so the server was down for a little while as a result of some “maintenance” so i thought i’d write here about what actually happened during the downtime.
first, i had a look online for some storage. excluding the boot drive, the server’s been living off of a 4tb seagate barracuda that was unable to access its last ~600gb of data as fast as it could the rest of it this whole time. i thought it was time for an upgrade because i was indeed rapidly approaching that last 600gb and i wanted to be able to continue downloading youtube so i don’t have to use youtube anymore. i found a listing for some 4TB SAS drives at around £31 per drive which i feel is fairly good considering the rapidly increasing price of literally everything. next i went looking for a SAS HBA card because the microserver gen8’s built-in drive controller doesn’t support SAS drives. that led me to an LSI 9211-8i that i got for ~£33. when they arrived i cable tied a small fan to the card’s heatsink as people claimed the cards run hot and after fighting with the iLO and USB ports then giving up and flashing a livecd onto a spare SSD, i had it booted to be able to flash the card to the latest firmware that the gen8 supports. the flashing was a surprisingly easy process, backing up the current firmware went quick and putting the new firmware on was equally as quick.
next i put the drives in and booted the machine. once in i chose to set the drives up as a raid 5 array with an ext4 filesystem as i figured 12tb would be plenty for now and some extra redundancy wouldn’t hurt. now why i didn’t choose something like zfs is mostly just because of my inexperience with it and that raid and ext4 has worked perfectly fine for me in the past and still continues to so i suppose i’ve just not felt the need for anything new in that regard. after that was set up copying the existing data took around a night, i had the old hard drive plugged into my main computer to transfer the files over the network. once i woke up the downloading began. i set up tmux and yt-dlp then went mad downloading youtube channels. clearly too mad because once i had got out of vrchat that night i SSHed into the VM doing the downloading and i had been banned from accessing youtube on my home IP lol. an install of the mullvad vpn client fixed that quite quickly though and within like a minute i was back to downloading.
a few days prior to this i had been offered another microserver gen8 from a friend. at this point it had turned up and i decided to link the two together in proxmox, give the other one a cheap graphics card for transcoding and pass the server VMs to that machine, and so onto ebay i went. i found an nvidia quadro p400 for cheap and bought it. once the most powerful nvidia card i’ve personally ever bought turned up i put it into the server and booted it but once it got past the first stage of boot the display on the iLO console went black. this was because the bios was set to output its display to a discrete gpu if one was detected which is actually really reasonable. the unfortunate part about that however is that i am not reasonable. into the bios i went to disable that! once the server started i edited the boot parameters to allow pcie passthrough and then passed the GPU into the VM running the jellyfin server. installation of the drivers went smoothly and now the server doesn’t take minutes trying to transcode my breaking bad rips using software.
we should be back for good now.