HP N36L Microserver - £100

[MadduckUK]

Err, what about a PBX and/or an OpenVPN endpoint? Or as Biscuit, a backup - you can never have too many file servers!
Actually, since you're using a not-so-power-frugal P4 system as your Smoothwall box, you could use this as a replacement and save money in the long run.

home server itself is a backup with a backup, so no need to venture there tbh

mmm... in the long run there would be power saving, although it is remarkably quiet and frugal for a P4, the optiplexes are little works of art inside tbh and i would see all those 3.5" bays in the Microserver and wonder why i am using it as a glorified switch. i may even have an celeron e1200 freshly pulled sitting on my desk right now that could slip in if i had the motivation.

Its a crying shame really, because it is sexy and cheap, but aside from pulling functions off of the home server and onto this for no apparent reason i dont see the need oh god im getting...sensible

dedicated RDP box for my phone? ishhhhh

[spoon_]

and that still qualifies for £100 cashback?

Yep, as long as its 250GB version you are good.

[spoon_]

Can anyone think of PCI-E x1 Dual NIC?

Ideally on VMware HCL

[MadduckUK]

Can anyone think of PCI-E x1 Dual NIC?

Ideally on VMware HCL

think you will struggle - a dual port x1 (presuming you want 1000) would be unable to actually do what it would say it can do, the best you can hope for is an x4 that is made to fit in an x1 slot as well.. i dont know if such a card exists... got a sharp knife and a steady hand?

[watercooled]

Just to add another hurdle, I think you need half-height cards for this server, and possibly half-length.

[spoon_]

think you will struggle - a dual port x1 (presuming you want 1000) would be unable to actually do what it would say it can do, the best you can hope for is an x4 that is made to fit in an x1 slot as well.. i dont know if such a card exists... got a sharp knife and a steady hand?

Yeah, I can only assume that the PCI-E x1 slot isn't open ended but like you said it can always be!

So we need PCI-E x4 Dual NIC that will work in PCI-E x1...

[watercooled]

There's also an IPMI slot right behind the PCI-E 1x slot.

[morda8]

no hdmi?

come on!!

[Splash]

no hdmi?

come on!!

It's a home *server*, not a media centre.

[watercooled]

It also excludes audio output for this reason. There's not much point adding media outputs to a server when next to no-one will use them. Even D-Sub probably won't get much use after installation in most cases, power + Ethernet is enough for a file server.
If you want a media centre, don't buy a server.

[Splash]

Mine is finally built (I've been busy, ok?). Hit on some problems installing NexentaStor to USB (wouldn't update the boot archive, and if I installed to the 250Gb disk that came with it and attached to the SATA port in place for the optical drive it threw a wobbler and was mailing me alerts saying that the array had failed (it hadn't) multiple times a day. Updated the BIOS, tinkered with AHCI/IDE and then decided that I might as well just run ESXi on the internal USB port, then install NexentaStor as a VM with RDM to the 4 2Tb disks in the rack. Working pretty sweet so far, next stop (ie after work today) will be to migrate some VMs to it, maybe setup a SMB share and see what kind of dedupe ratio I can get out of it.

[spoon_]

Sweet value for 4GB stick....

http://www.crescentelectronics.co.uk...in-ddr3-2.html

[badass]

Mine is finally built (I've been busy, ok?). Hit on some problems installing NexentaStor to USB (wouldn't update the boot archive, and if I installed to the 250Gb disk that came with it and attached to the SATA port in place for the optical drive it threw a wobbler and was mailing me alerts saying that the array had failed (it hadn't) multiple times a day. Updated the BIOS, tinkered with AHCI/IDE and then decided that I might as well just run ESXi on the internal USB port, then install NexentaStor as a VM with RDM to the 4 2Tb disks in the rack. Working pretty sweet so far, next stop (ie after work today) will be to migrate some VMs to it, maybe setup a SMB share and see what kind of dedupe ratio I can get out of it.

Make sure you enable the write cache on the disks/controller. Performance is terrible without!

[Splash]

Make sure you enable the write cache on the disks/controller. Performance is terrible without!

Cheers for the heads up! Luckily I have a spare slot on my UPS to run this from

[watercooled]

Make sure you enable the write cache on the disks/controller. Performance is terrible without!

You mean with hdparm or something more specific?

[Splash]

As I'm using the onboard controller (it's essentially a toy which whould hopefully bump the performance of my ESXi home lab environment - if anything goes bad it can all be restored from backup or rebuilt from templates) I just enabled it in the BIOS, where it was disabled by default.

EDIT - ok, after setting a machine to migrate from one datastore (my current Thecus NAS) to this box I'm not massively impressed with the throughput. the CPU is really taking the hit here!