Tech/The Lenovo ThinkStation C30

From ~esantoro

I recently acquired a Lenovo ThinkStation C30. This page contains notes on using it with GNU/Linux :)

A stock picture of the Lenovo ThinkStation C30.
A stock picture of the Lenovo ThinkStation C30. This is not my exemplary, mine is cuter :)

It's a fairly old machine that used to be a mid/high-end workstation when it was released in 2013. While there are certainly better systems today, I managed to buy it for very little money with an interesting configuration: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz (8 cores / 16 threads... each) and 128GB DDR3 ECC memory.

I'm running the good old Proxmox on it, it's essentially going to be my private laboratory :)

This page is essentially a collection of various snippets, fixes and setting that I feel like are worth sharing.

My machine specs

According to the machine labels my C30 might be from August 2014 (I'm not really sure).

Machine types

Turns out there are different "machine types" for this exact model. This means that two ThinkStations C30 might have slight (but potentially relevant) differences in non-trivial hardware.

For example, different machine types have different AMT (Advanced Management Technology) versions (and hence capabilities).

My exemplary's machine type is 1136 with model number 3P6.

Hardware upgrades

Planned

  • Memory: 256GB (8 x 32GB ECC DDR3 RDIMM)
  • Storage: 2 x SATA/SAS Disks (spinning/magnetic, large-ish capacity)

Maybe

  • Lower-power gpu?
    • I don't really need the nVidia Quadro K5000 for now, and saving power is always a good idea.
  • NVMe disks via a pci-e adapter?
    • The machine has some free PCIe Gen3 x16 slots, i might get some speedy storage over there.
  • SSD Cage?
    • IcyDock has some interesting products, one of them being a 4-bay SSD cage than could replace the optical CD/DVD drive (it's very unlikely i'll need it in the future)
    • Link: https://global.icydock.com/product_72.html

Done

  • none yet :(

Hardware system setup

AMT Setup

I did set the AMT password. I need to look into more advanced features.

Boot sequence

I disabled network booting. That would be an easy way to hijack the machine after a power outage

Power state after power loss

I did set the machine to boot again when power is recovered after a power loss.

Proxmox setup

GPU Issues

One day while connected via SSH i noticed that one cpu core was pegged at 100% utilization, all in kernel space.

Turns out that the K5000 gpu is not very well supported by the out-of-the box noveau driver which ends up in a sort of crash-loop, keeping one core pegged at 100% usage.

The following fix disables the noveau driver:

# prevent the noveau driver from loading at boot
echo "blacklist nouveau" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
echo "options nouveau modeset=0" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf

# apply the changes to the initramfs
update-initramfs -u

The following snippet instead is a hot-fix to have the system return to a normal state without rebooting the entire machine:

# On most machines
echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind 2>/dev/null

# On some machines:
# echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind 2>/dev/null

What it does is un-binding the framebuffer console from the DRM, so that the console is not rendered using the GPU. Note that this will effectively disable video output, but this is not really an issue (for me at least) as I use the machine as a headless server.

Are SAS disks supported?

Apparently some of these machines came with a piece of hardware called "SAS enablement kit" that would allow use of SAS disks. It's essentially a SAS controller on a small mezzanine board, installed near the PCI-e slots.

This command checks for it presence:

lspci | grep -i sas
LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2004 (rev xx)

# Depending on the hardware revision, it might also be:
# LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 (rev xx)

AMT Setup

This machine comes with Intel AMT 8.0. Having Intel AMT was one of reasons why I seriously considered buying it and I gambled on getting a model with AMT 8.0 rather than 7.0.

The basic AMT setup involves pressing CTRL-P when booting the machine and setting up the admin user's password, along with enabling the web interface.

That has been done, and i have verified it works. I did have to mess a bit in order to have it reachable from the MeshCentral instance running in my lan. I'll probably write a page on that in the future. I should probably write a page on AMT in general.

I'm having issues with remote display capabilities, and I really want that to work.

Neither the CPUs nor the motherboard have a built-in GPU, and I'm afraid that could be a serious problem.

I couldn't get it to work with CIRA, so my current AMT setup is a bit handy-capped.

Useful documents

I've collected/archived some reference documents, hoping Lenovo won't mind.

Considerations

I'm fairly in love with this machine and with the amount of documentation I can read about it.

For example it's interesting to see that according to the PSREF document I could swap the two Xeon E5-2650 v2 CPUs for two Xeon E5-2650L v2 CPUs: they'd be much slower (base clock goes down from 2.6GHz to 1.7 GHz) but I get two extra physical cores (and hence four logical threads) per physical CPU... Meaning I could go for 16c/32t to 20c/40t in total. All this while shaving 50W of extra TDP as it would go down from 95W to 70W.

Or I could go the opposite direction and go all in on two Xeon E5-2695 v2 (12c/24t) and get 24c/48t in total :)

It's also interesting to see that the nVidia NVS 300 is another officially supported GPU requiring only 17.5W of power (the currently installed Quadro K5000 requires 122W instead). I would also free one PCI-e slot.

The PSREF document

The PSREF document is particularly interesting and guided me into buying this machine used.

For example it states that machine types 1095 and 1097 have Intel AMT version 7 while other machine types have Intel AMT version 8. You *do* want Intel AMT version 8 of course. But from the eBay listing there's really no way to tell what machine type it is. Thankfully the PSREF document also says that machine types 1095 and 1097 have two USB 2.0 front port while other machine types have two USB 3.0 front ports. As the picture listing showed two blue usb plugs I was fairly sure i was not buying a machine type 1095 or 1097.

It's also nice to see what kind of expansions slot the motherboard has. This machine has a total of six slots:

  • three PCIe 3.0x16
  • one PCIe 2.0x4
  • two 32-bit PCI 2.4

Weirdly, it seems it might also have an mSATA slot? That's interesting because the machine came with one of the three 3,5" SATA disk bays populated by a most likely used and near death 2.5" SATA SSD. If I could fit an mSATA disk on the motherboard I could use three SATA spinning disks (or two sata spinning disks and one data - not os- disk).

Useful software tools

In the product homepage (https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/workstations/thinkstation-c-series-workstations/thinkstation-c30) in the Drivers&Software section there are a number of downloads available for BIOS and other components.

I need to take a mental note to download them all and apply them. I see that some updates are from 2020 (and i did not check what versions I have installed).

Recovering the recovery media

Lenovo has a section of the website when you can request (buy?) a copy of the recovery media. I'm not really into getting a copy of Windows 8 but for the sake of it I tried filling the form anyway, using the serial number of my machine. Turns out they're not shipping those recovery media anymore because the product has been discontinued. Fair enough, that's reasonable, can't really complain.

Pictures

Various pictures. Not all of them are from my specific exemplary.

  • A random photo of a C30 from the Web
    A random photo of a C30 from the Web
  • A picture of the motherboard from an eBay listing
    A picture of the motherboard from an eBay listing

Links and references

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