Oh yeah, I can probably power up my old PowerEdge R530 now that the portable AC is offline.

Would likely be close to the limits of the circuit, but I need to shuffle some data around before my storage server implodes.

I know that’s still an absurd amount of free space, but I’m not super comfortable with it, percentage-wise.

@maddy talking about rack mount servers, have you ever used POWER (powerpc) servers before? i heard they exist.

@fries Closest I ever got was my old PowerMac G5, which sadly died in one of my last moves. :(

I wanna play with PowerPC stuff again, but room is at a premium in our apartment.

@fries @maddy I have one of those!

@maddy wow we're almost space left twinsies.

Apparently, between the four computers and the network equipment I have running through the UPS, I’m only using ~450W right now. Lots of room to plug in the Dell server.

Got connected to the iDRAC before powering on. Gosh I’ve missed extensive lights-out management.

Why the hell did I throw an SN770 1TB NVMe SSD in this thing when it wasn’t likely going to be used for more than TrueNAS?????

I’m yoinking that after I move the VM to the SATA SSD

So this server has 5x8TB SATA HDDs that I shucked from desktop size WD external drives, years ago. They’re in raidz1 configuration, ~29TiB of usable capacity.

Ranging from 35,000 to over 40,000 hours of power-on time with good SMART status and no errors, they’re still kickin’!

The initial time estimate for this batch was way off. It’s now saying ~29 minutes for the remaining 729GB

Thank goodness for 10Gbit.

@maddy i wish i even had 2.5Gbit lol

too cheap to buy a 2.5Gbit router so everything is limited to 1Gbit despite us having a 1.5Gbit internet connection lol

@niko It’s so dumb that MGig stuff is generally more expensive than 10Gbit gear, and that’s a big reason why I’ve never bothered with it.

@maddy wait what is it actually i have never noticed

@niko Last few times I’ve looked, yeah.
I also don’t bother with RJ45 10Gbit because of heat and length limits which might help a bit. Old SFP+ enterprise gear is generally pretty damn cheap second-hand.

You can get a PCIe 3.0 10Gbit SFP+ NIC for like $30 CAD, SFP modules are generally ~$20CAD each if they’re not included with what you buy, the cabling is relatively cheap, and DAC cables are a cost-effective option for shorter runs.

If you plan to keep most of your equipment on Gigabit, you can likely find a cheap managed enterprise switch with a couple of SFP+ ports as well! I use a Dell N3024 as a distribution switch for all my Gigabit gear.

@niko @maddy damn 1.5 gigabit 🥺. lucky,, I wish I lived in an urban area.

@fries @maddy it's stupid expensive though $70 CAD + $8 in tax is a lot more than it's actually worth lol

Main server is simultaneously serving five Plex streams from the same storage pool that I’m copying these disc dumps from, and not a single stream is buffering.

@maddy huh damn that's shockingly cheap

most devices would be forced back to gigabit anyways, there's only three (maybe four) machines in the entire place that could even accept a PCIe card for 10Gbit i believe, everything else is 1Gbit lol

@niko Right?
The most expensive gear I have in the chain is a Mikrotik 8-port SFP+ managed switch I got back at the start of COVID for like $300. I’m sure I could do better value-wise these days, but I still haven’t filled all those ports.

@maddy ... dammit now i want to upgrade our place to 10Gbit networking

the longest run if we rearrange the entire place would be 2 meters if that although then it might be a good idea to move the router to the other side of the apartment that way it's centrally located and it stops dropping out in the kitchen

but still even a few hundred dollars is too much for us anyways lol

@niko That’s fair. It’ll likely all get even cheaper and more accessible as time goes on considering that 40Gbit and 100Gbit gear is approaching the state 10Gbit was when I started looking into it back in 2020.

@maddy holy crap i just glanced at mikrotik's homepage and a router that can switch at data rates up to 3.325Tbps is only $1600 now what the fuck

@niko Their stuff is generally really good value, yeah!

@niko @maddy note that those old 10G PCIe NICs use a lot of power even when not doing anything (I have a Mellanox CX312C and an Intel X520-DA2, the Intel card uses ~5W at idle (without anything even plugged in), the Mellanox card uses ~4W (also the Mellanox card has other unrelated issues, specifically sometimes (and on some computers) it falls back to 2.5GT/s (PCIe 1.0 speed) or fails to enumerate at all (or does enumerate and then the driver fails to load), and it consistently makes newer versions of mstflint segfault, the Intel card has been much more reliable))

@noisytoot @niko Weird. Never had issues like that with mine, and I’m also using a ConnectX-3.

As for power usage, that was never more of a concern than device cost or heat output for me.

@maddy @niko Maybe mine is just faulty. Any version of mstflint newer than 4.23.0 consistently segfaults for me (I tested on both x86_64 and ppc64le).

Strangely it seems to be more reliable on POWER than on x86, which is odd because POWER is generally much stricter about badly behaved PCIe devices (for example it will immediately drop devices that attempt bad DMA accesses, whereas x86 will just ignore them), and it also supports a full 64-bit address space for DMA unlike x86 (which is limited to 40 bits), which can cause issues with certain non-compliant PCIe implementations (such as in AMD GPUs) that assume x86's DMA addressing limitations.

Got 5TB worth of UHD and regular Blu-ray disc dumps copied over last night, and it looks like there’s another 1.22TB of Blu-ray dumps to go!

Got a bunch of stuff shuffled around, consolidated, and yeeted some redundant copies of stuff I didn’t need.

I can’t really cleanup much more without starting to compress my remux movie/tv series rips.

The media dataset for my Plex server is at ~53TB used.