Tara 🌷<p>I'd like to share an update about my Dell R710.<br>At least some joy in this otherwise awful week.</p><p>Where were we? Ah, yes. The R710 was almost ready for colocation in my garage, and I still needed to install the two PCI 2xNVME adapters.</p><p>So, first, good news: The R710 finally found a home in my new colocation in Milan, Italy. At least one of us has something that can be called home.</p><p>The picture shows the final installation of the R710. <br>Unfortunately, the Dell rails I had did not fit in the new rack, so I had to use a couple that were ... ahem ... borrowed from the colo provider. Apparently, the rack is somehow longer than the usual ones. From what I saw in the other racks, I'm not the only one having that problem.</p><p>I installed the two PCI NVME adapters. However, I had second thoughts about L2ARC. From what I've read and my usage, I would not benefit<br>from an L2ARC, and perhaps it's better to have a good-tuned memory ARC. I also considered using either a write cache or a special (mirrored) device<br>for ZFS metadata. But given that the spinning disks are mostly for archive/disaster recovery, I don't think I will benefit from them either.</p><p>Instead, I installed two 1TB NVMEs in different cards configured as ZFS mirror to hold virtual machines and jails. I believe that's plenty of space for what I need, but I left the two remaining slots to expand that pool or for future use.</p><p>I bought a Schuko PDU and a shelf to hold the router and the switch. The former is the only new equipment in the rack. Everything else<br>is something I previously had in my garage.</p><p>The router is the exact copy of the router I have in another location, with 4x2.5G ethernet ports running plain FreeBSD, automated through Ansible, and terminating the VPNs. In future, I would like to <br>experiment with VXLANs and BGP... and maybe E2VPN, when support on FreeBSD will be available.</p><p>It's not much, but it's a start. I need to start somehow, right? I hope to have made my hardware fairy proud.🧚♀️ </p><p>So, what's next?</p><p>I have a twin R710 that I'm refurbishing. That will mostly hold virtual machines for community projects and have different disk layouts. <br>I also plan to buy a decent switch. I want something rack-mountable, managed with at least 16 ports and 2.5G+ speed (with 2x10G)<br>In future, I also want to build a machine for a private LLM, as I have a specific use case for that,<br>but that's definitely not happening before next year.</p><p><a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/hardware" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>hardware</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/colocation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>colocation</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/rack" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>rack</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/servers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>servers</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/update" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>update</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/freebsd" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>freebsd</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/zfs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>zfs</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/l2arc" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>l2arc</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/tags/rewindtheweekplease" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>rewindtheweekplease</span></a></p>