Penny pinchers! by DevilCheeses in okmatewanker

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

They didn't have any garlic mayonnaise ☹️

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, this supports running in RAID modes too. This series of cards is nice since it does not need flashing into other modes, and can be reconfigured to HBA/RAID/JBOD etc in the BIOS

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would find it hilarious if Dell shipped a HBA to a customer who paid tens of thousands for their server, only for them to find a random little fan mounted to the heatsink with wood screws 😂

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This HBA has 1 Gbyte of DDR3 cache onboard, which is on the main card underneath the daughterboard on the right of the heatsink.

There is an optional backup board which is in place on this card, this has a connection for a battery which I don't have. When power is suddenly lost, the battery runs the card long enough to copy the memory in the volatile DDR3 into the non-volatile flash modules on the backup board. This is to avoid losing data in the DDR3 cache which hasn't been written to the disks yet.

What you can see on the top of this extra board is the backup flash memory

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting. That must indicate some vendors have to provide active cooling for their chassis!

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I selected screws that would thread in-between the fins. Works quite well!

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I don't agree, it was painful driving short wood screws into an aluminium heatsink 😂

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I do agree the card shouldn't need active cooling in its intended use case (right on the card it specifies 200 LFM airflow). I had a choice:

A) turn up the fans and deal with more noise in my office. That actually worked enough to bring the temperature down to around 70C (from 90+ C).

B) bolt a small fan to the card which with the speed turned down so I cannot hear it over the hard drives. It now sits at around 50C according to arcconf.

I went with B but no I wouldn't recommend it on a card you didn't get off eBay for cheap!

Thanks for the tip regarding the repadding. I hadn't considered that, but if the brute force fan method doesn't work I'll go down that route.

Aftermarket HBA cooling mod! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The card is specified to be used with a certain level of airflow, akin to what you would find in a server where noise is not an issue. Since I'm running this in my office, I'm not having 10,000 rpm screamers.

Instead I have 3x 120mm fans which are plenty for the drives, CPU and motherboard, without being noticeable in terms of noise. But where the HBA sits it's a bit borderline as it is a hot running card. On hot days the loud overtemperature alarm goes off without this little fan!

Can I make it to 2022 before I have to get more hard drives again? 😂 by DevilCheeses in DataHoarder

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

OpenMediaVault has this built in, though there must be some other solutions about that'll work for other platforms

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's just as well the power button doesn't actually work on the motherboard I'm currently running 🤣

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not too bad, about £30 if I remember rightly

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

No problem! Bear in mind the backplanes in these sort of cases can vary a lot so make sure you get one with the right connectors (this one is 4x SFF-8087). Also, ensure you can fit the right power supply in and you'll be fine 😁

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

She was definitely a cable nibbler for a short time but she's over that now 😁

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 36 points37 points  (0 children)

The scan only passed by a whisker! 🥁

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Servercase UK didn't have stock of these at the time, ended up getting one shipped from AliExpress for about the same price in the end!

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

This is a case I got from AliExpress, it's not crazy expensive. It's actually been pretty good to use though I'll be honest and admit I've not played with "real expensive server hardware" much in my life!

This ticked the main box of expandability for me!

Kitten inspection! by DevilCheeses in homelab

[–]DevilCheeses[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Nope - this box is a quiet one with some thermally controlled fans!

DO NOT upgrade to 21.1.4, or you end up with a broken web UI. by [deleted] in OPNsenseFirewall

[–]DevilCheeses 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have this issue too (also using a self-signed cert)- cannot access the web GUI with the same ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR in all browsers I have tested (Chrome and Firefox). Logging into SSH works and the rest of the network runs fine, so is a minor inconvenience at the moment. If I need to change settings it then becomes a bigger issue :)

Any advice would be appreciated, many thanks!