Do it here.
Whoo last one of these for 2018!
Hope its been a great year for everyone and their labs. Looking forward to more stupid eBay finds of 2019
Posted Dec 28, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC
I think my project for 2019 will be building a Custom unraid server that will run a home steam streaming and a NAS for storing mass amounts of data and that I have accumulated. Not sure where I’m going to start but I would like some feedback on what I should look into hardware wise
Sounds like a good project, nothing quite like building a new system. I'm sure there are quite a few folk around here who can offer suggestions on such things.
Sweet I’m really exited I’m thinking threadripper but I’m really liking this Xeon 710 I have
One thing to consider is the monthly power bill. Yesterday powerful servers can be had for cheap but they usually cost a lot to run.
I'm so confused right now. No idea whether to decide for rack server hardware or consumer hardware for my ESXi virtualization server (mainly for Plex, Web Servers, experiments). This would be my first home lab server.
One thing to keep in mind with ESXi is that it has a pretty stringent HCL for what it'll run on. There have been times in the past when consumer grade hardware doesn't make that cut so you'll be stuck trying to inject the drivers you need for it, assuming they exist somewhere.
If you don't mind the noise and (depending on generation) power consumption of rack mounted servers, the prices on them are so much more attractive than building it yourself with consumer grade hardware. A solid Gen8 HP or R720 can be had for under $400 US often enough, and you'd be hard pressed to make a decent consumer desktop for that price.
I could give it a try but it's rather hard to find someone who ships to Switzerland and it's almost never that cheap if you want many cores. For example https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/123230106103 is 1’180.45USD. And can you put normals SSDs in those? Samsung EVO SSDs for example?
This one here https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/401563807480 seems to have 2x 8 core processors. Might be enough.
Is this something that ships to you?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/292841051200
Sorry I'm not from the EU so I'm not familiar with shipping in the area. https://uk.labgopher.com/ is a great place for looking for great deals on servers. I think there are other Europe specific places to to get cheap gear. I do agree though it's more expensive than getting it in the US.
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Why not the NUC8i7HVK with two NICs and good graphics plus the 8th gen CPU?
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My top 3 fails of 2018:
Bought an ATS for a real good price, waited 2 weeks for delivery, came in just before Christmas - and then realized its IEC309 input plugs are 32A, not 16A, and thus cannot hook up to my power line. Adapters simply don‘t exist.
Wondered for days why my rsync backup suddenly took hours instead of minutes for a simple daily increment. Finally realized I had botched an edit of my script and had „-inplace“ instead of „--inplace“ in the options, thus triggering, among others, the „-c“ (checksum) option that simply takes ages on 15 TB of data.
Botched a rename on my backup, triggering a re-sync of 1 TB of data, and since I have btrfs with snapshots, that cost me 1 TB of space.
Already feel like the UPS I bought doesnt have enough plugs :/
What's my option? Get a PDU?
It really depends on what you're running off of your UPS. Mine runs my R710, a small 8 port switch, modem and router and 2 raspberry Pi's. I'm using 20% of what my UPS is capable of but like you, I'm out of outlets
What I've done with some of the smaller load stuff like the Pi's and switch, modem and my router is run it all off of a power strip from one of the UPS outlets. It's "frowned upon" but I'm not overloading the UPS, nor do I have any high draw devices plugged into the power strip so I'm fairly confident in my setup. I've got maybe 3-400 watts in total power draw and that's on the high side. I've got maybe 50 watts on the power strip and it's one of the monster kinds just because I didn't want to have some sketchy "chineseum" strip with my gear.
Luckily I found a managed PDU that wont break the bank.
That's awesome. eBay?
Amazon actually. Used APC AP7900. Nothing fancy. Just didn't want to spend $500 at the moment on new.
I can never wrap my head around the difference between NAS and SAN. They say san is a storage AREA network. How can one device be an area?
A NAS provides file level storage over a network. A SAN provides block level storage over a network.
SAN technically does not refer to the device but to the network the device attaches to. a SAN device would simply be a NAS where the Network part is connected in a closed network to other storage devices or devices that use the storage, and not the local network with other traffic. It can be as simple as a NAS directly attached to a compute resource through Ethernet/Fibre/Infiniband, or as complex as using a SAN mesh network complete with Fibre switches.
In common parlance most people refer to a NAS as storage that connects through a traditional network while a SAN connects to a dedicated storage network.
This makes sense to me. However..why would computer stores have different sections of NAS' and SANs?
Also, this means I would have a san if I use a management port on my nas, as the storage traffic would go over a regular port. (?)
No, a SAN would have a dedicated port for storage traffic. If you have a dedicated management interface that is separate from the storage traffic, that is referred to as Out-of-Band Management.
