had an old HP Proliant 350ML G6 kicking around the office we have upgraded to a new server its got a 1.2 tb raid installed and had 5 x spare pair SATA ports. As we are still in lockdown i decided to make the ultimate server on a budget.
you can pick this server up fro around £150 on eBay complete. it was running 16gb of ram and 2.15 GHz processor with 4 core processor. and had a spare port for the second CPU.
I had to buy a second hand mother board due to me damaging second CPU socket and killing the monther board £30 for one shipped with 24gb of memory with it.
I also removed DVD drive to give me 1 extra SATA port for a SSD
on eBay, i picked up 2 x matched CPU 2.56 and 9 rams 4gb DIMMs for around £65 i picked up a GTX 1050 GPU and sound card for around £160 salvaged a 4 port USB card. i was going to use some old 2tb drives out of a raid server but when i the disk performed health check was getting some errors so decided as this project is sponsored by my company would invest in some NAS 4tb drives £104 each so got 5 one will act as a parity drive. also using a 500gb SSD for cache drive files. oh and extra fan for missing CPU slot and fan baffle for £36
i have also added ordered 2 matched six core cpu 3.05 Ghz maxing out the board for £40 will upgrade them when they arrive as coming from asia.
So all in if had brought it from the net i would be in under £1000. 16tb server with 60gb of ram 4 Gb GPU.
the hardware went together very easily i started off by fitting memory to the second processor DIMM slots. i then fitted changed out the first CPU and added the second one. do love big towers only got 2 cuts from heat sink and frame.
All came today and all installed looking nice and full inside the case build is all done. just fits thankfully a little tight in areas. but looking good.
now to turn on V-rt so i can use pass through tech and turn on some other features.
Setting up Unraid got 32gb USB flash drive download installer and flash drive plug it into a USB slot. In my case, the motherboard had an internal USB slot then on boot get into the bios and change boot order i did USB, CD and HD. the system will then boot USB first.
first boot takes a few mins you are greeted with the login screen. the user name is root password is blank.
you are then greeted with a register for trial or buy screen click trial.
would recommend adding community app plugin there are lots of guides on this but basically you to unraid web site and look in the footer for apps store and look for plugin url then go to add the plugin and then past it there a few seconds later all installed.
next up you going to need to build an array in my case its 5 drives, 4 for data and one parity drive for back up just in case one drive fails .
next up is adding services and some virtual machines going to be running Windows 10 and Ubuntu desktop 20.4.
First you will need to enable the array and set dockers going. would recommend looking on you tube space invader one seems to have some good tutorials.
I am currently clearing down 2 TB drive so i can make a back up of business array then will have an off-site backup as well as the current live version. this will live sync every day.
so far i am impressed with the unraid system couple of glitches but stable.
Will update this project as i add to it. have set an octofarm server going and its also managing all the house entertainment. looking at other addons as well. have set up OpenVPN so i can tunnel into the server work from it remotely have 3 virtual machines running. processor seam so working ok till i get the extra 4 cores going 12 cores 24 threads but that’s a few weeks off.
going to be out of London for a week hoping to get one more project done before i leave as have also been running it back to back with wast board. but might break it into two parts as 3d printing side done but now going to work on making some aluminium clamps with fusion 360 and CNC machine. this is a new idea so as going to be in deepest darkest wales will use spare time to teach myself manufacturing.
Will post the 3D brackets project tomorrow or Saturday.
