Dang, about five months since my last update. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy. I got my first real career job as a help desk tech at a school district. It’s been about three months in this job so far and I think it’s going fairly well. I’m probably 90% up to speed now; I know most of what I need to know and the rest is relatively minor stuff. I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome in the first couple weeks because I’ve never been a tech support person in a professional setting before. Getting a ticket and just going there and clicking around on someone’s computer until the problem is solved and getting paid for it was kind of surreal. I’m used to it now. I think I could probably communicate a bit more confidence to the people I’m helping; I don’t want to say I can fix something immediately for sure until I see the problem, but “I’ll see what I can do” isn’t the best thing to say to someone who really needs their computer to work normally so they can do their job. I might have to see if I can come up with another way to under-promise and over-deliver. Or maybe I should just say “I’ll come over and fix it.”
A lot of IT people, or maybe even most, start out on the help desk. It’s a good learning experience, it’s usually not too difficult as long as the customers are nice, and someone has to do the job. The pay isn’t horrible, but it’s not great either. Help desk staff are definitely the lowest-paid employees under the IT umbrella. I don’t want to stay on the help desk forever (no one does) and help desk has nothing to do with my degree, which is in networking. I’d be much more interested in a network engineer or network admin type job, but I need some experience and probably a certification first.
I’m getting more experience by the day, I have a degree (just an associate’s, but that’s better than nothing), but I don’t have any certs yet. The classes I took in college align roughly with the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) cert. This is the entry-level networking cert, but combined with the degree and a modicum of professional and personal experience, I think getting this cert will open up the next tier of IT jobs, and thus salaries, to me. I’m planning on studying up this summer and hopefully taking the test by the fall. Afterwards, I’ll have to see what jobs are out there. I’m hoping for a 40-50% salary increase with my next jump.
Somewhat longer-term, in the next year or so I’d like to get at least one more cert. The Red Hat Certified System Administrator (for Linux) or the Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate (for Windows), or maybe even both. I’m more interested in Linux personally, but the Windows cert might open more jobs in my area. Maybe I’d wait to move jobs until I can get either of those, but it never hurts to throw applications out there.
Longer-term than that, my career goal for right now is to make $100,000 a year by the time I’m 40-years-old. I have 13.5 years to go. I think it’s probably attainable with some luck and hard (ish) work.
To this end, I’ve started getting some more stuff going on my server to practice for these things. One thing that seems to be pretty important for IT jobs is experience in Active Directory. At the help desk, there isn’t much need for techs to delve into AD for anything other than a password reset. Setting up users, groups and OUs isn’t really under the purview of the help desk; it’s a systems administrator’s job to do all that. To help me get some experience, I got a Windows Server domain controller going and joined a couple virtual machines to it. I’m practicing things like deploying software, creating network shares, using Group Policy settings, and I’m getting a bit of experience with PowerShell. That last one is pretty important for a good sys admin. Windows doesn’t have any built-in bulk import tools or tools for regularly updating user groups, so it has to be done with PowerShell scripts. So far I’m mostly copy-pasting, but I’ll probably check out a Udemy class sometime to learn more.
So that’s basically it. Mostly job stuff these days. I’m going to try to post here once in a while to record what I’m doing. It might make me look like a great candidate for a new job some day.
Last I left off, I was going to put an extra manifold gasket on my Triumph. I did that, and it definitely fixed the sucking noise issue, but I still didn’t have any luck with the idle problem. More expensive and pressing car problems came up, so that’s where things are still sitting. I haven’t driven the car in a few weeks. Before the summer is over, I’m going to get new diaphragms for the bypass valves and a new ground wire for the distributor. I have a friend with a shop that will soon be able to do state inspections, so I’ll have him inspect it when he’s able, and maybe I’ll borrow his compression tester while I’m there to see how the engine is doing inside. But after that, I’m done spending money on the car for the season. I have other things that need my money and time, and an annoying car can be put on the back burner.
