Well,
I have come to the conclusion that I am in need of a new home server. My combination of a HP N40L for storage, a HP Laptop for Plex and a Raspberry Pi 3 as a Home Assistant machine just isn’t working well anymore. Of course, I can’t afford to go out and buy brand new gear (for the most part). I am considering “old” LGA 1356 Intel E5-2670 Xeons (around $80 each), a motherboard to support two of them, rackmount case (new Norco RPC-5224 and probably the most expensive part of the build), new PSU, an additional SAS/SATA controller so I can use the case properly, etc. Just need to determine if I want to do Ubuntu with ZOL & root on ZFS or if I want to go with FreeBSD and a beta install of Docker. I’ll run as much as I can outside of Docker containers, but some will need to be containers. I’m also thinking of putting the server in the garage, although I have no clue how hot it gets in there in the summer which worries me. I would love to be able to run two fiber runs out there to do a connection between my current Meraki MS220-8P and my old Dell PowerConnect 2724 (LAG between them just because I can), would also give me the ability to upgrade to 10Gig at some point in the future.
Jul 13 2019
Home server
Well,
Last night I moved my home server from an old crappy tower case to a Rosewill RSV-L4500 4U rackmount case. No rack to put it in so it sits on its side but oh well. So much room in it, plenty of room for my ASUS KCMA-D8 motherboard. Will be really nice when I get the replacement board so I can use both CPU sockets and have 16 true cores and hopefully 128GB of RAM. If not, I’ll have either 64GB (like I do now) or 96GB of RAM. Both of which are a huge improvement over the 24GB I had before.
By Shaun • Server, smart house, tech 0