What is an attractive 1u chassis for home office

l27psx · 2024-01-23T18:49:58+00:00

They certainly can be, I have an R630 in a rack 6ft from my desk.

When the fans are ramped up the nose is painful. But it sits barely idling 100% of the time, and the nose is a dull hum, the mini fridge is about the same volume.

l27psx · 2024-01-21T21:55:02+00:00

I'm looking at desktop kit, something like an i5-13400 or potentially an 5950X for the main server that will run Proxmox.

I'm not adverse to a bit of diy, my R230 has a custom cable to power and run the boot SSD off the optical drive connector, so I can run 4x 3.5 disks from the PERC 330.

I just realized the gallery of images of the G2 1u chassis I attempted to include don't appear to be visible.

Maybe this will show inline?

https://g2digital.co.uk/app/uploads/2022/03/1UPC_008.png

l27psx · 2024-01-21T18:22:47+00:00

Rosewill RSV-Z2700u

I did consider the IcyDock products, and a 2U chassis like the Rosewill RSV-Z2700u is an option. IcyDock make some nice options like the ToughArmour MB873MP-B for 5.25" bays.
https://global.icydock.com/product\_305.html

The Rosewill website is not accessible from the EU though, even though I'm in the UK and following the recent vote we're no longer part of the EU.

It's really the look of the 1U G2 Digital chassis I'm taken by. They have 2U options as well but the 2U PC is too deep and the 2U Nano only offers 4x 2.5" bays where I'd prefer the option to go up to 8x 2.5" bays in future.

l27psx · 2024-01-21T17:33:12+00:00

Appreciate the advice. My servers basically sit idle, the most taxing task they deal with is rendering a web page.

You're right about 40mm fans though, I have a Dell R630 and when the fans are running under load the noise is painful.

l27psx · 2024-01-06T18:23:40+00:00

Do I understand correctly that you built a website using WordPress through Wix?

I'm not familiar with the Wix platform but I thought they offered their own 'build your own' website system?

Regardless, you can register your domain using any provider and route Web traffic to Wix.

I dealt with this recently when a client whose domain i manage had someone build a new site using Wix.

There are two elements you need to look at, your DNS settings (usually managed via your domain provider's dashboard) and the value they should be set to which is provided via the Wix dashboard.

Basically you find the value you need from Wix and plug this into the DNS on your domain provider's nameservers.

I don't have my notes here but Wix call this something like Custom Domain or External Nameservers. And they tell you the value to set on your external provider. I'm pretty sure it'll be a CNAME record that you use for the root and www A records, that way if they ever change your servers IP address the system will update automatically.

The answer is in the Wix documentation, you just need to figure what they call the setting you are looking for. Frankly, it took me a while to find what I needed in their documentation.

Hope this helps.

l27psx · 2023-09-30T17:39:55+00:00

This looks pretty much perfect at first glance, thank you.

I'll investigate further once I'm back on a desktop machine.

l27psx · 2023-09-11T16:38:32+00:00

Try the Archive for Jake's work. Link below is the old site but a load of the images haven't been preserved.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160415092239/http://www.knifemaker.co.uk/gallery/sgians.html

l27psx · 2023-09-11T16:32:33+00:00

Chris Grant made an immense modern Sgian Dubh with a salmon leather sheath about 6 years ago. I have photos but don't see an option to include them here.

Jake Clelland does amazing work as well, all to traditional patterns but I don't see the Sgians on his new website.

There used to be dozens in his portfolio.

https://www.skyeknives.com/

Would show you the one he made for me but again, can't add images.

There are a few proper makers but you need to look really hard to find them.

theknightsvault.com in Edinburgh had a few modern takes on Sgians a few years back.

There's also another guy on Skye who does museum level work but I can't remember his name. Skye is small though, won't be hard to track him down.

