hardware

Adding another pair of drives to a zpool mirror on FreeBSD

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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

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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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Dan adds 2 x 12TB HDD into r730-03

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I know, I know. You can hardly contain your excitement as you read about my exploits. In this post, I add the drives into the host and run some simple tests. As in recent posts about 12T drives, these drives are not new. They are used drives. A later post will deal with the commands which add these new drives into an existing zpool. These drives came from serverpartdeals.com. They are used and

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Clearing-out multiple drives concurrently – while Watching Fargo Season 5

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It is time to let the knew server go. It has gone through multiple upgrades, new drives, new boards, and new chassis. It has been replaced by r730-03. Before I let it go, I want to clear off the drives. By that I mean: I did this by booting the host using mfBSD (a lovely USB-bootable version of FreeBSD). I then ssh‘d in as root (one of the few situations when ssh as

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Moving 4x storage devices into a new home

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Yesterday I did some scavenging of some servers which I’m going to dispose of. I managed to put together 4 x 1TB storage devices: 2 x NVMe sticks and 2 x SSDs. I also pulled a riser card from an R730 and relocated it to another host. The NVMe sticks are mounted on these PCIe cards, which I do not regret buying. They came with full height and low-profile brackets. More to the

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Preparing a server for sale – Supermicro 846 – 10 x 5TB HDD

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FYI: This server has since gone to a new home. After powering off the server about 8 months ago, I took the first steps to selling it. I opened it up and took out 2x NVMe sticks (1TB each, ZFS mirrored, giving a 930G zpool) INTEL fiber NIC (Intel X540-AT2) I’ll be keeping those items. I also took an inventory of the drives still in the system: 10 x 5TB drives – all

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Can I really swap CPU and RAM between my Dell R730 servers?

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Can I really swap CPU and RAM between my Dell R730 servers? I wrote about that recently. Sure. It might just work. First, let’s look at the service tags and find out. I have four Dell R730 servers in the basement: r730-01 – main development server – contains 2x E5-2650L v3 : add some RAM from r730-04 and swap in the CPUs (E5-2699V3) from r730-02 – 9ZJ1282 – 591-BBCH : PowerEdge R730/R730xd Motherboard

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