[Build Log] Network ReShuffle - Gigabit VPN Offsite Backup Server (pics)

[K D]

This Akasa A-ITX17-M1B chassis is pretty badass I have to say. Was pricey but if it performs as well as it looks I'm going to be quite happy. Also got a Cooljag 1U HSF for the Xeon D-1521 board.

I see you are putting the mini photobooth to good use.

 

[IamSpartacus]

I see you are putting the mini photobooth to good use.

Yea unfortunately I don't have a good camera right now but still better than nothing .

 

[IamSpartacus]

Added some of these 2.5" SSD Hotswap bays to my 4U iStarUSA Trayless chassis. This allows me to put my 2 cache drives in theses hot swap bays and free up 2 of the 3.5" trays for data disks. Not an immediate need but figured while I'm re-configuring things I might as well get these in since I don't like downtime .

Right now I'm in the process of copying all my data back to a fresh array of the WD Gold 10TB drives. Once that is complete, I can start moving the drives in my current backup server into the newly built off-site backup server which I'm going to start building over the next 1-2 days.

 

[IamSpartacus]

Installed Xeon D-1521 board along with the Cooljag 1U HSF and cut some thin black plastic strips to ensure proper airflow over drives.

 

[manxam]

Got some more goodies in today, including a new mini photobooth I've been meaning to get. So tonight will be my first opportunity to see how that works out. Certainly overkill for posting pics to a build log but a good test run .

@IamSpartacus, what mini booth did you get? The pictures look pretty good!

 

[IamSpartacus]

@IamSpartacus, what mini booth did you get? The pictures look pretty good!

Here you go @manxam.

 

[K D]

Here you go @manxam.

I think the link is messed up. this is the one.

amzn.com/B01GIL6EU4

 

[IamSpartacus]

Thanks @K D for that fixed link.


So one thing I just realized is that I can't use my SATA DOM's on the ASRock Rack board which I had planned to use as my boot drive for pfSense. So now I'm contemplating what's the better move:

1. Buy a cheap M.2/SSD for boot drive
2. Swap uses for the Xeon D-1521/i3-6100 setups and use the Xeon D board as my firewall and the ASRock board + i3 in my backup NAS.

Thoughts?

 

[SGN]

I think you should put at your location the most powerful setup you have. This one will aggregate all the traffic to the remote backup location(s) and your incoming/outgoing traffic to other nodes (it can be normal, non encrypted traffic but in some time you can decide to use eg. VPN for whole incoming traffic). I would choose Xeon D as SM mainboards are rock solid and they are well equipped, eg. 10Gbps and can provide nice PCI-e lanes for future proof solutions, like 40 or even 100GbE (PCI-e 3.0 16x). This 1521 has really nice clocks and 4 cores (as for Xeon D)

 

[IamSpartacus]

So I wound up deciding on using the i3 in my backup NAS and the Xeon D-1521 in pfSense. The project was delayed by those small missing parts you never think about (I/O shields, power supply extension cable, etc.).

Firewall is now up and running on the Xeon D-1521, the C2758 board is now installed in the Akasa case ready to be deployed at my parent's house, as is the backup NAS which isinstalled with drives and data has been fully replicated.

Forgot to take pics of the firewall swap but not much to see there really. Even though the NSC-810a case is designed for mATX cases, I'm glad I went with Mini-ITX. It accomplished exactly what I wanted which was give me more room to work with compared to the NSC-800 I used a few years back. As you can see I'm pretty terrible at cable management so it paid off.