Hardware

I bough a new server, this summer, and it’s technically arrived in a usable state, but it left a lot to be desired to be able to be fully operational as home server. As I had to jump through multiple hoops to avoid some pitfall or spend way too much money on some plastic parts I thought the information might be useful for someone else, or probably for myself the next time I have to build a server.

Disks

Boot disk

The Chassi is quite nice and has most of the ports one would need to operate a small server, but it really surprised me that the server, even though it was built in 2019 or 2017 did not have an M.2 slot to populate a boot disk with. As my Dell r720 it also possesses an internal sd card, probably to boot ESXI from, but I couldn’t find any information online on how to use it. Luckily, M.2 slots are technically just special PCIE ports (with the added benefit that you have to pray a bit less until the Bios allows you to boot from it), so I bought an PCIE to M.2 adapter and a new NVME ssd, as it turned out, that my old server was running on an SATA ssd and this was not compatible with the PCIE adapter. I would not have expected it, but it just worked, and the server could boot from it.

So, it all works now, but really how should this server boot, additional PCIE cards can’t be the official recommendation. I can only see two official options, and both seem really bad. Either you boot from a SAS disk, which is, compared to NVME just really slow, or you try to just run the operating system in memory, and yes I understand that it’s a server, but just one power cutoff, could bring the whole system to an halt, what where they expecting.

Storage Disks

I really tried, but I just couldn’t find an Tower server with 3 inch drives on ebay for so I just went with the model that had 8 2,5 inch slots. You normally get wors data density on these drives, but it was my only option. While I was awaiting him, I was already searching for possible drives until I stumbled upon an unrivalled offering an any aspects besides safety and storage density (yea just money, but it was so unbelievably good, I just had to take it). I could by 6 320GiB NAS drives, for just 18 Euros each. This is so incredibly cheap, I new there had to be a catch, besides the low density. I guess the “problem” was that they were pull-ware, which means that they have been take out of some preconfigured servers or Nases, but they assured me that they were new and unused. I just decided to let them run in a zfs raid 2 level, which means that they will be able to withstand two drive familiars and there would be no loss in data integrity. So, I bought them, and up until now everything seems fine.

Disk caddies

Oh man, I would have never through that that could be a real problem. The disks I bought for my dell were SSDs, way more expensive, but they got shipped with their own caddies. I would not have expected the cheap HDDs to be shipped with caddies, but the images looked like the server had already installed some. Not sure if I had enough screws to screw the drives in, so I preemptively bough some additional ones.

Who would have thought that, but two, all of the caddies that came with the server were placeholders. They looked like caddies from the outside but had a plastic bar that would stop the disk being mounted in it. I first hopped that this wouldn’t be a problem and I could just buy some, for 5 euros a piece or something on ebay, like I did for some extra ones on my dell, but as it turned out, first of all, caddies are not standardized so only Fujitsu caddies work, and secondly a lot of people have to little caddies.

The seemed to be selling for about 50 Euros a piece, which would have meant that I had to pay 300 Euros(without shipping) just to get some caddies for my disks that cost me just about 100 Euros. That’s kind of insane, given the fact that these caddies are just plastic pieces.

Thankfully some redditors noticed that these are really just some pieces of plastic and you can 3D print caddies, give you have an 3D printer(I think I should really fill this gap at my workstation).

Caddy printing

I started by downloading this 3D model https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3753528 and checked it’s dimensions, which seemed to fit. Then I send it to a friend with 3D printer, let him print one and give it to me:

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I could just give me one half, but thankfully it was the more important one and enough to test if it were to fit, and it did.

So, I sent the model to PCBway, who also have a 3D printing section, because I would have liked it to be reson printed, selected a more heat-resistant material and waited. Before they could print there was some quick back and forth about the thickness of the wall, because they could not assure me that there would be no cracks or something similar, but as soon as I said that I was O.K. with that, the printed and sent them over.

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I was a bit nervous, but all of them arrived in one piece and looked fantastic(one had one small crack in the wall but that’s really not a problem). I plopped in the drives and all, but one, were not recognized. I had already tested all the drives with the two working caddies that came with the server so, it must have been the 3D printed caddies’ fault. It would have made more sense if all 3D printed ones, were undetected by the server, but one obviously was. So I tried to switch and mix the different drives with the different caddies until I got 3 working, but it was very flaky. Then I noticed that some of the drives plopped out of their enclosure when slide into the server, and I had to make sure that they are locked in before the small stair. I made sure this was the case for all my drives, but it still wouldn’t quite work and was very flaky. A closer look at the difference between the real caddies and the 3d printed one, revealed that the 3D printed ones stood out a millimeter. So all I had to do was push them a bit further into the sever and all of them were suddenly recognized.

IPMI

The Fujitsu S4 Impi is really ugly, and of limited use, but the server also did not come with a license. There are legends floating around that it could be possible to hack the license, but I just havened had the time for this yet, and the power usage stats and power button are accessible, so there is nothing in particular (besides fan speed control) That I would be missing.