Writing tagged "home-lab"
Reinventing my rack cooling solution
Most of my computers have been sitting in a noise-insulated 19“ rack for 6 years or so. Although I’ve been administrating real servers for more than a decade, I still get a kick out of cosplaying as sysadmin with machines that I can actually touch, rather than being located in some rented data hundreds of kilometers away.
The rack I bought came with a temperature-controlled fan that pulled air through the whole box (just tall enough to fit under a desk), but could only run at 0% and 100% speed, because the temperature control was just a binary switch. That kinda defeated the point of the rack being noise-insulated, because even Noctua fans make some noise at 100% speed.
Suspicious disk failures
The disks in my home server have been acting up lately: Two of them (which I bought at once a few years ago) deliver different results when I hash a file multiple times, another just randomly hangs sometimes for a few minutes. The SATA and power cables seemed fine, replacing them had no effect on the problem. So, why not check what wisdom S.M.A.R.T. has to offer?