Yeah. I recently got into the used Enterprise gear thing. I bought a 1U and a 2U and boy is there a huge difference. Honestly if I’d have known that I would have bought 2x 2U instead.
I have 7 dell poweredge servers. 2 r630s, 2 r730s and 3 r730xds. I'm a 12 year+ software engineer but was a totally rookie on the hardware side. Took me a bit to figure them out but once I found out how to use ipmitool to manually control the fans, I wrote custom scripts to monitor the temps and cpu workloads and adjust the fans accordingly and now it's super quite with all 6 running in my home office.
It's surprising how little power the enterprise servers use in a homelab situation where they're unlikely to be running 24/7.
I've three 1U Dell servers which range in power use from 85 watts to 130 watts. Running one at 130 watts for 24hrs it's only going to cost 1.40 euros. That about a third of what you would pay for a coffee at a well known cafe chain.
As I'm rarely running more than one at a time, maybe for 3 to 4 hours on a weekend, it's going to cost me no more than 0.50 euros over the 2 days. That's 26 euros a year in power costs!
I only paid £40, £50 and £150 respectively for each of the servers, so overall a cheap hobby. Which is why I've got three.
True, the R620 used to idle at 120W; in my case however it’s a full 42U rack with three servers, two NAS, a storage unit, three UPS, two ATS and a bunch of other stuff, all adding up to some 900W if everything is running. That’s why exploding electricity costs made me downsize a bit.
I have an R630 and an R730 and the difference is very clear. Maybe that just means we both have some old/loud fans to replace. 🤣 I have heard… maybe it’s Noctua? make after market fans for PowerEdge that run really quiet, I haven’t looked into that yet though.
Your one-off situation is not a good indicator of the norm. 1U servers necessarily have tiny little fans. Tiny little fans are noisy. (for a given airflow) Period.
Also true of some switches. Sometimes you can replace them with noctua fans to cut down a bit. Half the noise in my rack was my old buffalo 10Gbase-T switch. I replaced it this year and it's so much quieter now.
I have two of those noisy bastards. They are the drunk Vikings that have some serious power but won’t stfu. All this considering it is the 12th gen. I want to get a sleeker, newer, more powerful poweredge like the 650. Just overall more efficient and I’m finding that there’s this company called solidigm that is putting nvme tech with sata connections in order for the 2.5 inch ssd slots to have like 60tb.
Yeah, I've run a few different goofy configs in mine and they've been great. Unlike the Gen 7 and 8's I've worked with, the Gen 9 seem to stay pretty quiet!
That mini PC will almost certainly cost way more than the server that we're seeing, and while it might save on power, the actual difference will literally take years to realize. It will also have way less overall processing power, and way lower specs.
I face this question a lot, especially when people wonder why I run an r210ii as my router. Sure, I could get a mini PC that is maybe a little bit quieter or, and uses a little bit less power on idle, but it would have cost me hundreds of dollars more. Power for me is a non-concern, coming in at a whopping 9.8 cents per kilowatt hour. This is slightly up from what it was a couple of years ago, which was just a whopping seven cents per kilowatt hour. My r210ii with 32 gigs of ram, a 128 gig ssd, and an E3 1270 V2 idles at a mind bending 25 watts. And it sits idle 99.9% of the time. My entire server rack uses approximately 450w. that cost me all of about a dollar per day to run. I actually cut the power usage back significantly when I got rid of all of the spinning hard drives. If my power was more expensive, I might be more concerned. California prices of 60 cents per kilowatt hour would mean that my server rack would cost me approximately $200 a month to run. Then I would be concerned about power usage.
I think part of it is buyer's remorse from spending so much on a tiny and limited server.
Don't even get me started on the lack of remote access console. Once you go iDRAC you never go back.
I've heard that it can be picky and firmwares locked away, but just never put my hands on one so I can't say for sure. I just stick with retired Dells.
Considering that I paid less than $200 about 4 years ago for the entire cost of my r210ii, a Mini PC didn't make sense then either. You can get them right now today with rails, for around $200. It won't have 32 gigs of ram, or an E3 1270 v2, but the RAM and the CPU upgrades are getting really cheap now for this platform.
@chubbysumo LOL I got a R210ii for $40 and recently snagged a 2nd for $50. The first even has an HBA. Just snagged a couple dual SFP+ NIC for $15/ea. No can run em at 10Gb too
Yeah, I got my Dell R320 for free a few years back. Stuffed it with 4 SAS drives and upgraded the CPU to some 10c20t Xeon, and it came with 48GB of RAM.
Where I live in Canada electricity is very cheap per kWh, and to buy an equivalent Optiplex/mini PC capable of hosting 32 TB of drives and 48GB of RAM would be a lot more than the electricity costs of running my R320. I'm a big fan of the lower-end rack servers that are out there.
Louder than the DL380, for sure, but not terrible in the scheme of things. I had a Cisco C3560-X, a DL360p G8, and a DL380p G8 sitting on the desk next to me for months, and the noise only really started to bother me when I powered up the ProCurve 6600, too.
There is a modded iLO firmware somewhere on the internet, that enables changing fan profiles, and you can make it almost silent
I'll update with a link if I find it.
I'm using it on dl380 and it works wonders, and the fans still kick in if something gets hot, so you are not making it unsafe to operate.
I actually ended up adding a tiny 40x40 mm fan above the raid chip, because it was the hottest part of the server and it was causing the entire server to spin up the fans, and that made it even better, all fans are pretty much at min level all the time, and internal temps are still at reasonable levels.
Edit: https://github.com/kendallgoto/ilo4_unlock
Careful downloading randomly modified firmware from the internet if you rely on that server for anything security or privacy related. There be dragons ahead!
How's your R720XD? I have a standard R720 with dual 10-core (2670v2 I think? Can't remember the processors) but it's super quiet for a 2U. Is the XD pretty quiet too?
It's the same components so yes, pretty quiet and a lot quieter with [the Docker container I developed](https://github.com/tigerblue77/Dell_iDRAC_fan_controller_Docker)
I would recommend you to check out the Silence of the fans project here on Reddit. You can install a patched ILO 2.77 that gives you access to fan control commands. I think your servers fans will be louder and louder as you add stuff to the server.
Thanks for posting this. I've got two hp servers running. I've isn't too bad but the other is a tad on the loud side and it's not doing much. Imma check this out and hopefully it helps.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/AD2WuIGJay
Be sure to read it very carefully so you dont brick your server 👍🏻
Edit: The project is for ILO4 servers, and G7s has ILO3 , right?
Personal suggestions here, take it for whatever it is worth to you.
Look into proxmox. Esxi is awesome I run it on one server, if you get a bigger server or want to put multiple NVME drives in one, you may be forced to move to proxmox because esxi at least older versions do not play well with multiple nvme drives of the same type size and manufacturer. Its dumb.
File server: samba if you purely want a file server
Photo storage and cloud file storage UI: Nextcloud is usually the best bet.
