Server rack review

[lukecyca]

I felt like this one deserved its own thread. Who all is running personal servers in here?

At the moment there are at least 5 servers running.

At the new VHS space we will be paying for electricity, so I don’t think we can offer free colocation, bitcoin mining rigs, etc.

[TyIsI]

There are no bitcoin mining operations in there.

There’s at least 3 infrastructure servers in there, which includes firewalls and the main VMware server.
Further, there’s an FPGA rig in there, with a Raspberry Pi, that @Jarrett has been meaning to make accessible.
IIRC, @laftho had a dedicated server running

[lukecyca]

Thanks @TyIsI! Can you go into some more details? I know that Talk, Nomos, Influx, and our website are all hosted on cloud VPS instances so I’m confirming whether we’re justified running all of these.

Ignoring anything smaller than 1U, I see:

• Red Gateprotect 1U - appears to be our firewall
• Dell 2U - labeled as @laftho’s server
• HP 2U - has 8 disks - might not be powered up actually (amber power light)
• Three HP 1U - only one is powered up
• Homemade 3U bare MOBO with 3 big fans - looks like a mining rig to me but maybe these are FPGA cards? Somebody told me this was a crypto mining rig at one point.
• Yellow google 2U that @SteveRoy donated - appears to be running

I think there’s a VoIP server hosted internally on a VM. Maybe the management software for our Ubiquiti gear. What else?

Are all these devices owned by VHS other than the one labeled as @laftho’s?

Anyway I don’t mean to be antagonistic - it’s just that time where we need to look around ask “wtf is this? do we still need it?”

[wander]

Here are my Server Rack threads from the start of the year; there are more details therein:

https://talk.vanhack.ca/t/vhs-server-rack/7680/15

VHS Equipment Review Project - Server Rack

Beside the Manual Miller is this server rack: [IMG_8277] [IMG_8281] A few members have their names on some of the servers: @laftho, @iMakeRobots. I have no idea what, if anything, the unlabeled servers are doing. [IMG_8278] [IMG_8279] [IMG_8280] A significant amount of the rack spaces are empty. It weighs a great deal and requires a huge effort to move. If the members maintaining servers in it have lost interest, can it be downsized to something more manageable? Poll: https://doodle.com/…

[laftho]

Yup I’ve got one in there. I’ll remove it and take it home for now until we decide what happens at the new space!

[SteveRoy]

The yellow google server box should be considered as VHS’s as I did donate it a while back.

[TyIsI]

I know that one of the servers is a spare firewall, but I’ll do a better inventory* before we move and perhaps consider dedicated hardware for some infrastructure.

(The intention was to run an internal PBX, but that did not work well in combination with VMware.)

*) I want to put a console onto all the machines and see what’s actually up/running.

[Jarrett]

@lukecyca

Homemade 3U bare MOBO with 3 big fans - looks like a mining rig to me but maybe these are FPGA cards? Somebody told me this was a crypto mining rig at one point.

Yeah, this is an array of ZTex 1.15y FPGA boards, originally (2011?) designed to be bitcoin mining rigs, but never used as such at VHS, because they’d mine like, a couple cents per year or something. I think they’re currently off, or at least have no useful /expensive logic running now. Because they’re totally open source, they’re good learning platforms that have some beefy FPGAs inside. If the thing is plugged in and turned on, there’s an internal Raspberry Pi that is accessible through the network that can reprogram them. I think there’s something written in the wiki about it.

Happy to do whatever people want, here. They are technically on long-term loan from an ex-member, and my opinion is that they’re relatively good for education potential vs size they take up, but it all depends on the future of the server rack I guess.