New Server Chassis and things..

The new server chassis arrived:

Seems nice enough. I noted that the seller jacked the price up an extra $160 after I purchased. 

No instructions. Kind of annoying. The 2U power supply I ordered didn't seem to fit - it's not a size I'm familiar with, so it's hard to know if the power supply was not quite right or the case design. Either way, I eventually made something mount with a random collection of brackets. 

I spent a couple of hours, whilst in a training course, trying to get it fired up - my HBA (disk controller) not seeing the disks. I eventually realised that the sockets on the backplane allowed the cables to be connected in reverse (I've heard of such stories, but I've never experienced that before). Hmm.. ID-10-T error or sorts. Flipped the cables, off we went. 

I've got a controller in there that the backplanes connect to that then carries on to the HBA. It needs a PCI-E x8 socket of which I lack any spares to suit, nor do I lack any space to fit it across the back I/O panel with an external riser, so I've managed to retro fit a riser card horizontally above the fans for all of the drive cabling to connect to. A little dodgy, but it seems to work. 

Once the backplane cabling was correct, all started behaving as expected. Now it's up and running, and the external disk shelf has been shut down, resulting a good reduction in power consumption and noise. 

Tax return in hand, I've ordered a couple of extra disks to get my storage needs under control for a while.

- A secondhand 6TB SAS disk for the NVR recording - it's hardly the end of the world when it does die given it's not for long term storage, but it is going to be thrashed with non-stop writes so a disk designed for running non-stop seems appropriate. 

- Another new regular 8TB SATA disk. My media disks are filling up, and I need to balance them out further. This should buy me a few more months. 

FWIW - I don't run my media in RAID arrays any more. I used to, but no longer. Simply because I currently don't need to. From a performance perspective, there's no need. It'd just wind up being an awful lot of disks having to spin when one disk could do the job. I used to have 25 disk arrays doing that. At nearly 10w per disk for an array that has something either reading or writing to it nearly 24 hours a day - that hurt. Especially when I had 3 arrays.

From a resilience perspective - I have a 48 tape LTO5 library running that backs up my data. Those tapes will do around 1.5TB uncompressed, and I'll keep using them until I no longer have enough operational tapes to do the job. Then I'll probably buy more simply because it's cheaper per terabyte than spinning disks.  It's ludicrous to have this, but I do, so I'll make the most of it. 

Bathurst is approaching fast - I've missed out the past 2 years due to the pandemic, so I'm pretty keen to get there this year. 

I realised that I'm no longer the owner of a functional laptop. The one I used to use has a dead keyboard - and being a rare high end model, the replacement board is worth more than the whole laptop. 

I do have a work laptop that I'll need to take, but it's encumbered with "work" things that don't make it appropriate for personal use. 

Space is a premium. It always has been. This year I suspect more so as we'll be looking to avoid heading into town for supplies - trying to limit our exposure to others as much as possible, so less will be more. 

I decided to buy a used Microsoft Surface Pro 4 - a device to be honest that I hate. I always have. But the form factor in this case is good - small, light, functional enough, and it is possible (however ironically) to run Linux on it. I'm waiting to get it to see how it goes. It was cheap enough and if I don't like it, I can sell it once I'm finished with it. I've grabbed a few accessories that I know I'll need. 

The model I've opted for has an i5 processor with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. That's about my baseline for power. Especially once I carve the disk in half. 

I haven't had a lot of time for radio of late. I've got a pile of certification work that I need to get on top of around a few other things that are consuming a lot of my time. I do tune to 7.214MHz when I hear that someone is giving EasyPAL a crack, but beyond that, I'm barely even listening at the moment.