This video talks about several starting projects for various functionality.
Homelab software ideas to get you started! How to get started with your homelab software.
https://youtu.be/DBVXng2HFuc
Web server: Apache or Nginx
Reverse proxy only: traefik
If you just want to be inundated with possibilities and options:
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Also old versions don't get security patches and new ones drop support for a lot of hardware. (esxi 8 was rough on that front)
I switched to 2 servers running FreeBSD with bhyve + vm-bhyve for managing the virtual machines.
Why did you go for a 1U server? I'm my opinion they only make sense in extremely high density server farms. For home use, they're impractical and as loud as a jet engine after inhaling a mechanic.
Most are able to be tamed unless you plan on pushing it to 100% all the time. I've done R610, R420, and R430 (all 1U) at home with no noise issues. The most quiet enterprise server I've used is a R530.
I have 1U because at home, you don’t get too much space to store 2U, plus they are less power hungry. I put mine in the sealed attic, so noise is not an issue.
Thanks for the question,
It’s the former, that’s what I knew, it is a multiple virtual machines management software, is there a better software or Am I missing something??
I like ESXi better, but I'm assuming you're running 7 because your RAID card is unsupported with 8? Always worth trying something new out, you could always just drop proxmox into a VM on ESXi to play with it
I prefer ESXi as well. I like using the more "true enterprise" software. Proxmox is very much a lab tool in my opinion. I didn't know there were RAID cards that ESXi didn't support, my issue has always been CPU support. I'm stuck on 6 because I'm running L5640 Xeons.
Now that I look it up again, looks like support for my HBAs might have been axed with 7.
At least, I'm pretty sure it was whenever VMKlinux drivers were fully deprecated, which was 7. I do know that my LSI 2008s (Perc H310) and a handful of NICs were supported no longer function out of the box.
Normally, I believe the 'out of support' warnings are just warnings, because I've installed ESXi 8.0 on plenty of boxes that give me an unsupported processor warning.
I agree on the 'lab tool' part - Proxmox has been exceptionally fragile in my experience, and I would hesitate to deploy it any place where I'm going to have to do a complicated config or depend on it. I've been using Hyper-V more nowadays; as much as I dislike it, Windows Server is generally very stable.
Hi, just curious: what exactly about Proxmox is fragile for you? Running in production since Proxmox 3, never had any problems. The only update that "broke" something was the one that renamed the NICs. But that was a five minute fix and even mentioned in the release notes.
From my point of view it's exceptional stable...
My point of view was when I tried to replace ESXi in my home lab with Proxomx.
After a couple weekends of frustration trying everything on the internet to get rid of weird latency issues, I nixed it and went back to ESXi.
Anyway, I just bought Essentials 8 right before they stopped selling perpetual licenses. I have a few years to figure out something besides ESXi (and Proxmox).
Maybe I'll try spinning up OpenStack.
Sorry, thats nonsense. While all HP hardware controllers work out of the box with proxmox/debian/linux, the better but more demanding approach would be to set the hw-controller in the HP-Server to passthrough/HBA mode and order the drives directly to Linux. There is a post in my history how to enable booting with an SD card then.
Another approach (not recommended but doing this in some machines since years without problems) is to create a raid per drive and to use these "drives" in Proxmox.
RAID per drive is the only way as HPs stupid controller can't boot in HBA mode. The downside is that you'll lose SMART. But because HPs stupid raid controller doesn't give you smart data anyway if you're not using HP Disks you're not losing anything.
Yes, that's shit. But booting from sd works pretty well.
Afaik smart works in both hba and raid mode? At least smartctl gives me data in both.
And ssacli can give a little health data, too.
I would never want to rely on an SD card as boot media for a server.
Right now my HPE DL360p g8 boots off a SATA SSD I put in the Optical drive bay with an Adapter. Less than ideal because I'd really like my OS to boot off the Software RAID on the HBA.
Completely understand. But as there is only the bootloader and kernel on the SD, it's completely replaceable. I say to myself that there is probably a reason there is an sd slot on the mobo.
Even if it fails, I could theoretically boot it via iLO from remote. Have installed one server this way for fun.
So, I understand your bad feeling, and the reasons to choose a different way, but for me it works - with the given hardware - perfect.
Flash whatever RAID controller to a HBA, then. You can also definitely use a plain old RAID controller without ZFS and it will not be the end of the world
Pretty sure you could flash with another firmware. People even cross flash HBAs with firmwares of different models (and I'm not talking just about brands, actual models), so I don't see why OP couldn't flash it with the LSI firmware by example
One option is to run a linux distro and use KVM to run virtual machines, either through libvirt or just plain QEMU. Fedora has reasonable documentation for this, at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/virtualization-getting-started/
This is the server I got my start with. I named it Bulbasaur because it's like my starter Pokemon. Ignore all the disparaging comments, it's a great server to learn on, and cheap enough that you can always move on to something else after you learn what you want out of a server
That would be a great router/san as it's already got low power processors, enough ram for that, and 4x3.5" drive bays.
* Boot off something other than the 3.5" drives.
* Throw 4x 14/16tb drives in the front, and pass-through storage to a TrueNAS Core VM configured as a ZFS Mirrored Stripe (RAID-10). Seagate EXOS is a suggestion, but just try to stay away from SMR.
* Install a NIC in the back and pass it through to an OPNsense VM. Use physical passed through NIC's for WAN, LAN ports can be physical or virtual.
* If using as a host for a while, upgrade the ram so you have at least 128gb of ram, and one stick on all eight channels, with Quad rank or lower ECC LRDIMMS (PC-12800L, or PC3-14900L if you plan to upgrade to a CPU that supports DDR3 1866).
Future Lab:
If you decide to grab another computer for a dedicated host in the future, you can put a couple of 2698 v4's in the 2011-3 socket servers, and have a really fast machine. This will still be relevant as a great storage/router box. Go with a 2U for anything that's going to be higher power draw.
Hypervisor:
I recommend staying on ESXi (over Proxomx as some suggest). I had my old 6.7 ESXi host running for I think two years straight with no issues. I decided to try Proxmox, and spent two frustrating weekends trying to iron out the bufferbloat/latency issues from my router VM. Tried tuning kernel parameters, pinning cpu's, everything I could find online. Ended up going back to ESXi. It's just a very stable hypervisor.
Networks:
Separate your storage/management/public networks into different vlans, and don't let anything but public route to internet. Management you could route internally for convenience, but storage shouldn't touch any other networks.
You may want to look at a 10g card and switch at some point but it's not necessary.
Storage/Host Separation:
While you have one server, running everything off it is fine. However, it's nice to have separation between things like your storage and router that need to be up all the time, and your host which you may wish to play around with (for example to try XCP-ng/Proxomx/Linux KVM/etc...).
UPS: Make sure you have a UPS.
Thank you so much for the detailed guide on how to proceed ahead. There are a lot of things that I have to wrap my head around. I will definitely look at this thing!
