Recent content by Oarman

These boxes don't have any moving parts, whereas the EQ12 has an active heatsink fan that will eventually fill with dust, get noisy and/or fail. That's assuming you're not adding a fan to one of the passive boxes, but if you're just running OPNsense it's pretty unlikely you need to. Once you...

The X13SCH-F uses a C266 chipset and according to Intel that only works with Xeon E-2400s, no cheap non-Xeon socket warmer listed. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231692/intel-c266-chipset/compatible.html

The SuperMicro boards with integrated heat sinks are essentially designed for 1U systems, often with fan shrouds and/or industrial (loud) fans. Cooling them effectively outside those conditions can take trickery. If you are using a bigger case and want quiet operation, you're better off with...

It seems a frequent request is some variant of "what M.2 stick can I put in this box to use the least power." Or, alternately "which SSD offers the most performance per watt". The current reviews don't measure drive wattage directly, and I understand (especially for loaded measurements) this...

I have one of the 2-port N100 units. When I got it, I tried two different 32GB Crucial DIMMs (two halves of a CT2K32G48C40S5 kit) and neither could pass MemTest86+ with any kind of consistency, albeit with strange errors that I suspect were config / tuning problems. I ended up swapping in the...

The documentation suggests the half-height port on the riser (where the H330 is) is a x4 and the full-height slot (where I have the sound card in mine) is an x8. Googling around but not bios diving, it does not look like the R240 supports bifurcation.

According to the manual, it's SATA standard, SAS optional, I guess that applies to whatever drives the chassis ships with. Looking in the bay it looks like it can take SAS physically, at least. You can google all this or just find it here, these are bog-standard Dells, the only slightly odd...

Couple notes: - The logs on mine showed it had been opened up once since 2019, decommed in May '23, afaict no updates ever applied. - The sound card is essentially trash, it's not bad if you somehow needed onboard sound and had an X1 PCIE slot to spare but these days you'd just use USB - Mine is...

The drive bays are regular SATA but I assume you need Dell caddies

It's a reasonably modern processor and chipset, power supply, IT-patchable RAID card. It has IPMI and works properly with ECC RAM. It seems like a far better starting point for a baremetal TrueNAS build than a lot of the garbage consumer stuff you see people using. At these prices and free...

FYI the original listing price is down to $159, I offered 140 and they took it.

vPro can do most of what full-bore IPMI does but can be quirky in ways you want to figure out while the box is still local. For instance my HP EliteDesk needed an HDMI dummy plug to reliably display graphics remotely.

Blindly buying random deals because they just look cool is half of homelabbing

I know the interest has moved on to the newer boxes, but just as a data point, my CWWK J6413 box made it 52 days uptime without issue, OPNSense VM on Proxmox with the 6.2.6 kernel and latest microcode updates. I had had one previous KVM crash on a 6.1.something kernel before that. Other than...

Mine wouldn't boot with a DietPi USB directly, but if I put Ventoy on the USB with a DietPi ISO, it worked fine, and installed fine to the eMMC.