Well, adding the door to the rack has taken the back burner. Not quite as interesting as I want. However, I think I will need to replace the rack posts with the “square hole” type. I thought that having the telco-style rails – tapped screw holes – would be best but it turns out, and I should have known better – that most equipment rails now come configured for square holes. It is easier – quicker – to mount rails into square holes as you don’t have to, well, screw anything in. :-S
Those four rails cost $100… 🙁
So the summer project is… A new NAS!
As I have posted about over the past number of years, I have three NASes. The old Synology DS211j that I use for iSCSI storage for my VMware ESXi server, a Synology DS216+II for documents and photos and a Qnap TS-219P II for movies and music. Even for me, three NASes is a little excessive. Two deficiencies that I have are: 1) each of these units only has two drive bays – that obviously limits expandability and 2) each of the units only has one network port – which means that to share DLNA services (movies, music) I have to use IGMP proxying to go across subnets. Since I use DLNA, I need good trascoding ability. I also use Docker for the Synology controller and have some more ideas of things to do with Docker.
So, this has arrived:
On the bottom is a
- Supermicro YS-6027R-3RF4+ chassis
- 8 x 3.5″ hotswap drive bays
- 2 x 3.5″ internal drive bays
- 2 x 740 watt Platinum Power Supplies
- Supermicro X9DR3-LN4F+ motherboard
- 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V1 Hex (6) Core 2.3GHzRAM
- 32GB DDR RAM
- LSI 9210-i8 HBA
- 4 x Intel 1 Gbit/s onboard NICs
- Onboard IPMI with KV
Phase 1 is to install FreeNAS. I have been messing around with ZFS, jails, etc. for the past month or so. I need to get some more disks; I have two 4 TB WD Reds, err…, ready. I need two more. Once that is done I can start removing the disks from the old Synology and Qnap NASes. But for now, I need to do some more experimentation.
On top are two Quanta S98J QSSC 1U rackmount server cases with 4 x 3.5 hotswap nays. They don’t have power supplies yet. They will be phase 2 of my plan. I will be adding another LSI HBA with two external (or more) SFF ports. On each of the Quanta’s I will be adding an external SFF port (like this) with a 4 cable SATA breakout. Of course, I have to find some affordable power supplies.
Once more note – Supermicro IPMI with KVM is awesome. Right up there with HP iLO or Dell PERC. It lets me sit in a comfortable recliner and watch TV.
