So I finished putting together the server last night, and then installed it. The motherboard SATA ports caused me enough concern to stop the assembly, and spend a little bit of time putting hot melt glue around them to reinforce them. Obviously this sort of activity will void your warranty, but since the board is unlikely to fail otherwise and it cost only about $100 to start with, I’d rather be working on the assumption that the SATA ports breaking off is much more of a concern than the unlikely event of an actual warranty component failure. It turns out all HDDs have a shroud on the top of their ports and the clips lock in, so I was wrong about that, but taking all the locking clips off the cables at the end that plugs into the MB was not enough to stop them flexing.
So it got powered up and I installed Debian 9.3 in UEFI mode, which I am starting to get used to. This is pretty easy to get the hang of; all you need is an extra partition, called the EFI System Partition, or ESP. This has to be between 100-200 MB in size, and formatted as FAT32, and set to bootable. On Linux you assign it the mount point /boot/efi. With that there on the SSD then it gets two more partitions as usual: the swap partition and the root partition mounted to /. After that the install went quite painlessly.
With the install complete after booting into Debian, it was time to set up the RAID array. I referred to my previous instructions, which is the reason I have them posted in this blog. The only real issue was assigning the wrong block ID in fstab to mount /home to, and logging on as myself instead of root (because my home folder is in the /home path). After fixing those issues, it mounted up properly and began syncing. Today when I turned it on, it starts resyncing straight away, which takes a while to complete for the first time. The disks seems to be OK despite their age, but they are server grade disks (RE3) rather than ordinary old WD Blacks.
The server is sitting under the desk incomplete. I am just waiting for the RAM to turn up (today hopefully) and also the adapter bracket for mounting the SSD, which probably won’t arrive until after the weekend. Neither of those things will hold me up from starting to use the server, but I have some other things to do anyway. One of those is to fix up the shelf it sits on, which as mentioned has to be lowered and reattached with new brackets onto the side of the desk. The other job waiting to be completed is to attach a shelf on top of the office drawer cabinet which sits to the right of the desk. This gets turned round 90 degrees to face me, and the shelf will increase the space on top of it from 500×500 to 600×800 by using two 600×400 melamine shelves I have left over. So the area just about doubles. The shelf will be attached using the “tee nuts” and 6 mm bolts I got from Mitre 10 Mega, rather than screwing it in place as I usually would.
Then of course there is setting up the server itself, I am not sure when that happens, but I guess I will be using it next week. I am surprised how quiet it is, I guess the Powerman PSU in this Inwin chassis is quieter than some of the older ones I have used. But I have given up on Enermax because their low end supplies aren’t quiet like they used to be; the one I got for the mediapc is the noisiest of all the computers I have here. Apart from the fact that the original one I got from Dove died after only a few days use and had to be returned under warranty.