Posts tagged with "hardware"

I want an extra ~350w of power available for a GPU that cannot run off PCIe bus power of 75w or 25w in some very old Dell Optiplex 990 Mini Tower nodes in my Proxmox cluster.

When one of my power supplies died earlier and I bought on eBay a NEW 750W Dell OptiPlex 9010 990 790 Power Supply Replace / Upgrade that was ~750w and the same form factor as those nodes PSU. This was just fast purchase to grab something that would ship the next day with no plan for an upgrade but I did pay attention that was both better and newer with a warranty.

So I have one machine that has the extra wattage available for a much better GPU like a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12Gb.

I inherited, from a stack of old junk hardware, two Netgear Powerline 500 Nano XAVB5101 plugs. I thought I would try it out for a quick network connection between two floors in my new house using the existing power cabling.

Wow did I learn a lesson in a combination of networking and electrical power the hard way… with a repeatedly blown breaker.

An extended power loss for my primary Proxmox 8 cluster, while I was remote, took half of my cluster nodes out of commission into an unbootable state. This unbootable half of the cluster would not show up on the network after the power came back even with manual physical rebooting. The other half would boot up and show on the network. All the nodes had a second problem that they would not open a PVE WebUI Console Shell or show any output on any of the video output ports for either the Nvidia PCIe GPU or the Intel iGPU. So I have to figure out what looks to be a set of overlapping issues and clean up this mess. There were several lessons learned and re-learned along the way.

First, I need a “crash cart” to recover these to a bootable state. What is a “crash cart”, well that is usually a rolling cart found in a data center that you roll up to a broken server. They typically include some sort of serial terminal and/or a monitor, keyboard and mouse with a lot of connectors and adapters to hook up to random port for the equipment you are fixing. Mine includes adapters for VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI and both USB and PS/2 keyboard and mice. I’ve even thrown in a spare known good Nvidia K600 video card for troubleshooting graphic cards. A trusty and up to date Ventoy Bootable USB is sitting on there as well. I have a laptop that I could use for a serial terminal if we get to that point but I was hoping I didn’t need it since those are mostly for network equipment.

Here is my quickly thrown together trash can crash cart (TC³) for this adventure.

I have collected nine (9) mostly functional Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients for use in my experimentation with Proxmox Clusters and SDN and Site-2-Site VPN configurations with Tailscale. Yes, I know I have a problem. :)

On the upside, they are very small low power consuming Debian 12 servers that have a 1Gbps NIC and run headless nicely once you fix the BIOS settings and Debian configuration correctly. What is not nice is their CMOS batteries are all mostly dying on me and their connector is a odd type that is not supported by many vendors and are between $8-$12 USD to replace. For example the Rome Tech CR2032 CMOS BIOS Battery for Dell Wyse 3040 is about $9.89 USD as of posting this. This bothers me intensely as the actual CR2032 can be picked up for well under a dollar ($1 USD) each at LiCB CR2032 3V Lithium Battery(10-pack) for a pack of 10 for $6 USD. Also, I’m picking these units up with power adapter for between $20 and $45 on eBay and the $10 bite jacks my price per unit up a good bit. So what to do?

We live in a world with a penny ($0.01 USD) per GB of storage. I just found this bare drive MDD (MD20TS25672NAS) 20TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5” Internal Hard Drive (for NAS, Network Storage) - 5 Years Warranty (Renewed) for $199.99 USD. I also found Avolusion PRO-X USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black) - 2 Year Warranty (20TB) for $229.99 $219.99 USD with the USB C enclosure.

Adding another SSD Drive

In my etermal tinkering with my Lenovo Thinkpad T480s, I have continued the trend of adding new features. So earlier, in A new to me but old laptop and New Laptop update, I threw out a bunch of enhancement options. Some of those I’ve done and some I left on the backlog as things that just cost too much on my metric of usefulness per dollar. The WWAN SSD for extra storage was one of those that just seemed like a bad bang-for-the-buck for storage. I also like the option to add a SIM card and have cellular network available in case I have to go back to consulting on the road.

My new to me Thinkpad T480 is doing great. The better processor and the upgraded Nvidia MX150 GPU are both getting a workout with several of the new LLM models. I maxed out the RAM, Wifi, Hard Drive, and swapped around adding all the best components/features to one laptop consolidated from several different junkers I purchased. Those components include IR Camera, WWAN, backlit keyboard, good batteries, and a nice case.

I’ve been using an older Lenovo Thinkpad T460p laptop that I bought brand new May 2017 for $2210 USD with a pretty impressive discount for the time. The Thinkpad T460p released April 2016 over a year earlier from when I bought it. I over bought on the CPU/processor and bought extra power adapters and batteries upfront. It has been a great laptop but starting to show its age and I’ve been looking for a new laptop with a little more pep. Older USB is starting to be limiting and I’d like to go beyond 32Gb RAM.