In tech news, my Ceton TV tuner died about a month ago. Just overnight, poof, it didn’t work. There was no obvious damage to the hardware or software, and I spent two hours with Verizon support diagnosing the problem. I initially ordered another used Ceton tuner from eBay, then decided to return it and get a new HDHomerun Prime for about the same price. The HDHomerun is a sort of re-run of a tuner that originally came out like 10 years ago, so it only has three tuners to the Ceton’s six, which is a disappointment. On the bright side, it actually works, has a warranty, and the company still exists. Plus, it works with whatever software, so I don’t need to run a whole Windows VM just for CetonProxy anymore. Which brings me to my next item:
I finally plugged my server into a Kill-a-Watt, and (probably unsurprisingly) it uses a ton of power at idle, which is most of the time. Right now it only runs a couple of fairly light VMs, so processor utilization is almost always in the low single digits, but it uses 200 watts of power. I explored a few options to get rid of the whole server, including hosting Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi, but it’s just impossible to beat the cost per terabyte on the big server. My six 3TB hard drives in a ZFS array give me 12TB of usable storage, and a failure tolerance of up to three disks (or two, I can’t remember now). Anyways, even getting just 6TB of total storage (two 6TB drives with RAID 1) would cost about $300 for new ones, and I’m still left with only half the storage space that I have now. And while that Raspberry Pi runs Jellyfin very nicely (thanks to the hardware accelerated video playback), NextPVR can’t take advantage of that same acceleration, so web browser viewing of live TV is impossible. So I’d have to purchase new hardware. Prices for crap office desktops are seemingly up from last year, which bites. Factoring in selling the server components, I’d probably come out about even switching to lower power consumer hardware. So rather than do all that stuff, I bought some different processors, a pair of Xeon E5-2450Ls, the 65 watt version of my current 95 watt 2450s. This should give some decent power savings I think, plus I’m going to take out the graphics card that I never could get working for transcoding. The processors should be in by early next week, so I’ll make an update when I get them installed.
Over the last couple days, I’ve acquired a whole bunch of TV shows with the HEVC codec. Not really a problem, but a lot of devices, like a Roku or Fire TV thing, can’t play it directly. That means it has to be transcoded. I use VAAPI in Jellyfin to trancode, but it doesn’t really work with HEVC. I found out the drivers that Debian provides are version 18.something, and I need at least version 20.1 for VAAPI to transcode HEVC video on an AMD graphics card. Those drivers are available in the testing repositories, but the dependency requirements are a little too complicated to make installing them worthwhile. I also put together a VM with Ubuntu 20.10, which has those drivers as standard, but it failed to boot up when I had the GPU passed though to it. The LTS version worked, but like Debian, the drivers are too old. Hopefully the newer drivers make it to Debian’s stable repos sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I’m fine for two reasons: First, I usually watch stuff through Kodi on a computer, which means I can direct play everything; second, my CPU can handle transcoding a couple streams at once, so it’s not a huge problem.
In other news, I ordered a new laptop today. I was eyeing a few during the black Friday week things a couple weeks ago, but decided against it. Today, I was at my parents’ house taking care of some school work. I had my Surface Book (first gen) hooked up to a 1080p monitor for some extra work space. I had Excel, Word, about a dozen Firefox tabs open while playing music on Spotify. It felt a little sluggish and not as responsive as it should be. In fact, when I scrolled though my RSS feeds, the music skipped when it was loading images. CPU usage was 80-95% when watching a 1080p Youtube video with the other stuff open in the background. This isn’t something I do often, and this semester is coming to an end, but I still have two more to go, and it is nice to take my work with me if I want to.
The touch screen on the Surface has also been broken since the summer. It sometimes experiences phantom touches along the bottom inch of the screen. That’s disappointing, but livable. I don’t really use the touchscreen. More unforgivable though, is the stylus situation. It won’t work along the edges of the screen, even after repeated calibrations, rendering it useless. I bought an iPad and Apple Pencil in September to pick up this slack, but I haven’t used it much. I haven’t felt the need to take notes in my classes. It feels like I kind of wasted the money on that, but eBay shows that I should be able to sell the stuff for almost as much as I paid for it if I want.
These issues got me looking for laptops this afternoon. I first turned to Slickdeals to see if there were any good deals out there today. First, I found an HP Pavilion that seemed like a good deal. It had a Ryzen 4700U CPU, 8GB RAM 128 GB NVMe SSD and a 1080p display for $450. Someone left a comment comparing it to a similar Dell. The Dell seemed like a better deal, with a better charging system, two M.2 slots, and 1x 8GB RAM stick (making the upgrade to 16GB easier). I found out from another Slickdeals post that there was 12% off Dell stuff with a sign up at a third-party site. I did that and was ready to order a 15″ Inspiron 5000 for about $500. I read and watched a few reviews, and decided the display and build quality would be too big a step down from the Surface, so I moved on.
