Over the past 8 months or so, I’ve been playing with my Dell R710. It’s a nice system to play on but it could use some SSDs. One day I shall get some. My last post described a bit about it as it currently stands. This post shall be about what I’ve done as far as creating automated system installs for both Windows and Linux. Windows Deployment Systems (WDS) + Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) I know some people might frown on the idea but my deployment system resides within my primary Windows Server 2016 Lab VM also running AD and TCP/IP Routing to a isolated virtual network of things.

An update on my lab server.

This is my pfsense box, the dell optiplex 790 computer there. I use it in place of a consumer router since the ones I’ve used in the past would quickly approach their limits. They just couldn’t handle the growing collection of internet connected devices. I have a Netgear WNDR3700v3 and TP-Link W8980v1 serving as Wi-Fi Access Points that used to serve as the home router until they started crashing or dropping connections.

Don’t do this. This is bad. Stop pulling on the flexy bits, take your hands and grasp the hard part and gently remove the cable from your device. Cables are cheap, yes, but avoiding expensive fires from shorting the wires out and melting things is a whole lot better. Just. Stop it. K?

Today, I decided to try and migrate a few VMs I have on Virtualbox to Hyper-V and it didn’t go so well. It’d probably had worked out kinda ok if I just did fresh installs but I went the disk conversion route. So I converted the virtual disks twice, VDI (Virtualbox’s Default) > VHD (A more universal disk) > VHDX (For Hyper-V). That was fun. Only to find out that 1) Windows 7 must have been installed wrong on Virtualbox with a SATA controller so I couldn’t get it to boot on Hyper-V no matter what I tried.

So I finished the fan controller mod on my R710. Now all you see is a nob sticking out where a tape drive might be installed. :) The controller is based on an Arduino Nano with a 10k Potentiometer for control. Positive and Negative from the power supply for the Arduino and outside posts of the Potentiometer. Center post goes to A0. D3 of the Arduino goes directly to the PWN pins of the fans.

hmm, running my server at night with the door closed still might not be the best decision. :/ in just a few hours, like 4 or 5 hours, it elevated my room to uncomfortable levels and disrupted my sleep while I was practically naked over the covers (just undies). I’m naturally hot so not good. I don’t have to do anything to sweat, it just happens. anyway, I need a better solution.

I realize it’s an enterprise grade server but it sits on a box in my room and I need to be able to sleep and leave it running overnight if I wanted to. At the moment, I power it down at night and work on it from another room. So I bought some fans and plan to hopefully slow them down enough to where I could leave the server running and not disturb my sleep and not overheat any components.

My Server came in Last week and I had some time to play with it. I looked it over a bit and found a place to put it so I can boot it up. Took a few minutes to learn the multiple bios menus. It has one for the main bios, network config, raid card, iDRAC6, and even a thing to update firmware of everything on it. All before the OS even boots.

So yesterday I bought a server, like an actual server capable of being installed in a rack. A Dell Poweredge R710 with dual Intel Xeon E5640 cpus, 24GB RAM, 2x 146gb 10k HDDs. It has upgrade potentials in all those areas but that’s at a later date. The idea for this is for me to get my hands on a cheap server to get a real world sense of what’s inside, to see how it goes together, and play with random software.