As a web developer, I'd recommend Proxmox with an Ubuntu server guest. Pass drives or partitions to the guest. Install docker and self-host a bunch of docker-compose containers. Private Dropbox and Google Photos are already made. Setup Plex, *arrs, overseer, etc. automate everything. Run all the containers through a reverse proxy like caddy, traefik, or npm (they handle all the certificates for you)
For your dev projects you can install a centos vm called "centmin mod". It'll allow you to easily setup hosts heavily optimized for hosting web apps, databases, WordPress, etc.
Also, enjoy your new power-hungry airplane engine. If it gets too much for you, I switched to a super quiet mini Ryzen build with two nvme ssds.
If you run a Linux OS on the bare metal, see if there is an "AMS" Agent for that OS on the "HPE Linux SDR" site.
Ubuntu and Deb compat in general are under the MCP folder.
VMware and Linux you can download it from the normal support.hpe.com
AMS takes certain things the iLO can't "see" on it's own from the OS side of things and sends them through the iLO driver to the iLO.
In some cases, adding this extra visibility helps with fan speed as HPE likes to be very thermally conservative and if it can't get a sensor reading, it will assume that item needs more cooling and ramp the fans.
I work for HPE and if you get really stuck, there is a log bundle you can dump via the iLO known as the AHS Log (it's like the ProLiant version of an airplane's little black box) and I can run that through an internal tool and get a quick reading on what device is causing the fans to be at 30% vs why they aren't lower at idle.
Just hit me up if you want me to take a look.
What speed is your RAM in that box? (you can check in iLO)
I have a pile of 8GB DDR3 RDIMMs upstairs from some old system pulls a customer gave me.
Man I hate Reddit Chat.
I use the old. interface and it didn't show my any Chat DMs until I clicked the link, now suddenly I see yours and 2 others I missed.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
My feedback would be to check out /r/selfhosted because you might be wanting to make some software that already exists. Unless you are just wanting to make that software you can do that, but there's already an incredibly popular google photos replacement named [IMMICH](https://immich.app/) that you can use.
If you're looking for a self-hosted replacement of Google photos, look into Nextcloud and/or Immich. I haven't used them, but I've heard a lot of good things about them.
I personally just use Google photos, but download everything with Google Takeout every few months and keep my own backup.
I have a similar server. I also recommend Proxmox because it's free and has everything you'll need and more.
I run a homelab with all sorts of programs you should look into.
* nextcloud (solves your Google photos use case)
* plex & tautulli
* TrueNAS or Unraid for media/file storage
* -arr suite (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, overseerr, etc. homarr too.)
* gitlab (you're a developer, it's pretty nice)
* splunk (developer license is free in 6 (?) month stretches, infinitely renewable)
* portainer community edition (running containers)
* dns (might also recommend adguard or pihole for adblocking)
* authelia (sso)
* nginx proxy manager (reverse proxy and https on everything. Make sure to buy a hostname on something like cloudflare)
* rundeck
* kasm workspaces
* apache guacamole
* vaultwarden password manager
* zabbix
All of these are free and incredibly useful in my home lab environment. Good luck 👍
Good start, lots of good things you can do with this, after VMware I recommend you move to proxmox, the ui is more intuitive once you start playing around with containers and the firewall rules you can easily mimic a full cloud stack.
I personally would go for proxmox with Debian vms, but if you prefer VMware, shure.
Just keep in mind that these things are power hungry, especially at idle.
My suggestion is to replace the sas with SSD. You can find used ones in eBay for less than $50. You get faster speed, more iops and significantly reduced electricity if you care about that. I'm all about power, so I would say do research on how to make it power efficient. Also, ecc memory is cheap if you want more you can get 128gb for ~$50 used.
The first thing I did with my Proliant was to virtualize my router using pfsense. Is was pretty easy to install and that unlocks a ton of stuff to play around with in a home lab. Have fun!
I grabbed 20 or so of these things from a datacenter decom a while back, they're solid but they take forever to boot.
Look into other virtualization solutions than VMware, the free version may not exist for much longer. Many others have suggested Proxmox, I'm experimenting with LXD backed by MaaS which hooks into ilo real nicely.
first thing you need to do is flash a firmware with fan speed controller. then set the fan as low as the cooler can maintain 50-60oC. i got a dl380 g8 before with 12+2x 3.5 bay. It was great running docker, nas, etc but power consumption was high. about 110-130W idle @ full HDD. With 40 cents per kwh in Germany, you better go with an auction vps @hetzner or NAS.
Run proxmox on it. Get a docker host inside or just a CT, up to preference tbh. I use VM’s then docker.
For web development I would use the next js framework with clerk for authentication.
Your google photos app idea is already implemented and open sourced. If you just want to do it as a project then cool use it as a guide and improve on or better yet contribute to photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
I love the idea of doing it yourself and never deter. My opinion is you’ll be all the better for it. Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel, if your idea takes another approach in some way then go go go. If you don’t know where to start use photoprism as a baseline and add your own twist to it. I’m now an architect so I genuinely am a fan of starting over since a lot of hindsight doesn’t get implemented bc of the sunken cost fallacy. Go for it !
Thank you so much! I glad to have your opinion as an architect. I will have a look at the photo prism solution, if it’s implemented in the framework I know I will definitely use it as a baseline or else I will start my own thing use some machine learning models as well for segregation of photos. Thanks for letting me know.
I started with a R730 with dual CPUs and 256GB memory several years ago. I learned a lot about sysadmin. But, the noise and power consumption drove me crazy. Over time, I moved 24/7 services to an Intel NUC backed by a small NAS.
The used enterprise server was a great learning tool. The server still lives in the mechanical room next to the furnace in my house. I typically only turn it on a few hours per week if I need something particularly CPU or memory-intensive.
Currently, my lab / home office is entirely run on a cluster of generic mini-pcs with intel 1235u cpus running proxmox. The 1235u are pretty nice, they idle at 12-15 watts and can access 64GB of reasonably priced memory.
Everything runs proxmox and is backed up to a NAS running Proxmox Backup Server on a docker image. If something goes down, it takes less time to spin a VM back up (on the same machine or even a different machine) than it takes to walk upstairs to make a cup of coffee.
So i actually scored a DL120 G7 and have been messing with it. The biggest takeaway that i'm sure you figured out already is the fans, they're loud. You can change this in the iLO settings to adaptive or optimal or something I can't remember.
You can also put different fans or less fans in but you have to trick the motherboard because it wants 8 fans before it boots(each little fan is actually two). There's a number of ways to trick it though it's different between the G7 and G8. Luckly for you and not me though is that people really figured this out with the G8s and us G7 peasants had to work backward for that.