I gave Best Buy a look and set my only criteria to an AMD processor and a 1080p display. Another HP popped up, but this time it was an Envy x360 (that means the screen flips all the way around). This one was equipped with a Ryzen 4500U, 256GB NVMe SSD and 8GB RAM for $629 new. I learned in the Best Buy questions and through some research that the RAM and SSD are able to be upgraded, and it’s compatible with an active stylus, like the Surface pen. The upgradability is a must-have for me, and the stylus compatibility is a huge plus. I waffled for a couple hours, but decided to buy an excellent condition open-box one for about $570. It should be in by December 22 they say, but of course I’m hoping it arrives earlier. The AMD processor bests more expensive Intels and has pretty good integrated graphics. I should be able to run some games at 1080p medium settings. It totally murders the i5 6300U in the Surface Book (11,286 passmark score vs. 3,269). The Verge called the 13″ version the best sub-$1000 laptop. I think I’ll probably keep the 256GB SSD for now, but I’ll definitely be upgrading to 16GB RAM as soon as possible. I’m really looking forward to it, and I’ll update when it comes in.
After too many weeks of struggling and waiting and struggling some more, I finally have a functional server running almost all the services I was planning on, including this blog. Last we left off, about a month ago, I was rounding up the parts I needed to assemble a white label server. So here’s what I got.
The Hardware
Intel S2400SC motherboard: This is a dual socket LGA1356 motherboard with eight RAM slots total and a decent selection of PCI express slots. I picked it because it has PCIe x16 and x8 slots that would be capable of holding a graphics card. I initially planned to use the built-in SAS mini ports to handle my hard drives, but this didn’t end up working out. I used the same Xeon E5-2450 CPUs I bought for the HP server. I also decided to add 16GB more memory just in case.
Dell PERC H310: I flashed this popular and cheap SAS card to IT mode which allows it to be used as an HBA so I can use ZFS instead of hardware RAID.
Corsair RM850x power supply: I spent a tad more than I wanted to really, but I wanted an 80 Plus Gold power supply giving at least 850 watts with semi-modular cables at the minimum. They were all priced similarly, but in and out of stock, probably due to the pandemic.
HP NC365T: A popular and cheap 4-port gigabit network card.
Antec P101 case: I picked this because it billed itself as a quiet case, it came with four fans and it said it should hold an E-ATX motherboard, meaning my CEB motherboard shouldn’t be a problem.
Turned out, the CEB motherboard was a tiny problem. Despite what the internet said would happen, only three screw holes lined up with the standoffs in the case. The standoffs that didn’t line up were touching the motherboard, so they had to be removed. The motherboard was definitely not mounted securely with only three screws, and it was a bit too flexible with no standoffs behind it. There were some foam standoffs on the motherboard, but only two and they weren’t in the right places.
I moved and super glued the foam standoffs into new positions, and then I 3D printed a few more for the rest of the board.
The orange things are the 3D printed standoffs.
With that done, it was no trouble the get the board in and screwed down. I had to use a zip tie in the upper right corner, but it gets the job done just fine. Building in this case was alright I guess. I’m not a fan of the immovable power supply shroud, and I don’t really care for the tool-less drive bays. On the other hand, there wasn’t much choice for an E-ATX case at this price.
Mmmmmm, that dual-socket goodness.
With the basic components assembled, it was time to install the hard drives and get going. Flashing the H310 to IT mode was a piece of cake and not worth talking about more. I bought two Seagate 1TB SAS drives to use in RAIDZ for my hypervisor. For some reason, these are incompatible with the H310. It knows the drives are connected, but doesn’t pass them though to the OS. I couldn’t get to them in Proxmox or a GParted live USB drive. It might be the fault of the hard drives, and not the H310, but I don’t have any other SAS equipped devices to test that theory out. So I bought another copy of an old 750GB SATA drive I had laying around. That worked just fine.
The Software
With the computer finally up and running, it was time to get some services installed. I got WordPress installed first, and it was running fine when it was being accessed via port forwarding on my router. I realized I was going to need a reverse proxy to handle access to multiple services on a single domain name. pfSense has HAProxy available in its repositories, so I decided to go with that. It’s a little convoluted to set up if you have no experience with reverse proxies, but after watching a couple videos and reading a few articles, I got it going. There was one problem though; no formatting (CSS and the like) was being applied to web pages accessed through the reverse proxy.
I found a few solutions on the web, but I couldn’t figure out how to implement them. They all involved changing the HAProxy configuration, which wasn’t a problem. It seems like most people run these reverse proxies on a separate virtual machine, not on pfSense, so their configuration was done in a text file rather than a web interface. Forum posters were being told to add a couple lines of code to the config files, but I wasn’t able to do that on pfSense. I decided to come back to that later.
