<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Oct 9, 2019, at 9:25 PM, Richard Thornton <<a href="mailto:thornton.richard@gmail.com" class="">thornton.richard@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">
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<div style="direction: ltr;" class="">Seems like you got good machine! Is it noisy?</div></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>It’s in the garage, so not a huge deal, but it’s actually really quiet once the OS is loaded. It is a 2U box, so it doesn’t have those really tiny/high-pitched whiney fans that 1U boxes have. I think if I move it to the other side of the room from my little workshop (which is where the server and firewall live) it will be largely inaudible.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Dealing with a chicken and egg situation on a drive firmware update - need windows to run the update, but the updater won’t run if anything in the RAID array is marked “degraded”. Oh Dell...</div><div><br class=""></div>C</div><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="">
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<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="dir="ltr"" class=""><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" class=""><b class="">From:</b> talk <<a href="mailto:talk-bounces@lists.nycbug.org" class="">talk-bounces@lists.nycbug.org</a>> on behalf of Charles Sprickman <<a href="mailto:spork@bway.net" class="">spork@bway.net</a>><br class="">
<b class="">Sent:</b> Wednesday, October 9, 2019 21:01<br class="">
<b class="">To:</b> talk<br class="">
<b class="">Subject:</b> [talk] When is hardware too old?
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Hi all,<br class="">
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Some home lab advice…? So I’ve been gifted an old Dell R-720. It’s from 2012 or so, pretty old.<br class="">
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It has:<br class="">
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2 CPUs - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2609 0 @ 2.40GHz, 4 cores (8 w/hyperthreading)<br class="">
48 GB RAM - DDR3 DIMM 1066MHz (6 x 8GB)<br class="">
PERC 710 mini RAID controller w/512MB RAM and battery backup<br class="">
4 Broadcom 1Gb/s NICs<br class="">
600 GB Seagate 15K 3.5” drive x 5 (2 are showing errors, may or may not be bad)<br class="">
iDRAC 7 (no enterprise license)<br class="">
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It all seems to be in working order, other than two possibly bad drives.<br class="">
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So… I have three options:<br class="">
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- recycle<br class="">
- give away<br class="">
- use for some VMs<br class="">
- sell (maybe $300 if I’m lucky and go local w/craigslist?)<br class="">
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Now every now and then I find a need to spin up some weird linux distro or some other testing that I don’t really want to run in vmware on my desktop or laptop because it’s going to be around for a few weeks/months. My home “server” is an older HP and I try
not to use it for experiments, plus it only has 16GB of RAM.<br class="">
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I can tell this was originally used for a bunch of virtual machines, and if it can handle 6 instances of Windows Server 2012, then a few *BSD and Linux installs are going to do OK. The “iDRAC” is on a trial enterprise license and it’s pretty nice - remote BIOS
updates, java-less & flash-less remote KVM, there’s an SD slot to boot off of, it’s all pretty nice, even “luxurious” for home use. I’d run the freebie vmware hypervisor just so I could move VMs between this box and my desktop w/o much fuss.<br class="">
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What I’d spend money on:<br class="">
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- bootleg iDRAC enterprise key ($30 on ebay)<br class="">
- 2 or more large/cheap SSDs for VMs (I’d keep two of the existing drives for the OS - about $130 x2)<br class="">
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This is all much cheaper than introducing a new server.<br class="">
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Thoughts?<br class="">
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Thanks,<br class="">
<br class="">
Charles<br class="">
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