08/29/2024 Newer server

Seeing as how the original attempt at running my website in a VM with Proxmox on a dinky Dell Optiplex 755 at home was successful I was feeling optimistic about getting some more professional-grade hardware. A little while ago I stumbled upon a listing for a Dell PowerEdge T410 on my local classifieds website. The seller was selling it for 60 bucks, and claimed that it includes 6 hard drives, 64GB of RAM and some old Xeon. Context of a server chassis aside, this quite a good deal, so I got into contact and shortly picked up the machine.

Upon closer inspection, it featured a dual-core Xeon so following the previous owners suggestion I ordered a second heatsink and a set of matching 6-core Xeons right away off of E-Bay. In the meantime I focused on trying to test and migrate my other sites and software to Proxmox. A few days ago the CPUs and the heatsink have arrived, and I installed them into the new chassis, along with an additional SSD to house the system image. Turns out, installing two processors has enabled the motherboard to utilize the rest of the installed RAM which totalled to 94 gigs. Nice. Unfortunately, Proxmox 8 didn't work out of the box, but I managed to install v7 and do an in-place upgrade.

After a bit of fiddling with the repos the update was complete. I have made a backup of this website through Proxmox's web interface and then transferred it to the new server via FTP. It took no time to restore the backup and reinstall NGINXPM. Even the local IP designated for the website VM stayed the same, so all I had to do was update the NAT destination for NGINXPM. All of this without even a seconds downtime, which was very impressive.

As for the server itself, its cool. I really like how it looks, and it seems like this model specifically, while old, is still quite sought after and actuall deployed and used in this day and age. Can't say much about power efficiency since today is the first day running it but we'll see. Other than that, its a bit louder than the Optiplex, and runs somewhat hotter it seems, but I still don't mind it too much through my open-back headphones. The little screen on the front is cute, but doesn't do all that much. Also it takes a while to boot and requires keyboard confirmation but according to the BIOS that is because it encounters an error. What sort of error that is I am not sure as I haven't been able to see any error message whatsoever. Who knows. This model came with a PERC that I setup with Raid 5, as I need more space than data redundancy on this system at the moment, but in the future I am considering upgrading the drives and consolidating this with my NAS as well.

More on the topic of the NAS, I plan to sell off some of the extra machines that this new server has made redundant and maybe invest the money into getting the extra SATA controller the NAS needs and some larger drives. That will let me run the NAS alongside the server and provide even more storage. I want to host a fileserver and a CDN for my own sites, so I'll be looking into it further when I have the time. I'm still quite disoriented and uncofused but I'm chugging a long bit by bit. There are also a couple other hardware projects im working on, so I think they will be fun to write about when I feel like doing it.

Deuces.