Big Brain Computer Parts

- "Build Day Monday Funday, Yet Another Machine Intelligence System [YAMIS]"
- Season 2, Episode 4: Mostly Modern Systems and Hardware Engineering

Despite some goon sending this kinda pricey Ice Lake Xeon through international post, wrapped up in two thin layers of non/anti-static bubble wrap shoved into a Tyvek shipping bag (not a box!), it arrived yesterday and seems to be in decent shape after a trip from Australia to the middle of America.

So, what one does with a NOS (new old stock) bit of hardware which needs to be perfect in order to function, we inspect with macro photos and various image filtering methods to identify any potential flaws.

CPU: Intel Xeon 8370C
Spec: 32 cores, 64 threads, 2.8GHz base clock
Dimensions: my favorite general purpose lip gloss (sorta) tube for scale

I probably should of known better, but use UUID when you are mounting hard drives in fstab.. I can now reboot my server more predictably!

Hey #homelab and #selfhosting gang, I need your advice. I have a Synology DS218play that is really showing its age. It's time to upgrade but I'm not sure what to get.

Storage-wise, I'm doing just fine. Only a couple TBs. I use this mainly for storing my personal photos, Synology Drive, etc.

I'm interested in the DS723+ but I read that it's pretty locked down to Synology hardware. Is there a decent FLOSS option that doesn't make NAS maintenance my hobby?

Sometimes I think, maybe I should use TrueNAS, and then I remembered that their C•Suite decided to give the to FreeBSD... the very same operating system and community of developers and engineers who enabled their company to exist from the start, to scale to the level which brought them success and growth and accolades from the OSS and enterprise storage communities alike.

So no, I don't use TrueNAS. Whatever many reasons they and their indolent fanboys push for moving to Linux, and I have heard them all, it's irrelevant. They didn't just bite the hand that feeds, they went straight over to the clown-show makeup meme table and slathered it on; trying so hard to convince everyone including themselves that this betrayal was the Good and Ethical thing to do.

Luckily there are alternatives, and those will get my time, engineering efforts, and fiscal support. One thing to remember: alienated users do not recommend those formerly loved products to their employers, they do not "spread the love" via organic marketing, and perhaps sometimes they dissuade when they would formerly embrace.

Yesterday, at about 5:30 local time (roughly) or 2100 UTC, my #homelab went offline. I was no longer able to access it from my undisclosed location. Right now, I'm at the coffee shop a few blocks from home, typing this instead of entering the basement on a discovery mission.

Coffee first.

I want to deGoogle a little.
What I'd like to set up is a simple next cloud/own cloud server that I can access from outside my home and automatically back up my photos. With a backup off site daily. Id also like to create accounts for a family to backup phones and be able to share documents with friends. I have about 90% of the skills I need to do this but need a good set of tutorials to follow.
Who do you recommend?
#foss #tech #homelab

Okay, we're gonna be yeeting our Echo devices shortly. What're good alternatives? We're a mixed household -- my partner is Android, I'm iOS -- and we have a home assistant installation kicking around, including integration with Hue

I'm leaning towards homepods, but I'm open to other options. #homelab #HomeAutomation

The way that games were meant to be played.

On Linux (NixOS), big screen.

AMD hardware fully for this machine.
Also the same machine that is part of a k8s cluster, running incus for lxc, Ceph for a storage cluster.
Connected by 2x 10gbs to the other machines.

TLDR homelabing strong lately.

bought the 3d printed rack back out to hold my SBCs. Time for some tinkering.

This is Gigabit Land, current home of the Pi 4 and Orange Pi 3 LTS.

did someone say homelab?!?!

While looking for new hardware for our home server (a 19'' mini rack server is very tempting...), I just came across project #minirack

10" rack server builds using a mix of off-the-shelf commercial and #diy #3dprinted mounts, panels, frontplates etc.

Looks interesting (and the mini racks are also rather cute).
Maybe interesting to some of you.

https://github.com/geerlingguy/mini-rack
https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/

Future #homelab space! Having part of the “attic” space finished to complement the recent solar+battery installation. Aiming for lots of sound proofing thus why the elevated floor.

#Proxmox virtualization often goes along with the great Proxmox Backup Server - and we always want statistics! Let's get our metrics of PBS in Grafana!

In this HowTo, we will quickly install and configure the pbs-exporter for hashtag#Prometheus on a Proxmox Backup Server system, add a token for the user and install the hashtag#Grafana dashboard. - #devops #homelab #netops #virtualization #backup #pbs #proxmoxbackupserver

https://gyptazy.com/howto-proxmox-backup-server-prometheus-exporter-grafana-dashboard/

fuck my #btrfs partition just went read-only for no reason. smart tests ain’t failing but btrfs scrubs are

waiting for the data to get backupd and then just gonna reformat it with fucking xfs or ext4
#homelab

Great video that explains how to manage storage on #Proxmox.

#HomeLab #SelfHost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqOGeqT-SCA

This Week in Self-Hosted (14 March 2025)

@homeassistant #Matter support, software updates and launches, a spotlight on #Cups -- a #container update monitoring platform, and more in this week's self-hosted recap!

https://selfh.st/newsletter/2025-03-14/

So I bought and used the cursed USB to 1/8" serial cable to reset the password on the APC #UPS network card. It's probably been about 20 years since I had to think about 9600 baud, 8N1 parity.

The ebay seller was pretty cool about it. They sold me 2 of these network cards. One had the default password and one didn't. When I pointed this out, they refunded one. Well, the cost of the cursed cable is about the same as the network card. So it all worked out in the end.

I will give #SchneiderElectric this much credit: one of these UPSes had firmware from 2014. And the release of firmware that I uploaded this week was issued in February 2025. That's pretty impressive, really. Especially for a UPS from APC, which they acquired.