For common use terminology, such as in a store like NewEgg, a NAS would likely refer to devices that pass storage traffic through a network with other traffic, i.e. using Ethernet. A SAN device would typically refer to a device that passes it's storage traffic through a dedicated storage network that is not necessarily Ethernet. Common protocols would be FibreChannel, Infiniband, and sometimes even 10G Ethernet. These have the advantage of higher bandwidth, but also using a protocol other than TCP/IP that is more efficient at passing the raw data of the storage blocks than TCP packets are.
The use is often largly different for example a company may use a NAS to share a D:/ drive for file sharing to all employees. While the San would be used for storing server stuff on. Most large companies do not have hdd's in the heir VM hosts. Often the boot over the SAN, the VM and data storage would also be hosted on the SAN.
I got my very first homelab T610 with 3 250gbs hdds, 24gbs of memory, and 2 Xeon x5660 CPUs. It's running Plex, openmediavault, and pihole on esxi. And 4TB external drive
Current Project I have hp z600 with 2 quad core cpu, 8gb memory with Asus hd7770 gpu, with win2012 server hyper-v Trying to do GPU pass through. It's currently installing win10 at the moment but I haven't tested any games yet. (Virtualized gaming)
Future Project 2019
Use PFsense as my main router on T610, I currently have TP Link onhub and 1 Google WiFi meshed.
Also, update memory on my T610 to 64 gb
If I can get the GPU pass through to work, maybe I'll upgrade GPU.
Yep.
How does your T610 perform when it comes to transcoding multiple HEVC streams?
Couldn't tell you, our Plex is just back up when we are out and about, usually use Kodi to stream. I don't really share my Plex with other people
Does it matter if both Intel X520-DA2 cards have different product codes, or are they the "same"? One is E10G42BTDA, other is EX520DA2G2P5. I am worried there might be some compatability issues, or that they are not as optimal, etc.
Anyone here from South Africa? Loving the whole homelab thing, just hating having to import everything and the high cost of the stuff locally ($1000 minimum for a dell 710). Would love to know where you get your stuff from.
What benefits of real cisco router or switch at home compared to Packet Tracer?
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My media server has been out of commission for for over a month now because I'm either two cheap to pay for the vSphere license or too lazy to just switch over my entire platform to another hypervisor. Really need to get it back up again to catch up on movies and add 12GB more RAM so my one server can host even more services! Right now it would be plex, radarr, and nzbget. Sooner or later it will additionally have sonarr and more storage.
I think I have good news.I am pretty sure you can get a free license for home use now with esxi. Someone correct me if I am wrong. If not I run UnRaid and am pretty happy with it.
Late to the Friday game but...whoever is going in and immediately down voting new posts...can you fricken stop it?
I've seen it on various tech subreddits where people ask legitimate questions , seek advice (myself included sometimes) and immediately I'm seeing the posts go zero.
Why? Who hurt you? Do you hate people? Do you hate questions?
Please just stop doing it. Or can the mods protect new posts for 24 hours or something? That way people can be seen and heard instead of crickets.
Moderators do not have this power, the closest thing I have done is to stop non subscribers from downvoting via CSS, which is easy to turn off obviously and pretty defunct now with Reddits shitty redesign.
Posts do tend to go back up from silly downvotes after a bit though, just hang in here and make sure your post is as imformative as it can be.
Half question, half complaint. I just picked up a key to fit my Dell 4210 42U Rack and it fits the front and back doors, but does not fit the side panels. I'm a little miffed, but I got the rack for basically nothing so I can't complain too much. I'm wondering if the quarter lock latches that the side panels use are standard and I can replace them, or if they are designed to have a different set of keys from the doors and I need to find a place that sells them. Anyone have ideas?
Well I'm no subject matter expert on these things, but of the racks I've encountered I've never seen one that used a different set of keys on a few locks and not the others. It's possible they exist because just about everything you can think of does exist, but everything I've seen about Dell/Rittal racks says they tend to stick to a single key for every lock for every rack.
Who knows though, maybe the previous owner stuck the wrong side panels on it, or rekeyed them, or just never used them so they got jammed up. They are not the words most high tech things.
Yeah, it's pretty strange. It's my understanding that these things are all keyed the same, so that unless you get aftermarket locks every Dell 4210 Rack can can be opened with the same set of keys (and apparently 4220s, 2410s, 2420s as well!). So the only other explanation is that someone swapped out the locks on the side panels but not for the doors, which is unusual because it's the doors most people care about.
Well if all else fails its a perfect opportunity to learn some basic lock picking skills.
So thank you for this little tidbit. I don't know the first thing about lockpicking, but I know enough about locks and tumblers. When I went to remove one of the locks I got a chance to see the tumbler and realized that the key is actually the correct one, but the tumblers are so loose and sloppy that I needed to press the key down very firmly to get the plates in the tumbler to turn.
I now have my rack locked, but I still think I'm going to replace the locks now that I know how difficult they were to get working.
I've seen separate keys for the side panels on Dell racks. I believe the side panels are ordered as an add on when you order the rack.