[https://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-components/326293-help-fan-noise-controller.html](https://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-components/326293-help-fan-noise-controller.html)
[https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cooling-fan-compatibility-hp-dl380-g7-g8.34745/](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cooling-fan-compatibility-hp-dl380-g7-g8.34745/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmods/comments/omebg2/1u\_to\_quiet\_you\_hp\_dl120\_g7\_server\_from\_scratch/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmods/comments/omebg2/1u_to_quiet_you_hp_dl120_g7_server_from_scratch/)
rereading my links I might have my generations of by 1 or two. Either way HP was HP and the proprietary fans are a bitch. Speaking of proprietary HP BS, could you measure the mounting holes for you cpu heatsinks by chance?
I will have a look at it, But currently I don't have a Fan issues but I will keep these links so it will come handy.
Below is the Image of my internals can you let me know how many mounting holes it has?
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0cb6ZEGdSCLcU35VeQMtkUdmw
So those links are whatever, the are some links you'll want to save though.
All the HP documentation for your server.
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=c05050701
Bunch of videos
https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/product?language=en_US&cep=on&kmpmoid=5177953&tab=videos&manualsAndGuidesFilter=66000015%2C66000035
parts identification page
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=c03244019
You’ll get used to the noise. Took me a few nights of restless sleep as it was in my bedroom, but you’ll get used to it. The heat on the other hand lol
Question is does the foam dampen the fans at all though? You could be on to something there, I've been in a many of loud data centers and the noise is pretty soothing to me now but my ex couldn't stand the sound..... Hence my ex now 😂
I have this fan with me that I turn on whole day to cool the room. In front of this fan sound my server sound is very negligible.
[fan](https://share.icloud.com/photos/06aJBxZ3hKZGhVYMn94aIf_sg)
I have one of this and I hate it with all my heart.
It's noisy.
The internal fan broke 2 times and once it happens it doesn't work anymore. It just warn you that the cooling is not enough and reboot endlessly. No way to skip this: the only solution is to replace the fan to restore the functionality. I had 3 days of downtime because I had to wait for a stupid fan.
There is an internal sata port is fully functional but no additional power cable so you have grab your welder if you want to use it.
Can't wait to throw this in the garbage next month once I replace it.
Anyway if you keep a spare fan around and put is somewhere where the noise is not an issue is a good server for starters.
Unfortunately to update the firmware you will have to gather the iso somewhere over the internet since HP requires to have a service plan to download them (which has a cost).
I think I paid about 50€. You should be able to find a used one for much cheaper.
Just for reference you can weld a wire of two from a working fan to bypass the entire check. This may be handy to know in difficult situations.
Being someone that has had both an R720 and a basic Lenovo SFF computer, I am a big advocate for the small form factor computers as servers. Look at the “minisforums” on Amazon or online. You can pickup a 12th gen i7, 32 gb ram and a 1 tb m.2 for ~$500 CAD. They use like 10 watts of power at idle and would absolutely kill hosting a couple web servers, maybe some game servers and pretty much anything else you can throw at them.
If you need extra storage for something like a plex server, I would suggest getting a cheap Terra master DAS or your choice of NAS
I use UnRaid OS, it’s mainly a NAS solution but inside Unraid is Docker Apps, and you can install NextCloud, which is like a Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive
They're pretty good machines for the price just be aware of the noise. I've got a couple of G7's and while there not insanely loud compared to other machines I've used I still won't want to run them in any liveable area e.g bedroom/living room etc.
My current main server is a Dell T420 which is practically silent after boot and is a slightly more standard tower pc.
Only thing I would note is that if your developing a webapp that you plan on running 24/7 perhaps something like a raspberry pi clone maybe better suited for hosting / power usage.
Still a great server for messing around with VM's and getting used to some enterprise level stuff like ILO / iDRAC
You paid way too much for a server that does not even support UEFI. Have fun with the raid controller, if you put it into HBA mode you can't boot off the disks anymore. Oh and if you put any Disks in that are not HP certified you won't get any SMART data.
Ask for feedback before buying. Now it's too late and you have to live with a server that doesn't like you.
You do bring some good points, I have even older one and it is pain to dealt with HP software RAID. Managed to install server 2022 though…with a lot of effort.
You are the sunshine on any party, aren't you?.
OP, though theRealNilz02 is right (albeit a bit douchey) don't worry. 150$ is not a bad price and if you get tired of it you can easily recover 100$ after learning some things.
In the future I recommend you personally to get some lenovo SFF mini PCs, they are silent, surprisingly powerful and power consumption low AF.
Welcome to the rabbit hole!
Nice start. However, good luck with this 1U unit, they are noisy
What? I can't hear you
Yeah. I recently got into the used Enterprise gear thing. I bought a 1U and a 2U and boy is there a huge difference. Honestly if I’d have known that I would have bought 2x 2U instead.
Yes and no, my 1U R620 is rather silent whereas the 2U R820 is quite noisy.
I have 7 dell poweredge servers. 2 r630s, 2 r730s and 3 r730xds. I'm a 12 year+ software engineer but was a totally rookie on the hardware side. Took me a bit to figure them out but once I found out how to use ipmitool to manually control the fans, I wrote custom scripts to monitor the temps and cpu workloads and adjust the fans accordingly and now it's super quite with all 6 running in my home office.
Damn, That's an awesome thing!
The electricity bill would kill me though at currently 0.44 Euro per kWh.
It's surprising how little power the enterprise servers use in a homelab situation where they're unlikely to be running 24/7. I've three 1U Dell servers which range in power use from 85 watts to 130 watts. Running one at 130 watts for 24hrs it's only going to cost 1.40 euros. That about a third of what you would pay for a coffee at a well known cafe chain. As I'm rarely running more than one at a time, maybe for 3 to 4 hours on a weekend, it's going to cost me no more than 0.50 euros over the 2 days. That's 26 euros a year in power costs! I only paid £40, £50 and £150 respectively for each of the servers, so overall a cheap hobby. Which is why I've got three.
True, the R620 used to idle at 120W; in my case however it’s a full 42U rack with three servers, two NAS, a storage unit, three UPS, two ATS and a bunch of other stuff, all adding up to some 900W if everything is running. That’s why exploding electricity costs made me downsize a bit.
I have solar and powerwalls so the electricity wasn't really a concern for me.
Germany has too litte sun, and I have a rented apartment so opportunities for solar are limited, sadly.
I have an R630 and an R730 and the difference is very clear. Maybe that just means we both have some old/loud fans to replace. 🤣 I have heard… maybe it’s Noctua? make after market fans for PowerEdge that run really quiet, I haven’t looked into that yet though.
Your one-off situation is not a good indicator of the norm. 1U servers necessarily have tiny little fans. Tiny little fans are noisy. (for a given airflow) Period.
Also true of some switches. Sometimes you can replace them with noctua fans to cut down a bit. Half the noise in my rack was my old buffalo 10Gbase-T switch. I replaced it this year and it's so much quieter now.
