Sr Vr. The sleeper server

[AlienALX]

Thanks man. I watched a long tutorial video on NextCloud last night so I am now in with a rough idea of what I need to do. Will obviously follow it through the steps once I am built.

 

I kinda have OCD. In fact no, I won't make light of a horrible affliction. I *do* have OCD. As such I really wanted to fill all of the drive planes. So I did. I found some 180GB Intel 1500 series SSDs on Ebay and bought three for £45.

 

 

They should look like that. I know that this looks pretty crazy. In a way it is. However, I did mention that the £10 for the IO panel for the USB front was the penultimate spend. Well it isn't now. Those drives are. I need to get them all situated and populated, then work out how to span the volumes into chunks. Once that is done I will know how big the "backup backup" drive needs to be. Will get an Ironwolf. I've also been reading on how you launch scripts that do a weekly backup of all of my spanned volumes onto a single drive that does bugger all else all week.

 

Nice thing is that with Linux you can still keep adding to the span. I think it would be bonkers to put 12 drives in a span and pray that none die, so maybe 3-4 volumes would be better. Which is cool, because that way I can choose what my friends get access to. I can also assign them their own space and we can share movies and music that way

[zogthegreat]

Super work! Have you done any system testing inside the case yet? What kind of temperatures are you getting?

[AlienALX]

On 1/28/2022 at 3:06 PM, zogthegreat said:

Super work! Have you done any system testing inside the case yet? What kind of temperatures are you getting?

 

Oh crap it seems I missed a update post. Apologies, this should be that here -

 

OK. Apologies for the radio silence, it's been a bit of a crap week.

 

I got home and lugged everything I needed up the stairs. Sucked tbh. Started building it that night, and immediately noticed an issue. Whilst everything fits how I planned it to I did not realise the USB 3.0 header would be covered so tightly. I thought it was up the side of the board like 99% of the boards I have used in the past so didn't pay it much thought. That was a mistake. It doesn't fit no way no how. There may be a way around this, and I will try, but as of now no front USB.

 

I also realised very quickly that I should not have stopped after shortening the 24 and 8 pin. Space is a premium in this old chassis, so that bit me.

 

 

That was after an over two hour fight with the PSU. Let me cover that also. Firstly the mesh grille was rubbing the fan. So I had to use the old frame as a spacer. Not a deal breaker. However, I soon realised the connector in the PSU for the fan made no sense. I figured it out eventually, and got a lovely electric shock for the convenience ffs. I also found out that yes it's a 140mm fan but Enermax used 120 mount holes. Meaning I had to drill the fan and mess around with it for ages. UGH. Then I found out it's just a hair too thick so had to mod that too ffs. I got that done, and then the next day I shortened the PCIE power cable.

 

 

It's not finished (needs final cable ties etc) but lesson learned from the past don't tie everything down until you are sure it all works.

 

I already had Ubuntu installed but it was giving some AMD error at launch. I got around that by connecting it to the network and installing a couple of updates via terminal. The rest? has been slow going, but that is what you get when you are in an alien OS that you have never really dug deeply into before.

 

It took me the best part of a day just to install the video driver. I downloaded them from Nvidia but they came packaged as a .run file. I then became blinkered by this, and it cost me a few hours. Firstly when I tried to launch it it was telling me I needed to be logged in as root. However, when I did that I could not see the DIR structure. I then found a way to make myself root, and launched it. Then it told me it was unhappy about something else. Many hours had passed now and I was peed off with it so I started having a look around Ubuntu and happened across the software update part that also has "other devices" listed. Sure enough, there it was.

 

However, I then noticed another problem. See if you can spot it.

 

 

I will come back to that shortly. The next step was figuring out how the heck you combine volumes in Ubuntu. Back to school I went. Found out that it was all done by terminal unless you used a GUI. Cool, so I set about finding one. I eventually found the respository for KDE partition manager. However, when I watched a guide on the internet it was making no sense and didn't even look like the one I was using. I then looked at the help guide, but again the GUI was completely different.

 

It seems it has been updated (the GUI/app) but the documentation hasn't. Eventually after a few hours I figured it out. And created my spanned volumes.

 

 

Which all worked beautifully. However, you will note something is missing. Look closer...

