easy compared to all the other suggestions.
Anyway, I tried it and so far it's been working flawlessly. Maybe this takes care of the problem, or maybe it's just being sneaky; time will tell. I am not sure whether the verbose boot is necessary or not. It's possible that the 'pretty' boot sequence chooses to use the hot GPU before it gets a chance to apply the gpu-power-prefs variable, and that the verbose scrolling text display does not. Well, we don't need it to be pretty and I don't want to mess with it any more than I have to. Supposedly the external monitor plug is only driven by the hot GPU, so we've lost that I guess. We've never needed it yet, so no great loss.
Daniel is interested in setting up a moderate Windows 10 gaming PC, one that can drive the 30" monitor. He was willing to spend $500 for a new office-grade PC, with a gifted-from-a-friend NVidia GTX 1050 video card. I suggested that perhaps one of our spare cheese grater Mac Pros might also do the job, via Boot Camp or the like. More effort, but no money required. He's currently investigating whether the Xeon Westmere processor of a 5,1 would work. This: http://blog.greggant.com/posts/2018/05/07/definitive-mac-pro-upgrade-guide.html, which seems to be an excellent resource, suggests it could work out very well, provided that one used optical media to install Windows.
If he does go this way, I'm going to insist that the machine remain capable of being a Mac, whether he has any interest in doing that or not. (The NVidia video card would be a problem, of course, due to an apparent feud between Apple and Nvidia. Also, the 1050 only drives HDMI and DisplayPort, and as HDMI is a non-starter for the D-DVI-D monitor, a DP→mDP adapter of some sort would also be required. [In fact, the 1050 also has a DVI port, so nothing additional is required.])
We connected the 30" monitor to the machine, along with the keyboard and mouse. (His laptop is now 'naked' again.) We're currently using the mini DisplayPort output of the GT 120 video card, he's going to have to investigate whatever cabling his final video card will need. (We needed to use the stock card, at first at least, so that we could see the progress of the pre-OS firmware.) With everything connected, but no drive sleds in it, we booted the DVD. It took quite a while to get there, but eventually it was offering to install an OS—but with no place to go!
Concept proven, I raided the spares cupboard and got him a 1TB Seagate Barracuda, which had originally been in HAL, and we installed it in Sled #1. (We needed some foam and tape to get the drive stable in the sled, as we only had two drive mounting screws for it. The SSD that had been in that sled when I got the machine had two slotted pins for one side, and used only two screws to hold it in.) Repeating the process resulted in what I assume is a bog-standard Windows install. It took a while, but eventually all seemed well.
I think he's going to be happy with this. I think the chances are good that, if needed, we could move his drive sled to a Mac Pro 2,1 and it would still work well for his needs. We may try that some time. The 2,1's are much cheaper and easier to come by.
At this point MBP6 was non-administrable. That's a problem! But,
however, it seems not an uncommon one. Dr. Google showed, though that
the easiest recovery was to delete
the /var/db/.AppleSetupDone file and reboot. Getting to
there, and in a way that lets you delete the file, is tricky. For M1
Macs you have to boot into recovery mode, which means (on this one)
you have to hold down the power key as you boot. Then you can enter
recovery. It insisted on Jill's Apple ID credentials, which was no
problem to supply. (This would no doubt have been a lot harder,
without them!) You can then run Utilities/Terminal, which gets you a
root shell. You can then get to the place where this file is, delete
it, and reboot.
At that point it behaved like a virgin Mac, and from there you can set up the 'first' account as the administrator. The other accounts were still there, unmolested.
With all that crap taken care of, I could then hook it to the Time Machine server, and I told it that I did not want to take over the MBP2 backup set. (We may yet be able to resurrect that machine.)
I was able to get it online using a powerline ethernet adapter, which simply joined (after configuration reset) the existing household network even though it was a different make. Standards!
Later, when installed, we find that all is working well, except that this system seems to be unable to awaken correctly from sleep. So, Daniel never puts it to sleep, and only shuts off the monitor. That's wasting a lot of power...
There is no expectation that it will not do this again, but I'm going to change to leaving it off and in its bag unless I have need of it, rather than leaving it on the dock. There's a 90-day warrantee.
Through Amazon I ordered an OWC interlink cable. I also ordered a WD 2TB Passport Ultra portable hard drive, one that's powered through USB-C. I think that with this I can do Park work from the laptop even if the power goes out. (Unlike with my current wall-powered 2TB drive.) $100 for these two items.
If I cable the Passport to the laptop, and not the dock, it'll continue work off the laptop's battery if the power fails. I'll lose the dock-connected peripherals: the keyboard, video, and mouse, but the laptop can continue to be used. (I'm not sure if the power connection to the dock is bidirectional so that the dock is powered from the laptop, if necessary. That'll be an easy experiment.)
Her specs: 12.9" screen, 3+ generation, 256GB+, no cellular required, with pencil and AirTurn Duo 500 pedal.
Probing around showed no voltage at all on the output windings of the flyback transformer, and only then did I notice the giant crack in its housing! Burned, and split. (And likely the initial failure.) So, that's where the magic smoke Daniel reported had come from! I had been looking for physical damage, I don't know how I missed that one, on the most-stressed component in the TV. The TV's CPU is looking for flyback output voltages at startup, and seeing none it shuts the horizontal drive down for safety, to prevent further damage. (Clearly this protection mechanism doesn't work adequately once operating, else the HOT could perhaps have survived the transformer failure.)
So, I need a new flyback if I want to fix this thing. 95-4601-01. I found one new flyback for sale online, at $50 plus shipping. I think... not. An alternate shown on the schematic is 95-4372-01; I found one of those, used, and made a $5 (plus shipping) offer on it. It might not even work, and I might not win it. [I did not.] This is all starting to look pretty unattractive. A HR DIEMEN spare equivalent HR-7841 is around $30.
I taped a sign on the back:
Attention: Thieves
I paid $20 for this TV. It is old (2009), heavy, and dumb. It is not 4K. Is it really worth risking jail for?
I then put the TV back together, and tucked the printed schematics inside. Total repair cost: about $30, more than the much superior putative replacement plasma TV. Still, I do like to 'win' such challenges. I stripped the ferrite core out of the dead flyback and cut off its high-voltage wires for use in the junkbox. I'll take both TV's back to the cabin, and make any necessary decisions there.
I ran both TV's off of a single DVD player, for comparison. (Simultaneous use of its S-video and composite video output jacks.) Of note is that the black levels of the CRT are quite a bit better than the plasma, I recall that black levels were a particular challenge for plasma displays, with only the last generations (and the vaunted Pioneer Kuro) approaching CRT quality. This plasma is one generation older than what we're currently using in the house, and definitely not as good. (It's grayer, but this is an older model with who-knows-how-many hours on it. Plasma displays are known to have rising black levels over time.) But the picture size, color, and clarity are excellent, and generally superior to the CRT. I also note that you can see a slight lag to the plasma's display, so I'm definitely seeing the point of the retro-gamers' current preference for vintage CRT displays. (This lag is due to the de-interlacing and re-scaling necessary to drive the raw plasma panel, which does not work at all like a CRT in spite of both being glass bottles with electron-excited phosphors on the face. There is a chance that an HDMI drive at the native resolution might exhibit less lag.)