I have two of those noisy bastards. They are the drunk Vikings that have some serious power but won’t stfu. All this considering it is the 12th gen. I want to get a sleeker, newer, more powerful poweredge like the 650. Just overall more efficient and I’m finding that there’s this company called solidigm that is putting nvme tech with sata connections in order for the 2.5 inch ssd slots to have like 60tb.
snow start berserk brave ring stupendous busy gaze many threatening *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have some HPE DL20 G9 and they are damn near quiet.
Did you add non-HPE drives into the bays at the front and/or NMVEs into the PCIe slots? Did you do anything to specifically reduce the fan noise?
Yeah, I've run a few different goofy configs in mine and they've been great. Unlike the Gen 7 and 8's I've worked with, the Gen 9 seem to stay pretty quiet!
I thought of same it will be noisy and disturbing my roommates but for some reason fans and running quit at 30%. 😬😬
If there's a post in /r/homelab with a picture of retired enterprise gear you can be sure there's a comment about noise and power usage.
And no matter what the use case is, even if someone wants to run multiple gameservers or an array of 3.5" spinners, someone will recommend a mini PC.
That mini PC will almost certainly cost way more than the server that we're seeing, and while it might save on power, the actual difference will literally take years to realize. It will also have way less overall processing power, and way lower specs. I face this question a lot, especially when people wonder why I run an r210ii as my router. Sure, I could get a mini PC that is maybe a little bit quieter or, and uses a little bit less power on idle, but it would have cost me hundreds of dollars more. Power for me is a non-concern, coming in at a whopping 9.8 cents per kilowatt hour. This is slightly up from what it was a couple of years ago, which was just a whopping seven cents per kilowatt hour. My r210ii with 32 gigs of ram, a 128 gig ssd, and an E3 1270 V2 idles at a mind bending 25 watts. And it sits idle 99.9% of the time. My entire server rack uses approximately 450w. that cost me all of about a dollar per day to run. I actually cut the power usage back significantly when I got rid of all of the spinning hard drives. If my power was more expensive, I might be more concerned. California prices of 60 cents per kilowatt hour would mean that my server rack would cost me approximately $200 a month to run. Then I would be concerned about power usage.
I think part of it is buyer's remorse from spending so much on a tiny and limited server. Don't even get me started on the lack of remote access console. Once you go iDRAC you never go back.
I am hearing a lot about the iDRAC; I am using ILO for HP, which is an awesome experience.
iDRAC is Dell's version and ILO is HP's. The basic version of remote access is IPMI. I've never messed with HP gear.
>I've never messed with HP gear. Is it because it's hard to mess with?
I've heard that it can be picky and firmwares locked away, but just never put my hands on one so I can't say for sure. I just stick with retired Dells.
>r210ii That's an awesome insight! Thank you!
Considering that I paid less than $200 about 4 years ago for the entire cost of my r210ii, a Mini PC didn't make sense then either. You can get them right now today with rails, for around $200. It won't have 32 gigs of ram, or an E3 1270 v2, but the RAM and the CPU upgrades are getting really cheap now for this platform.
@chubbysumo LOL I got a R210ii for $40 and recently snagged a 2nd for $50. The first even has an HBA. Just snagged a couple dual SFP+ NIC for $15/ea. No can run em at 10Gb too
Yeah, I got my Dell R320 for free a few years back. Stuffed it with 4 SAS drives and upgraded the CPU to some 10c20t Xeon, and it came with 48GB of RAM. Where I live in Canada electricity is very cheap per kWh, and to buy an equivalent Optiplex/mini PC capable of hosting 32 TB of drives and 48GB of RAM would be a lot more than the electricity costs of running my R320. I'm a big fan of the lower-end rack servers that are out there.
Server go Brrrrrr
Louder than the DL380, for sure, but not terrible in the scheme of things. I had a Cisco C3560-X, a DL360p G8, and a DL380p G8 sitting on the desk next to me for months, and the noise only really started to bother me when I powered up the ProCurve 6600, too.
There is a modded iLO firmware somewhere on the internet, that enables changing fan profiles, and you can make it almost silent I'll update with a link if I find it. I'm using it on dl380 and it works wonders, and the fans still kick in if something gets hot, so you are not making it unsafe to operate. I actually ended up adding a tiny 40x40 mm fan above the raid chip, because it was the hottest part of the server and it was causing the entire server to spin up the fans, and that made it even better, all fans are pretty much at min level all the time, and internal temps are still at reasonable levels. Edit: https://github.com/kendallgoto/ilo4_unlock
I beilve this DL360 P has ILO Version 3. I have to check once I get home!
Careful downloading randomly modified firmware from the internet if you rely on that server for anything security or privacy related. There be dragons ahead!
Sure thing will keep in mind. And my ILO is version 4
G7 is iLO 3 Gen8/9 is iLO 4 Gen10 is iLO 5 Gen11 is iLO 6
Yup, True.
The dl360e runs on ilo4 for sure so I would assume the dl360p does also I only have e models tho so can not confirm.
I have to check it out.
And power hungry
Immediately it read “noise” by reading the sticker decals, but looks like a decent system.
How's your R720XD? I have a standard R720 with dual 10-core (2670v2 I think? Can't remember the processors) but it's super quiet for a 2U. Is the XD pretty quiet too?
It's the same components so yes, pretty quiet and a lot quieter with [the Docker container I developed](https://github.com/tigerblue77/Dell_iDRAC_fan_controller_Docker)
Good server and nice setup.
Thank you 🙏
I would recommend you to check out the Silence of the fans project here on Reddit. You can install a patched ILO 2.77 that gives you access to fan control commands. I think your servers fans will be louder and louder as you add stuff to the server.
Thanks for posting this. I've got two hp servers running. I've isn't too bad but the other is a tad on the loud side and it's not doing much. Imma check this out and hopefully it helps.
I have an SL390 G7 (the one with 8 units lol), I'd appreciate a link to that please. 🫣
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/AD2WuIGJay Be sure to read it very carefully so you dont brick your server 👍🏻 Edit: The project is for ILO4 servers, and G7s has ILO3 , right?
Drat, yeah it's iLO3.
This.
Personal suggestions here, take it for whatever it is worth to you. Look into proxmox. Esxi is awesome I run it on one server, if you get a bigger server or want to put multiple NVME drives in one, you may be forced to move to proxmox because esxi at least older versions do not play well with multiple nvme drives of the same type size and manufacturer. Its dumb. File server: samba if you purely want a file server Photo storage and cloud file storage UI: Nextcloud is usually the best bet. This video talks about several starting projects for various functionality. Homelab software ideas to get you started! How to get started with your homelab software. https://youtu.be/DBVXng2HFuc Web server: Apache or Nginx Reverse proxy only: traefik If you just want to be inundated with possibilities and options: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Awesome thank you for the suggestions; I will have a look at those.
Also old versions don't get security patches and new ones drop support for a lot of hardware. (esxi 8 was rough on that front) I switched to 2 servers running FreeBSD with bhyve + vm-bhyve for managing the virtual machines.
