Ucav's homelab blog

ucav117 · August 9, 2021, 6:59pm

No iDrac. 8GB of memory.

You can see the bulge in the battery for the SAS controller

ucav117 · August 9, 2021, 7:35pm

I think I am going to get a few used 2TB drives and some more RAM off of ebay. Depending on Blue Iris performance I might have to get an old Nvidia card to offload HW Encoding but I am pretty excited to get this thing going. Seems like a lot of the accessories are pretty cheap on ebay so I guess that is the nice thing about old hardware lol.

HaaStyleCat · August 9, 2021, 7:59pm

Yeah I’d ditch the battery.

Should be able to boot her up. I will attempt to get some screen shots to help soon. Should have a way to get a hardware inventory… that might help us with what sas interface you have… should be a 410 or 700 something… you have a backplane for hotswap so thats nice. Just need the trays. Can find good deals on those.

I’ll reference back to my post.
[[Build Log] Home lab in a box (first time trying)-x470d4u Proxmox/ Tech Blog - #42 by HaaStyleCat]

Yes, its a interesting socket and set up. It is the last gen with ddr3 ram I believe. Processors are cheap side too. I have a few extra as well… I think a 4 and a 8 core but Id have to check. probably in the thread.

ucav117 · August 9, 2021, 8:26pm

IF you have any spare memory I will buy it off you. Would rather spend my money with you than random ebay people.

HaaStyleCat · August 9, 2021, 8:29pm

That sadly I do not have lol… I fully populated mine 192 gb of 1333 ecc ram… lol

And I’m still justifying that lol.

redocbew · August 9, 2021, 8:39pm

ZFS is the justification for all memory hoarding.

I wish I could put more than 64GB in my NAS now that I’m messing with it again, but once I get the VM and the jails I have running now off it that’ll help free up some more space.

Jolly · August 10, 2021, 7:10pm

Look at this for rfid fun.

ucav117 · August 10, 2021, 7:27pm

Proxmox is very cool. I want to mess around with one

ucav117 · September 24, 2021, 5:51am

So I plugged my T320 in after having it for several months now. One of the power supplies is dead and one of the hard drives seems like it might be on it’s way out. Need to get a VGA cable so I can actually see what is happening (realized that everything I own is HDMI or DP lol). I am considering something like this for the setup:

4x SSD’s (~120gb enterprise drives for cache and OS storage)

8x 3TB HDD’s

Proxmox running:
TruNAS
Home Assistant
Windows VM/Blue Iris
Gitlab
Plex?

Blue Iris will most likely be the most demanding of all the things listed here and there is a good chance I might run it bare metal on an old laptop instead of virtualizing it if the performance is bad.

HaaStyleCat · September 24, 2021, 6:27pm

Nice, RAID z2 I assume on the 8 x 3tb drives via TruNAS?

So 18tb total with a two disk failure?

ThatGuyB · September 24, 2021, 6:41pm

You need a minimum of 4 drives for RAID-z2. So it’s most likely RAID-z(1) (i.e. RAID 5)

HaaStyleCat · September 24, 2021, 6:48pm

I though he said 8 three TB drives for the spinners… not sure how he would utilize the sides best as a cache.

Gnuuser · September 24, 2021, 6:48pm

unless its an installed security system!
individually recording a voice alone is not admissible in court without the consent of all people involved.
video and audio recording from a security is a totally different animal.
there is no legal reason to refuse an officers request for footage from a security system.
however they cannot delete the footage or corrupt the evidence.

my system covers the mini-mart across from my house and i gladly provide copies of any footage they request.
I am a well known supporter of our local and state officers and and they know me very well also.

ThatGuyB · September 24, 2021, 7:17pm

Oh. He does have 8x 3TB, I read that horribly wrong. Yeah, either stripped mirrors or RAID-z2. But for RAID-z2 default settings, the best configurations to not get performance penalties is 4, 6 and 10 drives. You can change stuff though and he does have cache. Personally I’d split the 4 SSDs into 2 RAID mirrors, 1 for L2ARC and 1 for ZIL.

ucav117 · September 24, 2021, 9:45pm

Please tell me more.

ThatGuyB · September 25, 2021, 2:32pm

ZFS storage server advice

ZFS has a default cluster size of 128KiB. You divide this by the number of drives in your vdev (not including parity) and you arrive at the amount of data written to each disk. Keep in mind that sectors on disks of this size are 4KiB, so you want your result to be a multiple of 4KiB or else you’ll have performance degradation.

Here are a few examples:
3-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 2 = 64KiB = good
4-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 3 = ~43KiB = BAD!
5-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 4 = 32KiB = good
9-disk RAID-Z = 128KiB / 8 = 16KiB = good
4-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 2 = 64KiB = good
5-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 3 = ~43KiB = BAD!
6-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 4 = 32KiB = good
10-disk RAID-Z2 = 128KiB / 8 = 16KiB = good
All this said, your configuration has introduced unfortunate constraints. Additionally, you did mention that performance isn’t extremely important

and some more discussions here ZFS RAID Config for old disks

SgtAwesomesauce · September 25, 2021, 9:46pm

It’s worth mentioning that striped mirrors will always be faster than RAIDZ.

They’re working on implementing a faster variant of RAIDZ, but I’m not sure if that’s been released yet.

ucav117 · September 26, 2021, 4:26am

So I can’t seem to get a video signal out of this Dell T320. I am using a VGA-to-HDMI adapter and I don’t really have a way to verify if that is the failure point or the server. iDRAC is working but I don’t have the login so kinda out of luck there.

Any suggestions? I am ordering a different cable but tbh I just need ssh and iDRAC so I can flash the RAID controller to IT mode and then get Proxmox installed.

Shopping list for this thing.

ucav117 · September 26, 2021, 4:39am

So I am buying 4x 120GB SSD’s from @GigaBusterEXE + the SAS drives from ebay. Is this a good way to set it up?

2x 120GB SSD’s RAID1 (OS and VM images)

2x 120GB SSD’s RAID0 (Cache)

8x 3TB Seagate Constellation Drives (2x 4 disk arrays RaidZ1 per your ZFS Storage Server advice.)

GTG or am I missing something?

SgtAwesomesauce · September 26, 2021, 5:08am

Does your server have a System ID button? It’ll be the thing that flashes when you press it. If so, hold it for 16 seconds, it’ll factory reset iDRAC.

Another option would be racadm racresetcfg -rc to reset the login to root/calvin and reset all the config.

For zpool cache? I highly recommend against using consumer SSDs for ZIL or L2ARC. You’ll burn them out in 6 months.

I did that with a pair of 850 pros a couple years back. One will max out at like 45MB/s write and the other is locked read only, due to NAND wearout.