After adjusting some HAProxy settings to try to get a reverse proxy going for my local services, I accidentally locked myself out of the pfSense web interface. No problem, I thought, I’ll just roll back to the most recent snapshot. So I did, and I was back in. That also wiped out the new SSL certificate I made earlier in the day. Again, not a problem I thought, I’ll just issue it again. Turns out I had already issued all the duplicate certificates I was allowed for the week, and I couldn’t get a new one until the next week (today).
In the Meantime
While I was waiting for the timer to run out on the certificate, I decided to press on with some other services. I set up a wiki to keep track of my network and installation notes for things. I decided to would be fun to try out an RSS reader, so I got Tiny Tiny RSS going.
A big part of setting up this server was for media serving with Plex, or something like it. I looked into the options, and it seems the three most popular, in descending order, are Plex, Emby and Jellyfin. I was originally planning on Plex, because it has the best name recognition and I knew it could do what I wanted. I tried out Emby before, and I was considering it this time. I hadn’t heard of Jellyfin before, but people seemed to like it. I axed Plex because while most commenters said it did a great job of serving up media, many useful functions are locked behind a not-inexpensive premium tier. The same is true of Emby, and Emby has an additional demerit with its licensing. Basically, Emby used to be open source, and the developers suddenly decided to go closed source. I don’t necessarily have a problem with closed-source software, but going from open to closed, and so abruptly is a problem to me. Jellyfin picked up the pieces and is based on the last open-source Emby code available. It’s not totally 100% quite yet, but it does everything I need.
From the start, this media server was supposed to take over the live TV services from the living room computer. Things were looking promising at first. Jellyfin supports live TV, and using NextPVR as a backend, so I was all set with my stupid Ceton tuner. I put the tuner in (with no drama like the HP server had) and set up PCI passthrough to a Windows VM for NPVR. I connected Jellyfin to that and things were working perfectly, with absolutely no fuss. I seemed too good to be true. And it was.
While the tuner worked perfectly (better than the bare-metal installation on the living room computer) with the Windows VM turned on, things went south when I shut the VM off. Shutting the VM down crashed the whole server. It was an abrupt shutdown, like yanking the power cord. That wouldn’t work. If it was a graceful shutdown, like clicking the button in Proxmox, maybe I could have dealt with it. Maybe not with the frequency with which Windows needs to reboot for updates.
The only solution to letting the new server handle the TV services was to get a new tuner. Pickin’s are pretty slim when it comes to cable card tuners these days. You can either have an old (used) HD Homerun, but they’re really expensive and only have three tuners, or you can have a stupid Ceton which has more tuners, but has very little software support (probably because the company doesn’t exist anymore). I picked a Ceton InfiniTV 6 Eth. This is an ethernet tuner similar in style to an HD Homerun, except worse. It’s gotten a tad less painful to go with a Ceton tuner in the past year because one enterprising person in the NPVR community has authored a piece of software called cetonproxy. This makes a Ceton tuner appear to be an HD Homerun device. That means I can either use NPVR 5.0 to handle tuning, or let Jellyfin do it directly. I’m not sure which way I’m going to go, but the tuner should be in tomorrow I hope, so I’ll post an update soon.
Today
I was finally able to issue a new SSL certificate today. I got HAProxy set up after reviewing a few tutorials and I figured out what I needed to do to make WordPress and my other services work though the reverse proxy. Some services need this code added to the “Backend pass thru” section of their backend configuration:
I don’t know why some need one or the other, but it works, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I’ll have to read about it some time.
WordPress would load up mostly fine with the the first option, but some sections of the site, like the live appearance customizer wouldn’t load, and Firefox would tell me passwords may not be secure. This said to me that there was mixed http and https content being served up. This happens because WordPress doesn’t know it’s behind a reverse proxy that is handling SSL. All I had to do was add this code to the top of my wp-config.php file:
/** Make sure WordPress understands it's behind an SSL terminator */
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true);
if ($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] == 'https')
$_SERVER['HTTPS']='on';
Next
Coming up this week, I need to get the TV tuner set up and get a torrent client going with Jackett, Radarr and Sonarr. The weather is going to be very hot and sometimes rainy after tomorrow, so it should be a great time to stay inside at the computer. I’m so happy to have the blog back after a month away. I really missed it.
