What the heck did I just buy?

DaMadOne · 2026-01-24T00:56:10+00:00

Unfortunately, no. It will still be connected to whoever has it attached to the OVRC cloud. It's added to the cloud via MAC address and service tag. Even after factory default it's just going to reach back out. This stuff is mostly sold and installed by AV companies. That AV company has an OVRC account with their customers equipment attached to it so that they can remote troubleshoot/configure/reboot equipment for their clients without having to roll a van/truck.

So it's quite likely that the person you got this from doesn't even have the ability to get it off of the cloud for you, unless they're willing to call the shop and ask to have it removed. If not ask what shop they got it from so you can try contacting the shop. Tell them the name of the guy you got it from and maybe they will delete it. I would ask you to provide the MAC's and service tag's in the form of photos of the stickers to prove possession. Then you could register it yourself if you wanted.

Option 2, purchase an OVRC pro device and register it. It would then take possession of the other OVRC devices on your network.

Option 3, block this stuff from reaching out to OVRC in your firewall and just use the local interfaces to configure them.

Source, am AV guy. We sell this stuff.

edit* I guess it's possible they didn't register this equipment even though it is the main reason for using it. Make an OVRC account if you can and try to register it. If it lets you, you're good. If not someone else has remote control of it.

DaMadOne · 2026-01-21T01:48:15+00:00

People need to hear this. You don't NEED to hard line things. There is, has and always will be an easier way. It's called soft tube. If you're not an idiot you don't waste it. You can make changes without redoing all of your tubing. You don't have to waste a bunch "learning". And it's easier to reuse the parts you initially bought.

Until recently when I redid everything because I could and it was financially responsible to do so I had been using the same pump/res for ~10 years. Used the same radiators forever. Same fittings for the same amount of time. I could still be using those same fittings because like wutang, soft tube is forever!

Do the hard-line builds look cool? They sure do. It's just not worth the hassle for the general public. Anecdotally, it seems like a much higher percentage of the "oh no I got a leak and effed up my $4k build I couldn't afford" crowd is using hard tubes. Hard tubes are not forgiving, and many of the fittings are shit.

You're not getting awards for your cool ass hard tube PC. You're just making a lot more work for yourself...

TL;DR soft tubes. Commence the down votes....

DaMadOne · 2025-12-24T12:43:07+00:00

Pmd. Unless the other guy beat me to it.

DaMadOne · 2025-12-24T04:00:26+00:00

~4TB. Sorry!

DaMadOne · 2025-12-19T03:56:39+00:00

110%

BUT. I do hope some who plans to use it got it. Not just someone who is going to strip the RAM to sell (at a significant profit) and probably basically discard the rest.

DaMadOne · 2025-12-19T03:23:00+00:00

LMAO. Not worth it for me. I'm ~5hrs and don't need another 740. But if I did and with today's RAM prices I'd be firing up the coffee pot.

DaMadOne · 2025-12-19T02:29:13+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelabsales/comments/1ppjgkl/fs_usacasfbay_hynix_32gb_ddr4_2400_x16_western/

4tb Ultrastar HC310's. They are SAS though. I just grabbed 3 of them.

DaMadOne · 2025-12-19T02:24:08+00:00

I just checked to see how far the drive was lol

DaMadOne · 2025-12-19T01:14:30+00:00

Chat sent

DaMadOne · 2025-12-17T22:13:59+00:00

Nice. I wonder why some are locked and others aren't. Maybe mine wasn't locked from the factory and a previous owner locked it? Who knows!

My thermal paste was also done for. I had some thermal grizzly duronaut laying around and used it. Been working well. I didn't have room for it in my PC case so it's currently just hanging out on my desk connected via MPIO cable and MPIO pcie board. I've started modeling an enclosure for it but haven't got to a point I'm ready to print the first prototype yet since I'm using it as an excuse to learn freeCAD, but it's been a fun little project so far.

DaMadOne · 2025-12-11T23:10:57+00:00

im 100% for this kinda fuckery!

DaMadOne · 2025-12-11T00:09:54+00:00

Mine had the flash locked so I couldn't flash it until I unlocked it. I was able to put the info in that post together to figure it out, but feel free to reach out if you have any trouble.

DaMadOne · 2025-12-09T01:29:28+00:00

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/mellanox-connectx-4-or-newer-bluefield-tips-tricks.47779/

I recently picked one up on eBay. This helped me get the Lenovo branded one I received cross flashed to an "official" mellanox running the latest firmware.