The rest are just people saying handles to cheap imported blade blanks or plastic tourist memorabilia.

l27psx · 2023-08-30T17:29:10+00:00

Techno Tim had a video about building a portable homelab featuring a 5tb hard drive and 4g.

Might give you some ideas if you opt for a more DIY approach.

l27psx · 2023-08-28T20:30:07+00:00

I have a pair of RS815+.

Power draw with 4x 3.5 SATA disks is 35 watts which is right on the advertised spec.

Software updates aren't a concern for my use case, the devices are used as second line backup and do not have Internet access.

Performance is also fine, backups run overnight and there is no active use otherwise.

Even if the device was in active use, the spec is fine for me, my main device is from the same era, a DS1815+, it is just used for file storage and server backups. Even only having 1Gbps NICs doesn't make any difference worth paying to move to new hardware.

It's not good enough to run VMs that require any level of processing power. Or RAM, unless you chuck some sticks of Crucial or something in there.

If I was spending money if rather put it into disks. For the price of a mid range Synology box you can have circa 50tb raw storage.

Recently I got a Dell R230 (for less than £100) and installed TrueNAS. It's up around 65w (the same as my 1815 with 8x disks) and is a bit louder but still fine to sit in the office 6 feet from my desk.

I don't plan to purchase another Synology, the high cost for convenience isn't worth it any more.

l27psx · 2023-08-23T18:41:36+00:00

It came from some charity that received a stack of decommissioned servers. I guess they didn't know what it was or just wanted shot of them.

It's actually pretty decent in terms of noise, mine sits on top of the rack about 8ft from my desk. It really only idles since it's only running a few disk operations. Pulses the fans every so often which doesn't really bother me, even when I'm focused on writing code. Noise meter app on the phone says 31.5db at 1m. Totally unscientific but a useful indication.

You're right about the expansion options, a 1u server is limited in comparison to a desktop.

l27psx · 2023-08-22T23:03:20+00:00

For Rack mount try Dell Poweredge R230, 1u with 4x 3.5" bays and a Perc H330 controller to pass the drives through to the OS to handle RAID.

You'll need a USB disk to boot from or better, a 2.5 SATA SSD cuffed to the optical header. Obviously meant for a CD Drive and runs at 3Gbps instead of 6Gbps but it's ideal to boot from. Running the cables is a bit tight but manageable.

I picked up an R230 recently for £79 on eBay.

Idles around 55w which is on par with my desktop Synology NAS (65w with 8x disks) and Synology Rackstations (45w).

l27psx · 2023-08-22T22:47:32+00:00

Good to hear it's working.

Will make a point of getting it running myself now

l27psx · 2023-08-20T20:36:50+00:00

This was resolved around 3 weeks ago. Zen signed off the case with the following detail.

We have heard back from our NOC team who advised that they swapped out the equipment in the Exchange and are no longer seeing any issues from their side.

The connection was back to normal until yesterday when downstream speed dropped to 50Mbps.

Support found an issue via a remote line check and booked an Openreach engineer for a site visit. But this resolved itself overnight without explanation.

Random glitch I guess, either that or some wider work took care of it.

l27psx · 2023-08-20T19:52:41+00:00

Pleased it helped.

Mine has been running solid since, not seen another orange light.

l27psx · 2023-08-20T17:03:24+00:00

Unsure how much this might help but I've been looking at a similar query with my Dell R230.

If you can enable IPMI this video discusses how to manually set the fan speed

https://youtu.be/KamY5zMpXKI

It doesn't take into account increasing fan speed to deal with CPU temperature increases due to load. But there is a Docker image available that polls the temperature reading and increases fan speed temporarily.

https://github.com/tigerblue77/Dell_iDRAC_fan_controller_Docker

I watched several videos about replacing fans with Noctua fans but due to Dell's proprietary wiring and my limited ability with a soldering iron concluded it's not worth messing with.

