hardware

Optimizing UPS power use when the power goes out

Leave a Comment / Eaton, Network monitoring, nut, UPS / By /

This post is mostly for myself. I’m just putting my Sunday morning thoughts down for later review and consideration. When Selecting replacements batteries for my Eaton 5PX UPS (5PX2200RT & 5PXEBM48RT), I began to think about: when the power goes off, why can’t I keep using my laptop? Usually, I still have an Internet connection: the ISP isn’t going offline. Why not turn off the two servers in the basement, and anything else […]

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r730-01

Leave a Comment / DELL, hardware, R730 / By /

This post has been replaced by a newer post. This is the Dell R730 host known as r730-01. For reference, the previous post on this server is still available. A few days ago, this host had a change in CPU and RAM. This is my primary developer server in my basement. gpart zpool list zpool status zfs list dmesg sesutil show jls pciconf (added 2025-09-27)

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Using powerd++ to reduce power consumption on a Dell R730

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Yesterday, I changed CPUs in my main server. That server builds packages, is the database server for dev, test, and stage freshports, amongst other things. It is a generalized server. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 powerdxx-0.4.4_1 Dell R730 2x E5-2699 v3 CPUs As folks started reading my tweets, crest pointed out that powerd++ may help. SPKaniu also mentioned cycling down. Straight out of ports After installing powerd++, I tried running it: [0:31 r730-01

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Spreading thermal paste – replacing Dell R730 CPUs

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On Sunday, I replaced the CPUs in r730-01 with something quite a bit more powerful. I have been thinking about doing this since before this September blog post: Can I really swap CPU and RAM between my Dell R730 servers? The answer was: Yes, I can. See also the next post: Using powerd++ to reduce power consumption on a Dell R730 In this post: FreeBSD 14 LibreNMS 24.1.0 2x E5-2650LV3 (old CPUs) 2x

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Adding another pair of drives to a zpool mirror on FreeBSD

1 Comment / DELL, Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, R730 / By /

Today, I’m ready to adding two recently obtained 12T spinning disks to r730-03. This host is the work-horse which houses all the main backups and database regression testing. It also hosts my newly-created but not yet-functional graylog jail. I will be following a previous post about adding drives because I don’t want to remember these things. They occur infrequently enough that documenting it is a good idea. In this post: FreeBSD 14 The

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r720-02

Leave a Comment / DELL, Disks, hardware, R720 / By /

I’ve been given a Dell PowerEdge 720, which will be known as r720-02. It sits in a datacenter in New York, New York, and acts as a FreshPorts node. For example, if you’ve ever accessed dev, test, or stage [.freshports.org], then you’ve accessed this host. Partitions zpools The zpools: Filesystems The filesystems: dmesg And dmesg:

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Clearing out multiple drives – while watching Band of Brothers

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The accomplished reader will first ask, how is this post any different from Clearing-out multiple drives concurrently – while Watching Fargo Season 5? Well, first, it’s a different server. This one is r720-01. Second, I’m watching Band of Brothers, which is completely different. However, the approach is the same: Boot the host using an mfsBSD thumb drive ssh in as root wipe the drives watch Band of Brothers profit What’s not to like?

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