As I said a couple weeks ago, I got my DL380 server going. At least for a little while anyways. I started testing some services on it like WordPress and Grocy (the latter of which will be a post of its own in a couple weeks). I was satisfied with the web services, so I decided to try getting my stupid Ceton TV tuner card set up in the server. I got Proxmox ready to do a PCI passthrough of the card to a Windows 10 VM and then installed the card. To do so, I had to detach the SAS cables from the RAID card. Unfortunately, the server won’t boot up correctly with the tuner card installed. So I took the tuner out, which means I detach and reattach the SAS cables again. I made sure to connect them to the same ports as before. But, to my annoyance, when I started the server, it couldn’t boot from the hard drives anymore. I don’t know if disconnecting the cables ruined my arrays, or maybe I mistakenly connected the cables to the wrong ports on the RAID card, or what. This enterprise server seems so touchy. I guess part of that might be because I’m not really using it as it was intended. Anyways, I’m going to cut my losses and use some of the parts to put together my own “white label” server.
I should have built my own to begin with, but I couldn’t find any parts that could beat the price to performance ratio of the DL380 on paper. I think part of the reason for the DL380’s excellent price/performance is the relatively unloved socket LGA 1356 for the processors. LGA 2011 is from about the same era, but was used in a lot of servers and desktops. The processors and motherboards, even many years later, are decent amount more expensive than similar LGA 1356 parts. At the beginning of this, I was unaware of the relative rarity of 1356 parts.
I found a dual-socket Intel motherboard that should do the trick. I’m teaming that with a Dell H310 RAID card that I’ll be flashing for use in IT mode so I can use ZFS and an HP NC365T NIC. This motherboard has enough slots to accept my TV tuner card, so hopefully it’ll boot with it installed. There’s also a PCIe x16 slot, so if I’m really lucky I might be able to put my RX 480 GPU in there too. The motherboard is a CEB size, which the internet tells me is between a regular ATX and E-ATX in size, and uses the same IO shield size and screw holes as ATX. I picked an Antec P101 case to hold everything. It says it should hold an E-ATX board and eight 3.5″ hard drives. Plus, it has a 5.25″ drive space on the outside, so I can move my Blu-Ray drive from my desktop over there and set up an automatic ripper.
Right now the only part I don’t have on order is a power supply. I want something that’s at least 750 watts, and I’d probably go up to 1000 watts. I definitely want something 80+ Gold efficiency at the least, and I have to have two CPU power connectors for the dual socket board. This narrows down my selection, but not severely so. Both EVGA power supplies I have in my house right now meet those criteria. Unfortunately, it appears coronavirus has totally wrecked the supply of power supplies. Hardly anything is available, let alone decent power supplies, and what is available is two to three times more expensive than usual. I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for reasonably priced used ones, but I may have to wait a while before I get this server going. I’ll update when I get it built.
Long story short, I couldn’t figure out how to get the DL380e going again. I decided it was best to just get another because it was so cheap. The new one came in over the weekend and other than some damage to the hard drive cage, it’s working perfectly. I switched the damaged cage out for the good one on the broken server. Set up was fairly easy. I used the HP SmartArray tool to set up two arrays; one single SATA drive for the hypervisor, then six 3TB SAS drives in RAID 6 for my VMs. That gives me 12TB of storage. I got some virtual machines running today, and they’re working great.
One thing I’m not too thrilled about is the power usage. With a couple VMs going iLO reports power usage at around 165 watts. I was hoping for more like 100 or 120 watts. It’s hard to justify that kind of power usage. On the other hand, it’s hard to beat the performance per dollar of a used server. The server itself, processors and memory were around $250, for a machine with 16 cores, 32 threads and 46 GB of memory. I could get something that uses less power, but it would cost more for less performance. My ideal machine would probably be a 16-core Threadripper, but processor and motherboard separately cost more than my whole server. Maybe I can get some used stuff in a few years when it’s time to retire the HP server.
I’ve acquired a everything I need to start my set up and I’ve been playing with it for about a week now.
The HP server is great so far, except for the noise. I know enterprise servers are probably designed with no thought given to noise levels, but Jesus, this thing is ridiculous. During the entire minute-plus POST process, the six fans run at their maximum speed of something like 12,000 rpm. It’s loud. If I was near a rack full of them all day, I’d definitely be wearing some ear protection. Once the fans settle down to 35-40% when the thing is idling, they’re bearable, but still too loud to have on an open shelf in the office. I’ve decided to make a redneck “rack” to suspend the server and the switch vertically in the office closet. I’ll be making it this week, so I’ll be sure to post some pictures. In other news, the server turned out to take 3.5″ drives, not 2.5″, which really pleases me. I found some used 3TB HGST SAS drives and got six of them, plus some drive trays. I’ll be doing a RAID 6 array, so I should have 12TB of total storage while being able to recover from two drives failing simultaneously.