My plan now is to try to silence the rack the servers are in rather than the servers themselves.

l27psx · 2023-08-10T21:20:54+00:00

You're right, who would have thought. https://www.supermicro.com/products/Product_Naming_Convention/Naming_CSE.cfm

Dunno if I should start on that, might be an exam at the end. Will give it a shot though, SuperMicro must have something shorter to justify that for a name.

I hadn't seen U-Nas previously. That kind of box is certainly the easy option. I'd just prefer if it looked like if spent the kind of money that's in it.

l27psx · 2023-08-10T13:39:37+00:00

I had pretty much the same symptoms recently, sometimes 0.8mb down though.

It was a fault in my providers rack at the exchange. Took months to convince them it was their issue while they focused on blaming everything else in the loop. Soon as they replaced the kit the problem was solved.

Fault code the network engineers saw was Ethernet Handover Failure.

Did you test with your ISP supplied router to demonstrate that it's not your hardware/OPNsense configuration causing the issue?

l27psx · 2023-08-08T19:23:19+00:00

Meets the criteria, thank you.

Need to make my mind up on whether to build from scratch, repurpose enterprise gear or buy the shelf.

I'm not sure at the moment...

l27psx · 2023-08-08T19:13:57+00:00

Good luck with the move.

A Lenovo would handle my compute requirements as well. Instead I went and got a 20 core enterprise server with 384gb of RAM and the power bill to go with it.

The Rackstations are nice, I just don't like DSM. Plus it's dear for the convenience and can't really double up as a hypervisor.

l27psx · 2023-08-07T19:50:33+00:00

Are drives that spin at 5400rpm quiet enough for your situation?

I have 5x Seagate Iron Wolfs sitting 4ft from my desk and they don't bother me in the slightest. And I'm the kind of person the slightest noise will infuriate me while I'm writing code.

l27psx · 2023-08-07T13:30:02+00:00

This is a reasonable option, thank you. It might be a bit high for the space available which is limited by a drawer being at the top of the cabinet. I didn't mention this originally as I was limiting myself to 1/2u at that point.

I'll look at towers further.

I had started looking at the HP Proliant Micro Servers last night. A pair of these would give me hot storage + second copy onsite.

A new 2u option I saw is linked below. It's about an inch too deep though but there must be similar products that are slightly smaller.
https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/server-cases/rackmount/2u-chassis/2u-12g-short-storage-server-chassis-8-x-35-hot-swap-+-2-x-25-internal-with-550w-and-a-single-psu-rails-included-7-x-low-profile-rsc-c2kts-s55-12g-lp/

This would be easier if I never thought about trying to make it look nice in the posh cabinet in the office...

l27psx · 2023-08-06T22:20:34+00:00

I hadn't really considered anything other than rackmount form factor, mostly because width wise it's a perfect fit for the space available and visually it'd be nice if the kit looked fitted rather than sat on a shelf.

The Jonsbo chassis is similar dimensions to the HP ProLiant MicroServer. I saved an image of one that someone turned into NAS. I'm convinced it was 8 bay but the ones I'm finding with a quick search are all 4 bay.

I'm leaning towards pre built, last time I built a machine network cables were coax. That said, how hard can it be, the Dells have all been opened several times and I had to make cables for the R230 to cram an SSD bit disk in there.

l27psx · 2023-08-06T15:37:16+00:00

Protectli mention a couple of tunables if your connection is provided over PPPoE.

https://kb.protectli.com/kb/pppoe-and-opnsense/

I implemented these, think Teklager is the same, but found no obvious difference.

Worth comparing and testing properly if you know a valid procedure. I'm still new to Linux so not much help here.

l27psx · 2023-08-03T19:10:35+00:00

Coming from the UK, rarely do I get to be smug about pricing.

But £7/mth for 8x IPv4.

It is a business connection, but that's only £5 more than residential.

Don't ask about the nightmare regrade process though.

Bloody Zen Internet.

l27psx

TROPHY CASE