Was driving the neighbours kid to school this morning and I spotted these outside a business while I was in traffic, managed to yoink them. They were completely drenched and had been snowed on for about an hour. Hoping I could use some, the ML350 seems really good if it works. Waiting for some RAM to arrive so I can test it and the DL380. None had any drives or caddies and only one had some RAM, though only 4gb of ddr2. Here are the machines:

• HPE ML350 Gen9 (dual Xeon e5-2620v4, untested)
• HPE DL380p Gen8 (dual Xeon e5-2670, untested)
• 2x Dell PowerEdge r610 (dual Xeon x5650, tested and works though one has problems on socket 2)
• Dell PowerEdge 1950 (single Xeon e5310, tested and works, no raid card for some reason)

There were a few more Dell towers but I didn't have room in my car unfortunately, kind of crazy that people just dump this stuff outside. I've dried them all up well and have given them checks all over, physically they all seem to be in unusually good condition apart from one bashed up PSU from someone yanking on it without pushing the latch.

I picked up this CSE-847, and i want to pull out the board and leave it as just a jbod. What do i need to be able to connect all 36 sata drives to a server right above it and have all drives listed individually in truenas.

I'm very pleased with myself, I'm not very computer literate and have been struggling for ages to create a network monitoring page in Grafana on my Raspberry Pi. Now finally with some help from ChatGPT I have been about to pull data from my router and switch via SNMP and save it into a Prometheus database and display it with Grafana.

This is by far the most advanced thing my non-coding capable brain has been about to do.
Now I've got this far the sky is the limit with Grafana, does anyone else have an cool network dashboards to show off here and inspire others?

https://preview.redd.it/jhtsthejy12e1.png?width=1539&format=png&auto=webp&s=6b1ec3e4e1c3b128f38c0bb2ec019bd16deaa35b

Long time lurker! Finally expanded the rack and configured 2.5 GB to the desk. Main purpose of the lab is for security range testing and multi region k8s with talos, pvcs via longhorn/democratic csi to take advantage of Truenas iscsi for a storage provider. It’s been a journey getting to know the full LGTM stack, but a joy to use.

Finally hid the mess of raspberry pi and orangepi5s for dual arch k8s cluster architecture. At the bottom i decided to add a razer egpu to add dual gpu capacity to the main system for LLM usage (3080ti + A2000) - surprisingly working very well over thunderbolt 4

outside of the hardware (and having to RMA a COU with team blue this year), continuously improving the gitops workflow (argocd) and hobby self hosting on the side.

I saw someone mention Incus in a random comment thread and decided to play around with it since I had a spare mini PC lying around.

I am FLOORED at the capabilities of this thing. How is no-one talking about it?

• Prebuilt Linux VM images for all of the same LXC images on linuxcontainers.org, standing up a Linux VM takes < 10 seconds
• Robust automation capabilities: great CLI, fully featured API, in house developed terraform provider
• Robust private networking capabilities with load balancers
• Node clustering
• ZFS + Ceph storage support
• Built-in metrics with a guide to prometheus integration + pre-made grafana dashboards

There are some downsides though:

• You need to install Ubuntu/Debian first, there is no all-in-one appliance like Proxmox
• The UI is more limited and you cannot do everything through it. And unfortunately in the fork to Incus, the maintainers did not take the UI with them and it is still maintained by Canonical. This causes some annoyance in having to use patches applied after the fact to get it working with Incus (though solved if you use Zabbly packages)
• Its a very Linux centric system. While you can get Windows up and running, its not as well documented as Proxmox in that regard: https://discussion.scottibyte.com/t/windows-11-incus-virtual-machine/362
• Obviously less community mindshare and documentation than Proxmox

But honestly if you are a moderately experienced Linux user, give it a try! As someone who uses AWS at work, this is by far the closest thing to having a cloud-like experience: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

https://preview.redd.it/3fvxr4yhg22e1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=d5c29c626b5913e4753c0639af6cdeee1961472f

Was a bit of a struggle, but finally finished the hardware side of my NAS Build. Still deciding on TrueNAS Core vs Scale, but just happy that it all came together and it POSTs. I'm new to NAS, I'm new to AMD, and I'm new to server boards, so feel free to comment on some improvements that could be made.