I got a Cisco 3560G 48-port switch to connect everything. I decided I had to update it, and killed it somehow. The flash memory appears to be wrecked. I used the web admin page to try to update it, and that image might have been too large for the flash memory. I tried to format the memory and install a new OS over the serial connection, but I had no success. So I bought another switch. The same model, but this one has already been updated to the latest supported version of IOS and it has a one year warranty. I won’t even be thinking about updating this one.
The SFF HP desktop as a router is coming along just fine. I dug up an old hard drive from a MacBook Pro I flipped a few years ago to use as the storage for that. At 250GB, it should be more than plenty. The system came with only 4GB of RAM, so I ordered another 4GB stick that should be in this week. I could probably get by on 4GB, but why not double it for like $12? I installed an HP NC365T NIC to give that computer a total of five gigabit ethernet ports. I’ll be using the built in port for the Proxmox admin console, then three of the four ports on the HP card for pfSense and Pi-Hole. I also need to get a VPN running, and I’d like to use WireGuard, which I may be able to do right in pfSense. If not, I’ll get a third VM going on this router box to handle VPN duties and use up the last ethernet port.
I’ll be running some wires to get wired internet and cable TV from the basement to the second-floor office. It shouldn’t be too difficult, but I’ve never run wires on the outside of a house before. Theoretically, all I need to do is add a couple holes to the area where the electric service and cable/fiber connections enter the house from the outside, put the wires through there and then drill a couple holes in a wall of the office. I’m hoping to not have to terminate my own ethernet cables because it’s a real pain. Monoprice has some outdoor rated cables with RJ45 connectors already attached for a great price, so I’m going to try to drill a hole big enough to let the connector through. The coax cable for the TV signal is no problem though, I’ve used compression-fit connectors on those a million times.
I’ll be ordering all my cables early in the week, so hopefully I can get drilling on the weekend.
A little while ago, I stumbled upon the r/homelab subreddit. There, users gather to discuss their home network setups, often used for experimentation like a laboratory. I finally have enough money to get started on a modest set up, so I ordered some pieces this week to get started.
I’m currently taking classes to get a degree in computer networking. One class is an introduction to computing class that has us using virtual machines for something. Another is a networking class that should prepare me for the Cisco CCENT certification exam. I’ve become a lot more interested in the subjects thanks to the classes. At the same time, my home network needs have changed and I could use some more power and storage.
Enter the homelab. Following some guidance from the r/homelab wiki, I decided on a basic set up. For hardware, I decided to get an HP DL380e Gen8 server, a Cisco Catalyst 3560G 48-port switch, and an HP ProDesk desktop. The plan is to use a hypervisor (probably Proxmox) on the ProDesk so it can act as a pfSense router, Pi-Hole ad blocker, VPN (hopefully with WireGuard), and reverse proxy (probably Caddy) all at the same time. This router will be connected to the Cisco switch, where I may set up some virtual LANs. I’ll have to see how everything works together. I got the DL380e as a barebones thing, so the specs were up to me. I decided to go with dual Xeon E5-2450 processors, and I’ll be getting 48 GB of RAM (the maximum is 384 GB). These are both pretty cheap options. I think I found a good deal on some 1TB 2.5″ SAS hard drives, so I will probably start with six of them in a RAID 6 configuration and add more as needed. I’m not totally certain about this though. The server will be home to a few virtual machines. I’ll be moving my TV tuner card there, so there will be at least one Windows 10 VM. I’m also going to be running my normal website from there, and I’ll probably run an OctoPrint setup so I can control my 3D printer, so I’ll need at least two Linux VMs for that. I’ll probably also throw in one for Arch Linux, just because I like to tinker with it. Beyond that, I’m not sure what else I’m going to do with it yet. Maybe host some game servers for Minecraft or something or get a media library going. I’d really, really love to put my spare RX 480 graphics card in it and stream some games. This is totally possible, but I need a very specific PCI riser card to fit a double slot graphics card, plus a power wire adapter and maybe an extra power supply. We’ll see how it goes and maybe I’ll try to track down the special riser in the future.
There’s no real purpose to doing this other than I want to. The experience with Cisco networking and virtual machines might help me get a job some time in the future. It’s not super expensive at least, and it’ll be fun to have a ton of computer power at my disposal.
