my server rack at home always starts out
neat and tidy and then all it takes is a
project where i've got to attach a dvd drive to my system here and a
failed router that i just throw a replacement in for there and
uh some contractors who come and clear
the fiberglass in my attic leaving fiberglass fibers all over the
front of my servers and all of a sudden it's a complete and utter mess again but
not this time this time sponsored by pulseway makers
of the software that allows you to monitor not just your servers but really
any mac Windows or Linux machine i am going to be completely properly cable
managing this once and for all accounting for the next few projects
that i have coming i will even be yes
making my own Ethernet patch cables look
at this isn't this adorable
watch see out goes this
in goes
step one is to give everything the old safe shot down i always do this i turned
off the desktops already so now i've got
to issue the shutdown command to my unread server here from my phone but
we're good system is powered off just as i released that screw i realized
something this server is
not mounted on rails it's just sitting on top of the ups's i better pull that
out first i do have rails for it i just never installed them oh wow you can see
i was using the top panel of this case
as a filming plan at some point that would
have been a while ago looks like because it's fiberglass so the strands
are quite long compared to regular dust we actually ended up with almost nothing
inside the system itself so the specs of this server are
kind of unusual um i've got a 9900k processor in here
and the reason for that is i ran into this weird issue where plex if you want
to transcode a 4k
blu-ray and also have subtitles baked into it it's like a single threaded task
that's super inefficient like 32 gigs of RAM i've got a graphics card in here for
GPU decoding a couple of uh hbas to power the drives here i think it's
around 150 terabytes total storage a couple cash drives and finally a 10
gigabit nick from a quantia and ah
a redundant power supply just in case one of these modules fails all i need to
do then is just clean off these drive caddies and oh
that's interesting so it's only the ones that don't have drives in them that have
a bunch of build up that makes sense since those are the ones that are going to be getting the most air flowing
through them something i do have an extra of in case of failure is a hard
drive so this is a cold spare and the key night among you might have noticed
that i'm using seagate archive drives which use shingled magnetic recording
now it's cheaper and more efficient use of the platter but it has a right speed
penalty and as you might have noticed in wd's recent scandal where they were
shipping wd red shingled magnetic recording drives without telling anybody
they are not ideal for raid but don't worry for my use case it's fine because
i'm not using raid i'm using unraid which has parody and
data redundancy but it does not use stripes across the
various disks so that means that i'm all good with these i get around 220
megabytes a second writing to the array and then a little faster reading off it
ah i'm sorry
oh shoot well
it's good for finding your keys when they're missing lttstore.com i used
tennis balls to hold up the ups is at the back i had
to find the right number of tennis balls to support them
the answer is five it's not stupid if it works flat
Ethernet cables these have a terrible reputation
with that said all i was using it for was like my sonos hub thing so
new rule any cable that i don't know where it goes i'm not going to plug it
in anymore at least two of these i have no idea what they're for
also gross deadbeat
i'm actually going to be adding some stuff to the server cabinet
oh some new switching gear from ubiquity
and that kind of stuff so i want to move it up so i can salvage two more u's
of space this thing really is awesome you see you can adjust the length
this is the first connection that i can make here so we're going into one of the
non-power over Ethernet ports because it doesn't have to deliver power to my
other switch obviously just the two ubiquity units so a router and a switch
and then we've got these three u's that we could theoretically move these up
into i'm going to leave mine on top because i quite frequently end up well
like plugging optical drives into it and stuff so that's just going to stay are
these cat footprints for those who are wondering i'm rocking
a 3900 x 12 core processor i've got a
titan rtx over there and then i've got this
weirdo Gigabyte i think it's a one terabyte NVMe SSD in the pci express
slot down here i'm running some super old 64 gigs ddr4 2666 RAM
not a great pairing for that processor i know and then i'm still using the ax
1500i this thing is going strong from the original build as well as this like
super cool custom reservoir d5 pump and then of course the x570 aqua from asrock
it's one of the few motherboards on the AMD side that supports Thunderbolt which
is really nice to have if you can run a Thunderbolt cable through the wall use a
Thunderbolt dock you've got 40 gigabit per second of io for all your you know
capture cards and all that kind of stuff that i use over there
Yvonne's rig doesn't really need to be touched it's a 60-second it looks
terrible what compared to yours well it doesn't have water cooling it doesn't
need water cooling it's messy
there let me tuck that there
you know we can well we'll clean the filter all
right you weren't even going to clean my filter well yeah i was going to clean