Case - Jonsbo N3

I've always liked, and have only ever built, in Mini ITX form factor. N3 Got good reviews, and it looks clean, so I went with it. Tried to make pathways for air flow as best I could.

Motherboard - ASRock Rack > Server Motherboard > X570D4I-2T

Searched around for a while to find a Mini ITX mobo which would support 8 drives and also offer 10Gbe. I will admit I don't have a use in mind for 10Gbe, but at least I have the option now. Liked the idea of the Oculink -> 4x SATA, so wanted to give it a go. Installation wise, the motherboard caused me to have to purchase a different cooler than I originally ordered, despite being an AM4 socket, the board is designed for LGA 115x coolers. End of the day it's a nice little unit with a few extra bells and whistles that I could try to utilize later on.

CPU - AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Benchmark

This is my first AMD build, so not super familiar with their processors. Just wanted something that had native graphics for some light transcoding if the need arose, and also had low TDP to extend life. Also wanted low TDP so I could downsize my cooler for noise.

CPU Cooler - NH-L9x65

Noctua has never done me wrong. Wanted to try and keep the noise down while still getting a bit of performance and not needing to cut holes in the case. I accidentally mounted the cooler in the orientation I didn't want, but I didn't want to re-paste it, and the power is so low I didn't think it would be an issue. If it does turn out to be an issue, I'll re-mount it.

RAM - 32GB OWC 32GB (2X16GB) DDR4 2666MHz PC4-21300 CL19 ECC Unbuffered SODIMM

Not super familiar with SODIMM RAM, read some reviews and reddit posts, OWC seemed like a good bet. Will add more later if needed.

SSD - 250GB Kingston NV2 250G M.2 2280 NVMe SSD | PCIe 4.0 Gen 4x4 | 3000 MB/s

I'm typically a Samsung guy, but ended up going w/ the Kingston because it was a good deal. I've never had an SSD fail on me, and Kingston has a decent reputation, so I thought this was an okay decision.

HDD - 4 x 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Hard Drive

Refurbs from eBay. Reviews were good. Haven't decided on RAID setup yet, but I wanted some flexibility, hence the 16TB. Spaced them apart in the chassis for air flow and weight balance until the remaining 4 slots get filled up.

Power Supply - SilverStone Technology SX500-G 500W SFX Fully Modular 80 Plus Gold PSU

This part actually took me the longest to spec out. I wanted to get as small a PSU as I could so I could stay in the efficient range with such a low power system. It seems like the trend for PSUs in general is to go balls out on watts. I was hoping to get a PSU that had PMBus support so I could play around with monitoring, but the only thing I could find was the Corsair HXi1000 which was way too big. Sure I could monitor power, but all I'd see is how poor of a decision I made with oversizing so big and killing efficiency.

Case Fans - NF-R8 redux-1200

Noctua again. Self explanatory. They are case fans and they fit. Set up for exhaust, pull in from the sides and the front of the case. The N3 came with a couple case fans with a brand I don't recognize, might change them out to Noctua's just for consistency. Also might add another case fan on the front grill near the PSU for a push/pull setup, I don't think it will be necessary though.

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Just built this 9U 10-incher for my evolving homelab and got the "ah, how cute" thumbs-up 👍🏼💙.

Watch this space as I add this little lot into it... (actually it's expanded somewhat so will be a bit of a squash and a squeeze, or more likely a bit underneath and on top 😆

https://preview.redd.it/o8ru36ggwy1e1.jpg?width=1500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=89c7070c5a5032f51be89e2703f1db48be61a234

I'm still setting things up and learning, but I can already tell I'm starting something awesome.

raspi 4 running octoprint
raspi 5 w/ 128gb nvme running Home assistant
netgear gs305
athlon II running truenas (not shown)

patch cables are a bigger pain in the ass to build then I expected.

Just found these out the back of our electronics storage with all the links and power supplies. Are these of any use or would it be too much to get them up and going. Also they have 1.1kw psus each, wtf are these poe? And what in the world would these be doing to need that much power each?