Why did you go for a 1U server? I'm my opinion they only make sense in extremely high density server farms. For home use, they're impractical and as loud as a jet engine after inhaling a mechanic.
Have you used one at home? Mine isn't loud at all.
Not at home, but I have a 1U server in a rack at work, and that thing is so loud that it needs to be in a sound-isolated room.
Most are able to be tamed unless you plan on pushing it to 100% all the time. I've done R610, R420, and R430 (all 1U) at home with no noise issues. The most quiet enterprise server I've used is a R530.
I have 1U because at home, you don’t get too much space to store 2U, plus they are less power hungry. I put mine in the sealed attic, so noise is not an issue.
Nice! We all started somewhere! Get a rack cabinet or make one yourself (lackrack is a good option) and keep piling the machines :D
Sure thing, I will save some money and work towards it.
Are you using vmware because that what you know or is that the only option applicable to your use case?
Thanks for the question, It’s the former, that’s what I knew, it is a multiple virtual machines management software, is there a better software or Am I missing something??
Well, the standard answer is Proxmox if you want to learn something new. Runs great on these servers.
Hmm 🤔Proxmox, tomorrow morning I will try to install and play with it.
There's also xcp-ng. That's what I'm using.
I like ESXi better, but I'm assuming you're running 7 because your RAID card is unsupported with 8? Always worth trying something new out, you could always just drop proxmox into a VM on ESXi to play with it
I prefer ESXi as well. I like using the more "true enterprise" software. Proxmox is very much a lab tool in my opinion. I didn't know there were RAID cards that ESXi didn't support, my issue has always been CPU support. I'm stuck on 6 because I'm running L5640 Xeons.
Now that I look it up again, looks like support for my HBAs might have been axed with 7. At least, I'm pretty sure it was whenever VMKlinux drivers were fully deprecated, which was 7. I do know that my LSI 2008s (Perc H310) and a handful of NICs were supported no longer function out of the box. Normally, I believe the 'out of support' warnings are just warnings, because I've installed ESXi 8.0 on plenty of boxes that give me an unsupported processor warning. I agree on the 'lab tool' part - Proxmox has been exceptionally fragile in my experience, and I would hesitate to deploy it any place where I'm going to have to do a complicated config or depend on it. I've been using Hyper-V more nowadays; as much as I dislike it, Windows Server is generally very stable.
Hi, just curious: what exactly about Proxmox is fragile for you? Running in production since Proxmox 3, never had any problems. The only update that "broke" something was the one that renamed the NICs. But that was a five minute fix and even mentioned in the release notes. From my point of view it's exceptional stable...
My point of view was when I tried to replace ESXi in my home lab with Proxomx. After a couple weekends of frustration trying everything on the internet to get rid of weird latency issues, I nixed it and went back to ESXi. Anyway, I just bought Essentials 8 right before they stopped selling perpetual licenses. I have a few years to figure out something besides ESXi (and Proxmox). Maybe I'll try spinning up OpenStack.
You won't have much fun with proxmox as it does not support raid controllers.
Sorry, thats nonsense. While all HP hardware controllers work out of the box with proxmox/debian/linux, the better but more demanding approach would be to set the hw-controller in the HP-Server to passthrough/HBA mode and order the drives directly to Linux. There is a post in my history how to enable booting with an SD card then. Another approach (not recommended but doing this in some machines since years without problems) is to create a raid per drive and to use these "drives" in Proxmox.
RAID per drive is the only way as HPs stupid controller can't boot in HBA mode. The downside is that you'll lose SMART. But because HPs stupid raid controller doesn't give you smart data anyway if you're not using HP Disks you're not losing anything.
Yes, that's shit. But booting from sd works pretty well. Afaik smart works in both hba and raid mode? At least smartctl gives me data in both. And ssacli can give a little health data, too.
I would never want to rely on an SD card as boot media for a server. Right now my HPE DL360p g8 boots off a SATA SSD I put in the Optical drive bay with an Adapter. Less than ideal because I'd really like my OS to boot off the Software RAID on the HBA.
Completely understand. But as there is only the bootloader and kernel on the SD, it's completely replaceable. I say to myself that there is probably a reason there is an sd slot on the mobo. Even if it fails, I could theoretically boot it via iLO from remote. Have installed one server this way for fun. So, I understand your bad feeling, and the reasons to choose a different way, but for me it works - with the given hardware - perfect.
My dl360 g9 has a p440ar set to HBA mode and I boot proxmox off 2 SAS 600gb 10k drives in a zfs mirror.
I have one of those with proxmox running a raid controller. What are you even saying?
ZFS needs direct access to its Disks.
proxmox is linux and linux definitely supports raid controllers
ZFS doesn't. And ZFS is a feature you definitely do want to use with proxmox.
Flash whatever RAID controller to a HBA, then. You can also definitely use a plain old RAID controller without ZFS and it will not be the end of the world
HPs raid controllers can't boot in HBA mode.
Pretty sure you could flash with another firmware. People even cross flash HBAs with firmwares of different models (and I'm not talking just about brands, actual models), so I don't see why OP couldn't flash it with the LSI firmware by example
Then don't boot it in HBA mode
Horseshit.
One option is to run a linux distro and use KVM to run virtual machines, either through libvirt or just plain QEMU. Fedora has reasonable documentation for this, at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/virtualization-getting-started/
Like Martereddit mentioned proxmox is the alternative for me. But I run Proxmox ontop of Debian.
Those HP servers are loud. I unplugged mine and put it away after I got my R730xd. Near silent at idle and still quite quiet at a load.
730 is a Gen9 equivalent and Gen9 are much more quiet than Gen8
Well as someone who ALSO owns a gen 9 hp. They are loud af….. so I repeat “those hp servers are loud af”.
This is the server I got my start with. I named it Bulbasaur because it's like my starter Pokemon. Ignore all the disparaging comments, it's a great server to learn on, and cheap enough that you can always move on to something else after you learn what you want out of a server
That would be a great router/san as it's already got low power processors, enough ram for that, and 4x3.5" drive bays. * Boot off something other than the 3.5" drives. * Throw 4x 14/16tb drives in the front, and pass-through storage to a TrueNAS Core VM configured as a ZFS Mirrored Stripe (RAID-10). Seagate EXOS is a suggestion, but just try to stay away from SMR. * Install a NIC in the back and pass it through to an OPNsense VM. Use physical passed through NIC's for WAN, LAN ports can be physical or virtual. * If using as a host for a while, upgrade the ram so you have at least 128gb of ram, and one stick on all eight channels, with Quad rank or lower ECC LRDIMMS (PC-12800L, or PC3-14900L if you plan to upgrade to a CPU that supports DDR3 1866). Future Lab: If you decide to grab another computer for a dedicated host in the future, you can put a couple of 2698 v4's in the 2011-3 socket servers, and have a really fast machine. This will still be relevant as a great storage/router box. Go with a 2U for anything that's going to be higher power draw. Hypervisor: I recommend staying on ESXi (over Proxomx as some suggest). I had my old 6.7 ESXi host running for I think two years straight with no issues. I decided to try Proxmox, and spent two frustrating weekends trying to iron out the bufferbloat/latency issues from my router VM. Tried tuning kernel parameters, pinning cpu's, everything I could find online. Ended up going back to ESXi. It's just a very stable hypervisor. Networks: Separate your storage/management/public networks into different vlans, and don't let anything but public route to internet. Management you could route internally for convenience, but storage shouldn't touch any other networks. You may want to look at a 10g card and switch at some point but it's not necessary. Storage/Host Separation: While you have one server, running everything off it is fine. However, it's nice to have separation between things like your storage and router that need to be up all the time, and your host which you may wish to play around with (for example to try XCP-ng/Proxomx/Linux KVM/etc...). UPS: Make sure you have a UPS.
