I like the case a lot. It surprised me as it was bigger than expected and than it looked like, but I should have seen it coming. For one, it has room for a full-blown PSU (and I have the PicoPSU), and for two, I picked it because it has room for 6 3.5" HDDs.
But it's still pretty small, it's nice enough that my wife would let me keep it in a living room :)
I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it's good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.
And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)
I thought about it, but I got rid of a lot of my electronic junk in the recent years and would have to buy everything from scratch anyway. So I went with the "small and silent and low-power" route. I also think it's going to live in a closet in my home office as well :)
Sure, here's the breakdown:
AsRock J4125-ITX -> 120,62€ Crucial 8GB RAM kit -> 19,90€ 2 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB -> 2 x 114,99€ Samsung 870 EVO SSD 500GB -> 31,41€ (I originally ordered an NVMe one that cost 29€). Fractal Design Node 304 -> 91,89€ PicoPSU -> 35,95€ No-name Power Adapter (220V to 12V) -> 12,99€ Molex-2x Sata -> 9,99€ (there is a ~1€ option, but I wanted a nicer cable for some cable management.
A few cables that I had. Total: 552,73€
I wanted to get a 4-bay NAS, and QNAP, Synology or Asustor would be a bit less, but without the disks. Also, I wanted an x86 CPU, for potential future use. This way I turned out a little cheaper, and it is a bit more flexible.
Well, yes, kind of. More power means the PSU or the power adapter is heating up, generating more losses. Closer to their top power, it's also a bit spikier. You have a bigger reserve for spikes.
The downside is a slightly higher power draw (in absolute values, it's negligible, but in comparison, it can be a double-digit percentage difference).
I've been reading a bit, and I believe that my setup won't exceed 50 Watts, maybe a bit more if I add two more spinning disks. It should be quite a good match, I think.
Oh, I am enjoying it, but I didn't expect to start learning already. I thought I'll pick up a thing or two about the software side of things though, but most of the stuff I've been doing already for a long time. But yes, it's a deep rabbit hole.
Yep, that was my intention. First, it's low power, so it can be always-on with only a small impact on the power bill. Second, it's only gonna serve a few things - my photography hobby and media library, and maybe a service or two will come with time. If I need other services, I put them on a Hetzner box and they're much better taken care of.
I've done my share of sysadmin work and even a bit of server-room maintenance, I don't want a full-time, or even a part time job. This is mostly gonna sit in the corner, and be quiet. If the prices matched, I would have probably just gone with QNap or Synology, but this way I get the NAS and the disks for the same price.
Yes, it didn't inspire confidence when it arrived so, but it's actually a tiny PSU, it's essentially all bolted onto the power connector :)
And if you have a large company and many teams, you think actions will help? (Aside from the UI issues you mention). Rebuilding the Jenkins from scratch now would probably get rid of most of your problems, but in a year is gonna be a mess. It's similar to how it's going to go with and CI.
Also, a good DevOps person or team will keep the Devs happy (or at least, not very unhappy) with any tool, a bad one will suck anyhow.
At least that's my experience.
Yeah NixOS is my other alternative, but I think that rabbit hole is much more deep than the Ansible one :)
I also manage my few self-hosted things and play-things with docker-compose on my box, but who manages docker-compose files? :) And nginx config, and network-related stuff etc etc. I am too lazy but I guess I will have to bite the bullet and after 20 years of manually doing it all and backing up raw and praying, actually figuring out the next level.
You can then remove the russian federation lang pack: rm -rf /
Thanks! Yes, getting some hardware work done is always exciting, like a kid with a new toy!
You're right, the cost is about 320€ without the disks, not something to throw away if you already have a working solution. But if I wanted to wait and get used parts (like case, board etc) and only get new disks, it would probably be even cheaper. I left a cost breakdown in a comment above somewhere, if you want to do some calculations and sell off that Synology. You would probably need to add some money anyway, but hey, that's why we have jobs so that we can have toys :)