Finally Operational

[Gbuddai]

Boy oh boy has it been an adventure. Let me start by saying, I have been incredibly stoked by the promise this OS has, ever since it was a twinkle in the creator's (and Linus Sebastion's) eye.

I bought the lifetime license when it was $99 on Black Friday. Only problem was, the server I intended on loading the software on, I had never turned on since my late father gave it to me from the town that he was the IT director for. The machine was an old intel server running dual Xeon E5520s that as soon as I bought HexOS, I immediately started pulling together with some shucked hard drives, a 3D printed SSD bracket and an RTX2060.

There was only 1 problem. This server would be going into my rack (without rails since they are proprietary and discontinued ~10 years ago), the rack is in a family room downstairs, and the server sounded like a jet taking off when it was online. After so much research, I discovered that the only way I could truly change the fan speed curves would be through IPMI and IPMI access would only be through an Intel proprietary module that would cost me more than I was willing to pay for old hardware rather than using what I have laying around. So, here I was with a proper server tower for my home server/homelab and it sounds like a jet engine. What's a guy to do?

The good news: I had an ASUS Z170-A motherboard with a 6700k and 16GB of RAM that was flagged for the family computer from the last time I upgraded my personal rig. The complicated news. The combo had an AIO cooler attached to it and the case I was repurposing doesn't have support for any radiator let alone a 280 radiator. In comes my late father to the rescue once again! He had bought but never used a brand new Hyper 212 LED Turbo! Fast forward and a swap of the motherboards, dropping in the new tower cooler, plug in the SAS controller from the server and.... HexOS is up and running! Only two catches. The front panel connector isn't compatible with a consumer motherboard and the HDDs in the hot swap bays aren't showing up in HexOS, only the 2 128GB SSD in mirror for the OS and the 2TB NVMe SSD I plan on using for a cache.

So now I have 2 new problems to solve in place of my 1 problem. It's a good thing I like tinkering! The front panel connector thing isn't that big of a deal. The motherboard has an onboard switch and I can configure the BIOS to automatically power on when power is restored as well as I can enable wake on LAN. So I just won't have any pretty blinking lights on the front. The harder problem was this SAS controller. Turns out, when plugged into the Intel Server board, it was configured to work as a pass-through; however, on my consumer motherboard it defaulted to being a RAID controller. I had 2 options; either flash the firmware (and risk bricking the card) or, once again, paying money for a new IT mode SAS controller.

With my tail between my legs and the future in mind, I finally shelled out some money and bought an IT mode SAS controller. And at the end of this journey, I officially have a home server that is a NAS box and will provide me with the self hosting ability I've been longing for!

Thank you HexOS and its developers. Without this awesome software and its promise, I may never have gotten as far as I have and learned all that I've learned already! And that's just the hardware side. Now it's time to play with software!

[ubergeek]

So with a bit of swapping you could change the fans and make it more quiet, I've done it with many older dells. For the front panel if you get a multimeter you can chase down the traces and find the outputs and solder on headers that will work for your current motherboard. Lastly for the SAS card, I have flash many over the years and have never had one fail. Just take your time and read threw the documents on how to flash and let it roll. 

 

Good luck and keep us up to date with what you end up doing

[Gbuddai]

It's all loaded up and operational. Definitely could be quieter with a fan swap. My plan now is to save up and get a proper rack mount case and reassemble the original server to sell it. It'll keep y'all posted!