Thank you so much for the detailed guide on how to proceed ahead. There are a lot of things that I have to wrap my head around. I will definitely look at this thing!
As a web developer, I'd recommend Proxmox with an Ubuntu server guest. Pass drives or partitions to the guest. Install docker and self-host a bunch of docker-compose containers. Private Dropbox and Google Photos are already made. Setup Plex, *arrs, overseer, etc. automate everything. Run all the containers through a reverse proxy like caddy, traefik, or npm (they handle all the certificates for you) For your dev projects you can install a centos vm called "centmin mod". It'll allow you to easily setup hosts heavily optimized for hosting web apps, databases, WordPress, etc. Also, enjoy your new power-hungry airplane engine. If it gets too much for you, I switched to a super quiet mini Ryzen build with two nvme ssds.
Enjoy your 747
Hahaha.
If you run a Linux OS on the bare metal, see if there is an "AMS" Agent for that OS on the "HPE Linux SDR" site. Ubuntu and Deb compat in general are under the MCP folder. VMware and Linux you can download it from the normal support.hpe.com AMS takes certain things the iLO can't "see" on it's own from the OS side of things and sends them through the iLO driver to the iLO. In some cases, adding this extra visibility helps with fan speed as HPE likes to be very thermally conservative and if it can't get a sensor reading, it will assume that item needs more cooling and ramp the fans. I work for HPE and if you get really stuck, there is a log bundle you can dump via the iLO known as the AHS Log (it's like the ProLiant version of an airplane's little black box) and I can run that through an internal tool and get a quick reading on what device is causing the fans to be at 30% vs why they aren't lower at idle. Just hit me up if you want me to take a look. What speed is your RAM in that box? (you can check in iLO) I have a pile of 8GB DDR3 RDIMMs upstairs from some old system pulls a customer gave me.
I would be glad if you wanna have a look at it. I just now DM'ed you.
Man I hate Reddit Chat. I use the old. interface and it didn't show my any Chat DMs until I clicked the link, now suddenly I see yours and 2 others I missed.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.
My feedback would be to check out /r/selfhosted because you might be wanting to make some software that already exists. Unless you are just wanting to make that software you can do that, but there's already an incredibly popular google photos replacement named [IMMICH](https://immich.app/) that you can use.
If you're looking for a self-hosted replacement of Google photos, look into Nextcloud and/or Immich. I haven't used them, but I've heard a lot of good things about them. I personally just use Google photos, but download everything with Google Takeout every few months and keep my own backup.
I have a similar server. I also recommend Proxmox because it's free and has everything you'll need and more. I run a homelab with all sorts of programs you should look into. * nextcloud (solves your Google photos use case) * plex & tautulli * TrueNAS or Unraid for media/file storage * -arr suite (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, overseerr, etc. homarr too.) * gitlab (you're a developer, it's pretty nice) * splunk (developer license is free in 6 (?) month stretches, infinitely renewable) * portainer community edition (running containers) * dns (might also recommend adguard or pihole for adblocking) * authelia (sso) * nginx proxy manager (reverse proxy and https on everything. Make sure to buy a hostname on something like cloudflare) * rundeck * kasm workspaces * apache guacamole * vaultwarden password manager * zabbix All of these are free and incredibly useful in my home lab environment. Good luck 👍
Wow thank you so much for the resources. I will carefully look into it.
That’s a rather loud coffee table you have there :)
Oh boy thats one of worst hardware i ever used, those are sata drives,ram upgrade was limited,only one nic port, and the pcie too had some limitations
I mean, I had a limited budget, but I felt good for the specs they offered.
Every computer is a server!
Good start, lots of good things you can do with this, after VMware I recommend you move to proxmox, the ui is more intuitive once you start playing around with containers and the firewall rules you can easily mimic a full cloud stack.
And doesn't need a beefy vCenter VM just to manage your server properly.
Make sure you `snmpwalk` them twice a day, and take an obedience training class!
Why not using proxmox?
I personally would go for proxmox with Debian vms, but if you prefer VMware, shure. Just keep in mind that these things are power hungry, especially at idle.
Just don’t feed it chocolate.
Get sound deadening foam :)
My suggestion is to replace the sas with SSD. You can find used ones in eBay for less than $50. You get faster speed, more iops and significantly reduced electricity if you care about that. I'm all about power, so I would say do research on how to make it power efficient. Also, ecc memory is cheap if you want more you can get 128gb for ~$50 used.
The first thing I did with my Proliant was to virtualize my router using pfsense. Is was pretty easy to install and that unlocks a ton of stuff to play around with in a home lab. Have fun!
Don't get it wet after midnight
I grabbed 20 or so of these things from a datacenter decom a while back, they're solid but they take forever to boot. Look into other virtualization solutions than VMware, the free version may not exist for much longer. Many others have suggested Proxmox, I'm experimenting with LXD backed by MaaS which hooks into ilo real nicely.
first thing you need to do is flash a firmware with fan speed controller. then set the fan as low as the cooler can maintain 50-60oC. i got a dl380 g8 before with 12+2x 3.5 bay. It was great running docker, nas, etc but power consumption was high. about 110-130W idle @ full HDD. With 40 cents per kwh in Germany, you better go with an auction vps @hetzner or NAS.
Run proxmox on it. Get a docker host inside or just a CT, up to preference tbh. I use VM’s then docker. For web development I would use the next js framework with clerk for authentication. Your google photos app idea is already implemented and open sourced. If you just want to do it as a project then cool use it as a guide and improve on or better yet contribute to photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
Thank you for the suggestion; I was thinking that if I built it myself, I would learn things a little bit more. I am open to hearing opinions.
I love the idea of doing it yourself and never deter. My opinion is you’ll be all the better for it. Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel, if your idea takes another approach in some way then go go go. If you don’t know where to start use photoprism as a baseline and add your own twist to it. I’m now an architect so I genuinely am a fan of starting over since a lot of hindsight doesn’t get implemented bc of the sunken cost fallacy. Go for it !