 

 

Yup, no Revodrive X3. Now if you cast your mind back to the first picture of Ubuntu you can see it is there. However, it is there in four parts. That is how the drive works. Four 250gb Sandforce SATA SSDs all hiding behind a Marvell controller. Now when I first saw this I figured "Hmm, no RAID but I can span the volumes to make the drive back up into one piece". Only you can't. It only allows you access to the first 250gb. The rest? can not be partitioned or formatted in any shape or form. So basically? that will have to come out. There was a hacked together user driver created in 2011, but I can't find it.

 

The good news is that you can see, we have the rest of the SSDs all picking up, detected and spanned into volumes.

So basically the rig is now ready to be set up for Nextcloud. That is literally the final step, now that I have all of the hardware up and running how it should be.

 

Read on for the latest update........

[AlienALX]

OK. So since that missed post I have -

 

1. Installed all of the LAMP components. So Apache, PHP etc. These have all been installed and tested and are working.

2. Installed Nextcloud.

3. Soon realised that I had a dynamic IP that changes regularly so contacted my friend who is an expert.

4. Am in the process of creating some things he said I needed and configuring the router. I will need something that can pick up the change in IP.

 

From point 3 on I was literally guessing. I am by no means an expert at networking and never was. I have limited experience of it from up to 2001 and then nothing since then.

 

However, my luck just isn't in at the moment. Saturday was a good day and I got lots done including system monitors and other stuff installed, however it seems this case just does not want to be closed. I cable tied the wires down and tidied it up really nice. Tested it, it was great. Tipped it up to pick it up and when I rebooted it something was rubbing on the fan on the lid. So I took the lid back off again....

 

I am having a TV delivered today (first new one in 9 years hurrah) and I figured I would have another crack at putting the lid back on last night. So I did even more cable tidying etc, and then refitted the lid. Booted it up and 10 minutes later it shut itself down. Booted it again, insta shut down. I figured it was a bad pin in the 24 pin so I took the lid off for about the thousandth time and extended a couple of the tight wires slightly. This seemed to work and it booted again. 10 mins later, even with the lid off it shut down again. Only this time? the lid was off. As soon as I moved over the lid I could literally feel the heat radiating out of the case. Uh oh.....

 

Turns out that I had disconnected the pump power wire for the AIO when tidying. As such it was literally boiling the anti freeze lmao. Reconnected that, put a cable tie around it so it won't get pulled out again and now the rig is working great again.

 

Apart from another problem I now have. I created my LVMs and formatted them EXT4. This was what was advised in the instructions I read. However, last night I was grabbing a torrent and the Transmission app crashed. When I dug into why I figured I had no files on the drive I sent it to. And then I noticed this.

 

 

And when I checked all of the others? sure enough they all look like that and only the boot drive is R/W-able. So that will need sorting at some point today when the TV has been delivered and installed.

[AlienALX]

Doh. Turns out they need to actually be formatted. Not sure why they could not have put that in the KDE part manager. Oh well, Disks did the job and I now have full access to all of the spanned volumes.

[AlienALX]

Upgrade time. I ended up removing the TR. It was massive overkill and the rad got in the way of the USB 3.0 socket etc.

 

I ended up fitting a 3470 with 8gb RAM. It was an old Dell board. It has served me for two and a half years, so it has done well. Unfortunately a couple of weeks ago I managed to procure a copy of Avatar 2 in true 4k and yeah, it wasn't happy.

 

As such when I had a 11400F and 32gb RAM left over I knew it was time to upgrade. I ordered a B560 board, and will be using a mining riser going into this.

 

 

No choice sadly. The CPU does not have an IGPU, and I can not use up one of the full sized slots on a GPU as I have two LSI SAS cards wanting X4 lanes each. Hence this to connect the GPU to a X1 slot.

 

 

Got most of it done today. I bought a Super Flower 850w PSU a while ago used for £30, but never used it. So I replaced the Enermax with it, given the Enermax is 1600w and the cables are very thick (meaning it was a sod to get it all stuffed in).

 

 

It is nice to have an IO shield, as the Dell board I was using had none. Am off on vacation at the weekend for a week. The GPU is at my mother's so I will collect that when I return, and at the same time buy 12 1tb SSDs. SATA ones. I will then fill every tray with one.

[AlienALX]

It worked.

 

 

 

No more hitching with a full blown 4k BR rip.

 

 

Coming in about two weeks - 12 SSDs. Currently running on the two 3tb 3.5.