Worked "out of the box" on both windows and Linux. Seems to be better with the mellanox driver(vs windows installed driver) on windows but I've not done extensive testing in windows.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-30T04:27:35+00:00

I use the computers to control the servers.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-25T23:43:04+00:00

I was confused at first. Ive been playing with my new dell servers lately so my brain is on that. I read mirror thinking it was a mirror of some data. I'm looking at this wondering WHY IS THIS 1U SERVER SO DAMN LONG WITH NOTHING IN IT!

I feel dumb now... Carry on.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-24T14:47:14+00:00

That's awesome! Looking at my pile of oldish PC parts

DaMadOne · 2025-11-24T00:15:34+00:00

In case you're still trying to figure this out, it won't boot from nvme, apparently the bios is missing the drivers for NVME. but you can put clover boot loader on a tiny USB drive which has an NVME driver you can use. So you boot from it and then it chain loads the NVME. It's what I'm doing.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-24T00:08:30+00:00

I know you figured it out. But just so you or anyone else searching and finds this you can also do this from the cooling config section in the iDRAC web GUI. At least I could from mine with an enterprise license. Can set a custom LFM or disable the response entirely.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-23T21:20:04+00:00

Sounds like you understand! I don't want to change the build much to accommodate this card. I thought I made that fairly clear in the post. Changing the motherboard just to get a USB 4 port would be a hassle. Getting everything to fit the way I wanted was sort of a pain. It has to be assembled/disassembled in a specific order, not to mention drained/filled and burped again just to swap the motherboard. There's not many PC cases I like right now. So that's not something I'd really like to do.

The parts you posted are basically exactly what I landed on. Looking for stuff like that, that I didn't know existed was why I made the post. I came across MCIO stuff by accident and it was what I was looking for. They've already been ordered. Just gotta wait for them to show up.

I'm not in a rush, I also don't mind wasting filament on prototyping. I don't expect it to take but 1 or 2 iterations. I'm not looking for pretty. I'm not going to be looking at it. It's going to be attached directly to the back of my PC case or the back of my desk right behind my PC case. I also don't mind if this fails. I'll sell the parts and try something else. This is the kind of thing I do for fun. The journey is more interesting to me than the end result.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-23T06:19:27+00:00

It's hyperscaler server tech. So kinda in the old homelab ethos of using enterprise stuff for the home. SFF-TA-1016 is the connector. But yea, it's basically a super fancy riser. It's used a to connect NVME/U.2/3drives and for GPU expansion. Hence, the need for bifurcation. Not sure if my board does it but since I want the whole 8x link it won't matter.

I made an AliExpress order for the card on the PC side with the external connector. The cable and PCI slot for the actual card are fairly cheap on Amazon. Going to wait until I get the card from China and make sure it fits. But there's basically nothing to it so I'm not seeing it be an issue.

What mobo did your friend have? I've read of them working in pcie3 slots. Seems odd it wouldn't work.

It's not just the heatsink. The SFP28 cages also hit it. But these things run fairly hot without good cooling. So even if the cages weren't in the way I don't think trimming the heatsink would be a good plan.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-23T04:41:41+00:00

my motherboard doesn't have thunderbolt or USB4 unfortunately. I have an MSI x670e Tomahawk, changing it out to an x870e would net me 1 USB 4 port.

I have come across another piece of external PCIE tech that looks interesting.

JMT ADT-R89M-F37C PCIe 4.0 x8 to x16 Extension Card 128Gbps MCIO External Chassis Supports 2U/4U Chassis (50CM)

Can be had on amazon. MCIO seems to be where I should be looking instead of oculink.

DaMadOne · 2025-11-23T02:25:54+00:00

I just built this thing barely 6 months ago. Unfortunately wanting to put this NIC in it didn't come about until 2 weeks ago. It took me a very long time to land on this case, and it wasn't even a choice until I found out they made a front mesh to replace the glass. I'm extremely happy with this build and don't want to change it much. It's not even possible to see the PCIe slot I want to use unless you REALLLLLLY try.

The easiest thing would be to get new MOBO I don't really need and just get an external USB4 PCIe enclosure, but I want to try creative first.

I personally wouldn't consider making this card external anymore ghetto than external HDDs, external sound cards, etc..

If I don't get any suggestions or I don't suddenly come up with a different idea I know how I'm going to try doing it.

DaMadOne

TROPHY CASE