your filter clearly doesn't get cleaned as often
it's fine as it is anyway 6700k i think it's got 16 gigs of RAM
you know uh you got my old titan x pascal lots of people would give their
left nut for a system like this so
i expect a left nut from you in the mail just don't tell me where you got it i
got to put both systems forward in order to put your uh
mounting hardware in and that means basically all the weight is hanging off
the front of this thing right now because it's empty
oh hey that's not that hey the printer saved the day after a recent experience
losing a ups at the office i just thought you know like why cheap
out on this so i splurged and picked up two
of these apc 1500 volt amp units here
when i was mapping out all of my circuits at my house recently what i
realized is that this room and everything in it is on a shared circuit
with a whole bunch of other lights and outlets in my house so what i'm planning
to do is have brian the electrician come up here and we're going to put a
dedicated circuit in there for that gear meaning that it would be nice to have a
little bit more capacity because when that happens i'd also like to go back to
my plan of having the vr gaming rig
that's down in the living room actually relocated up here so we can do like a
super clean setup down there
that is terrific no more tennis balls for me
thanks apc help i'm stuck under a server
oh
okay now i get to attach these systems
properly for the first time ever how fun
is that i always like to get power cable management out of the way first they're
just kind of bulky and it's nice to not have to deal with them when you're trying to do the finer stuff route both
of the gaming desktops to the top ups
and the server to the bottom one that means that the gaming desktops won't
last as long in the event of a power outage but they're just quite frankly
not as important this gives me a lot more time to react and get the server
shut down correctly i know i said i was going to do everything really properly
but if you think about it hot gluing a power bar to the inside of
your server rack isn't really not properly like it's
i'm pretty sure that's generally accepted best practice
material right there one aspect of the cable management that i can't fix by
tidying up the rack here is the fiber connection that comes in
from my garage and the DisplayPort and optical usb connections that go out to
the room over there so i made a new hole but i'm gonna have to run those again
because right now ever since colin set it up they've just been coming in
through this opening and i haven't been able to close it and the cat keeps going out there it's a real pain in the butt
here's the other side of that hole i totally nailed lining it up now we make
a new more bigger hole well it's hardly perfect but it is
literally in the attic so i'm not going to stress about it too much the good
news is it's a lot cleaner on this side so i'm just going to install one of those
little like brush things here and then we're going to be good to go that is a lot
better small update i am
not bothering with the custom cables for everything
it is three in the morning
one thing that i'm not gonna cable manage properly is this ASUS router just
because it's going to get replaced so i'm just going to plunk it right there but i mean it's all still
looking you know pretty good from the front here i think we are ready
for the big test go.com
i'm on wi-fi see if the computers work
oh well that's simple mine's up linustechtip.com form yes
okay and then yours we're good keyboard working yes man i am just so
stoked with how this turned out check this out
magnet mounted dust filter
oh yeah it's gonna stay tidy this time ladies
and gentlemen of course managing your hardware is just
half the battle and that's where today's sponsor pulseway comes in pulseway is a
real-time remote monitoring and management software that allows you to manage systems and support users from
anywhere so i signed up for their free account which allows you up to two
systems for my home closet here and it means that i can just log in from
anywhere on my phone or from a computer and see things like available memory
processes that are running i can open up a terminal and execute commands and i
can even run automation scripts it's pretty freaking sick and if you get into
their more advanced tiers man you can do some amazing stuff we're talking full
remote desktop access and this really cool new feature called auto remediation
where you can basically set up workflows that will fix problems for you on their
own so you can have something like actually we had an issue that this would
have been perfect for a couple of years ago where the dropbox service kept
randomly stopping on one of our servers that we needed to synchronize all of the
scripts that we put on our teleprompter so with pulseways autoremediation you
could just say hey if this service stops restart the service and hey fire off an
email over to us so that we can keep an eye on how often this bloody thing is
failing it's super cool don't take my word for it though try it out today for
free at the link in the video description we've also teamed up with
pulseway and Corsair to give away a pretty sick working from home slash
gaming rig it's a Corsair i-140 with a core i7 9700k and NVIDIA rtx 2080 we'll
have those full details down below as well thanks for watching guys if you
enjoyed this video you might enjoy a recent one where Anthony and i made some
upgrades to our server room at the office it's definitely worth a watch