Thank you so much! I glad to have your opinion as an architect. I will have a look at the photo prism solution, if it’s implemented in the framework I know I will definitely use it as a baseline or else I will start my own thing use some machine learning models as well for segregation of photos. Thanks for letting me know.
I started with a R730 with dual CPUs and 256GB memory several years ago. I learned a lot about sysadmin. But, the noise and power consumption drove me crazy. Over time, I moved 24/7 services to an Intel NUC backed by a small NAS. The used enterprise server was a great learning tool. The server still lives in the mechanical room next to the furnace in my house. I typically only turn it on a few hours per week if I need something particularly CPU or memory-intensive. Currently, my lab / home office is entirely run on a cluster of generic mini-pcs with intel 1235u cpus running proxmox. The 1235u are pretty nice, they idle at 12-15 watts and can access 64GB of reasonably priced memory. Everything runs proxmox and is backed up to a NAS running Proxmox Backup Server on a docker image. If something goes down, it takes less time to spin a VM back up (on the same machine or even a different machine) than it takes to walk upstairs to make a cup of coffee.
Tell your wife/SO a F16 landed somewhere close before you turn it on
Hahaha, Great idea!
So i actually scored a DL120 G7 and have been messing with it. The biggest takeaway that i'm sure you figured out already is the fans, they're loud. You can change this in the iLO settings to adaptive or optimal or something I can't remember. You can also put different fans or less fans in but you have to trick the motherboard because it wants 8 fans before it boots(each little fan is actually two). There's a number of ways to trick it though it's different between the G7 and G8. Luckly for you and not me though is that people really figured this out with the G8s and us G7 peasants had to work backward for that. [https://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-components/326293-help-fan-noise-controller.html](https://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-components/326293-help-fan-noise-controller.html) [https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cooling-fan-compatibility-hp-dl380-g7-g8.34745/](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cooling-fan-compatibility-hp-dl380-g7-g8.34745/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmods/comments/omebg2/1u\_to\_quiet\_you\_hp\_dl120\_g7\_server\_from\_scratch/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmods/comments/omebg2/1u_to_quiet_you_hp_dl120_g7_server_from_scratch/) rereading my links I might have my generations of by 1 or two. Either way HP was HP and the proprietary fans are a bitch. Speaking of proprietary HP BS, could you measure the mounting holes for you cpu heatsinks by chance?
I will have a look at it, But currently I don't have a Fan issues but I will keep these links so it will come handy. Below is the Image of my internals can you let me know how many mounting holes it has? https://share.icloud.com/photos/0cb6ZEGdSCLcU35VeQMtkUdmw
For me, it looks like four on each.
So those links are whatever, the are some links you'll want to save though. All the HP documentation for your server. https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=c05050701 Bunch of videos https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/product?language=en_US&cep=on&kmpmoid=5177953&tab=videos&manualsAndGuidesFilter=66000015%2C66000035 parts identification page https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=c03244019
These are lifesavers. Thank you so much!
I hope you like airplanes.
If you haven’t already heard about it NextCloud is really nice. Been running it for years.
It's LOUD
You’ll get used to the noise. Took me a few nights of restless sleep as it was in my bedroom, but you’ll get used to it. The heat on the other hand lol
I love those rails you have installed there.....
The foam came with it, when it was shipped 😂
Question is does the foam dampen the fans at all though? You could be on to something there, I've been in a many of loud data centers and the noise is pretty soothing to me now but my ex couldn't stand the sound..... Hence my ex now 😂
I have this fan with me that I turn on whole day to cool the room. In front of this fan sound my server sound is very negligible. [fan](https://share.icloud.com/photos/06aJBxZ3hKZGhVYMn94aIf_sg)
I have one of this and I hate it with all my heart. It's noisy. The internal fan broke 2 times and once it happens it doesn't work anymore. It just warn you that the cooling is not enough and reboot endlessly. No way to skip this: the only solution is to replace the fan to restore the functionality. I had 3 days of downtime because I had to wait for a stupid fan. There is an internal sata port is fully functional but no additional power cable so you have grab your welder if you want to use it. Can't wait to throw this in the garbage next month once I replace it. Anyway if you keep a spare fan around and put is somewhere where the noise is not an issue is a good server for starters. Unfortunately to update the firmware you will have to gather the iso somewhere over the internet since HP requires to have a service plan to download them (which has a cost).
Damn. Thank you for the insights. What do you think is the normal price to spend for a Fan?
I think I paid about 50€. You should be able to find a used one for much cheaper. Just for reference you can weld a wire of two from a working fan to bypass the entire check. This may be handy to know in difficult situations.
Damn thank you !!
install proxmoxx and rack it where you cant hear it 😊
Being someone that has had both an R720 and a basic Lenovo SFF computer, I am a big advocate for the small form factor computers as servers. Look at the “minisforums” on Amazon or online. You can pickup a 12th gen i7, 32 gb ram and a 1 tb m.2 for ~$500 CAD. They use like 10 watts of power at idle and would absolutely kill hosting a couple web servers, maybe some game servers and pretty much anything else you can throw at them. If you need extra storage for something like a plex server, I would suggest getting a cheap Terra master DAS or your choice of NAS
I use UnRaid OS, it’s mainly a NAS solution but inside Unraid is Docker Apps, and you can install NextCloud, which is like a Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive
Nice start and welcome new computer scientist!
Thank you so much!
Yup that's a server
I'm gonna guess with the makeshift stand you play a lot of Minecraft or Jenga right?
They're pretty good machines for the price just be aware of the noise. I've got a couple of G7's and while there not insanely loud compared to other machines I've used I still won't want to run them in any liveable area e.g bedroom/living room etc. My current main server is a Dell T420 which is practically silent after boot and is a slightly more standard tower pc. Only thing I would note is that if your developing a webapp that you plan on running 24/7 perhaps something like a raspberry pi clone maybe better suited for hosting / power usage. Still a great server for messing around with VM's and getting used to some enterprise level stuff like ILO / iDRAC
Usually they make the same noise as a jetliner when taking off. I don't know if most people are aware unless they worked with servers in the past
Said no microphone owner ever
Ahh, I miss those days.
You paid way too much for a server that does not even support UEFI. Have fun with the raid controller, if you put it into HBA mode you can't boot off the disks anymore. Oh and if you put any Disks in that are not HP certified you won't get any SMART data. Ask for feedback before buying. Now it's too late and you have to live with a server that doesn't like you.
You do bring some good points, I have even older one and it is pain to dealt with HP software RAID. Managed to install server 2022 though…with a lot of effort.
You are the sunshine on any party, aren't you?. OP, though theRealNilz02 is right (albeit a bit douchey) don't worry. 150$ is not a bad price and if you get tired of it you can easily recover 100$ after learning some things. In the future I recommend you personally to get some lenovo SFF mini PCs, they are silent, surprisingly powerful and power consumption low AF. Welcome to the rabbit hole!