Working stock bare metal HP Proliant Gen8 MicroServer - CPU G1610T
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Prerequisites:
Gen8
Ensure Gen8 box is set to AHCI disk mode in BIOS
Ensure Gen8 box is set to boot from internal USB in BIOS
iLO remote console or VGA attached monitor and keyboard
Router
Manually assign your router DHCP server settings to provide a fixed IP address to the mac Gen8 is using. (Not really a pre-requisite but it saves a lot time.)
Windows
synology_broadwellnk_3622xs+.pat (DSM 7.1-42661 Update 1) (Download from Synology Downloads)
Win32DiskImager
Putty
Synology Assistant (Download from Synology Downloads)
Notes:
Brand new USB stick, I used a Sandisk Ultra Flair USB 3.0 16GB stick. A 4GB USB 2.0 stick is plenty for this task but the shop did not have any. It’s overkill, I know. I could not get anything to boot using the internal microSD card so gave up trying. I can't stress enough how important it is to use a new USB 2.0/3.0 stick, I spent days having failed installs which I believe was due to old USB sticks which look and work fine using Windows.
At the time of writing, I used tinycore-redpill.v0.9.2.5.img. Burn the image file to the USB2/3 stick (I used Win32DiskImager). Once complete, eject the stick and insert it into the Gen8 internal USB port.
Boot the Gen 8 and let it load Tiny core (I used HP iLO remote console to monitor the console boot process). Once you see the red smiling pill, monitor the small green console within where it says “System Main IP” until you see the IP address (that you manually assigned in your router) of your Gen 8 come up.
Start of Putty session - Use Putty to connect to that IP address. User/password tc/P@ssw0rd
Cut and paste the following “sudo” commands into the Putty terminal/console one at a time and accept the defaults and use y/Y (yes). Do the edit and continue the cut and paste of the “sudo” commands including the last line “exitcheck.sh reboot” as well. Please note: With the changing of USB sticks etc, I am not convinced the edit is required but I did it anyway and it worked for me.
sudo ./rploader.sh clean
sudo ./rploader.sh update
sudo ./rploader.sh fullupgrade
sudo ./rploader.sh identifyusb
sudo ./rploader.sh serialgen DS3622xs+ realmac
sudo ./rploader.sh satamap
sudo ./rploader.sh listmods broadwellnk-7.1.0-42661
Begin of edit - Within Putty terminal, edit (I used vi) the “user_config.json” file
vi user_config.json
In the "extra_cmdline": stanza, the last line says "DiskIdxMap": "00" add a comma to the end of that line so it looks like...
"DiskIdxMap": "00",
Add another line so it now looks like this...(no ending comma on the last line)
"DiskIdxMap": "00",
"dom_szmax": "2048"
Save and quit
The example given below has the sn and mac1 entries blanked out. To check the edit you have made, use....
cat user_config.json
"extra_cmdline": {
"pid": "0x5591",
"vid": "0x0781",
"sn": "XXXXXXXXXXXXX",
"mac1": "XXXXXXXXXXXX",
"SataPortMap": "6",
"DiskIdxMap": "00",
"dom_szmax": "2048"
},
End of Edit – the dom_szmax parameter sets the Red Pill build partition size to 2GB instead of the default 1GB
sudo ./rploader.sh build broadwellnk-7.1.0-42661
sudo ./rploader.sh backup
exitcheck.sh reboot
End of Putty session
Use iLo remote console to monitor the boot process
Let it do it's thing for a few minutes after booting the Tiny core kernel.
Run Synology Assistant and you should see the server (It may take a minute or 2). Note: If after 3 minutes, you can’t ping the Gen8 ip address, it will never work and you will have to rebuild RedPill again.
Once Synology Assistant does connect, it gave me the option to Migrate, so I selected the defaults and when requested for the pat file to use, used the pat file downloaded earlier. It then goes into a blue screen with a circular percentage upload counter. Once it gets to 59/60% it then states something like installing/updating DSM, I can’t remember exactly.
On completion, I could log into my Gen 8 Synology system and had my RAID 5 btrfs volume back with all my files preserved. It does warn you the volume requires scrubbing and you will need to do a re-setup of various items.
Another tool I found that was very useful for checking boot process of Tiny Core was
http://<yourip>:7681 (user/pass root/<blank>)
use:
dmesg
cat /var/log/*rc*