Month: April 2023

For the case I have chosen a 2U high model from inter-tech:

The case has enough room for the hardware, an knowing the hardware will not take much space, it will not get very warm (hopefully) with the help of two case fans. For convenience I have chosen a 500W power supply from the same vendor.

The server hardware consists of the following items:
– Asrock B450M-HDV R4.0 motherboard
– AMD Ryzen 5 4600G processor, with cooler
– G.Skill DDR4 Aegis 2x 8GB 3200MHz memory
– WD Blue SN750 500GB M.2 SSD storage

The build was not too difficult. Took some fiddling to put the cooler on the CPU, and I noticed that the power supply had its fan on top, which means that this is covered by the lid of the case. This had me worried a little, but it turns out not to be a problem, as the system is not getting very warm. Top temperature I got from the motherboard is below 30 degrees, and the case does not feel hot. Will be interesting to monitor this when there are three of them on top of each other in the cabinet.

Installing Proxmox was very easy, and I will publish an artikel on the subject at a later stage.

On the network side:
Being a big fan of Ubiquity Unify products, and knowing there will be a 19 inch rack, I decided to replace my Unify Dream Router for the Unify Dream Machine Pro. This would boost the throughput and me not having to worry about having multiple networks.

On the server side:
Three brand new servers with decent capacity but also budget friendly. The main server to be rebuild to a NAS storage.

Optionally:
A test server, to be able to play around with new things

First steps . . .
I started out by playing with TrueNas for the NAS part, and Proxmox for the server part. TrueNas was fairly easy to install and work with. Only choice to make is the Core version or the Scale version. In the end I have chosen for the Core version, as this is the oldest of the two.

For Proxmox, I followed a course on “Learn Linux TV”, which was a very good introduction in all the basics (and more) I needed to succeed. (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT98CRl2KxKHnlbYhtABg6cF50bYa8Ulo)

And then of course a migration is needed of the most important services from the now main server and swarm nodes to the Proxmox nodes. A lot to think about . . .

The followers of this site are probably disappointed by the lack of updates. There are several reasons (I will not bother you with that), but one of these reasons is the struggle with the chosen paths and a long time desire to have my own server rack.

So we started out with a single server with enough power to run several services and still have power to spare. At this time I was doing this together with my son, which resulted in this beast:

We had this running for a long time, and it was fulfilling our needs and that of the rest of the household. But whenever we were working on the server and things started to go wrong, we ended up with complaints because the services were down. Not a good spot to be in . . .

This is when we started our next endeavor, and decided to buy some second hand HP workstations to build us a fully redundant docker swarm.

This was working fine as well, and we had our redundancy in order, but it was not entirely the way I wanted it. In the mean time my son was getting more busy with his own projects and spend less time on the swarm. This made me decide to start my own project and at the same time fulfill a wish to have my own server rack.

Keep visiting this site, so you can follow along how this dying wish materializes . . .