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Welcome to the site of solemnwarning (Daniel Collins), here you will find software and other debris I've published over the years.

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Dual-Node Dell N06D Thin Client Server

Posted on 11 Aug 2024 at 15:52 UTC

Do you ever have those ideas that are really time consuming for not much reward? I get those a lot, and this one lodged in my head.

I've been running a Dell Wyse N06D thin client with a pair of 2.5" SSDs in USB enclosures cable-tied to it as my mail server for a while now, it works... but its a bit... rough.

A Dell N06D thin client, a USB 3.0 hub and two 2.5" SATA caddies cable tied together. A Dell N06D thin client, a USB 3.0 hub and two 2.5" SATA caddies cable tied together.

"The motherboard in this is pretty small... I could put it into a 1U enclosure along with a power supply and drives and have plenty of room left over."

"In fact... I could build a dual-node one!"

"I don't need a second node and don't know what I'd do with it, but..."

Bilbo the Wise.

And so that's how this project began.

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Watercooling a custom Supermicro-based server

Posted on 04 Jun 2024 at 19:14 UTC

Earlier this year, I built a server using a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard in a custom case (build thread), it is loud. It is very loud.

Sound meter reading 73 decibels
My phone running some random sound meter app is scientific, right?

Before starting this project, I took some baseline measurements - at idle, I recorded a noise level of 30 decibels in front of the server and both CPUs were hovering around 40C, after 10 minutes of running stress-ng --cpu 32, the recorded noise level was 73 decibels, the front CPU was hovering around 55°C and the rear CPU, ingesting the pre-heated air from the front CPU cooler was sitting around 75°C.

Not ideal.

I've always felt water cooling was unnecessary and overkill for computers... but with a server I can hear throughout the house whenever a CI job spins up on one of my projects, I'm willing to try it.

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I don't want to go on the cart!

Posted on 31 Aug 2022 at 16:36 UTC

So its been over 2 years since I last posted anything on this website, I'm still around though.

Those of you who follow me on GitHub have probably seen that I've been spending a lot of time on-and-off developing rehex (which I should probably write about here at some point), and besides that, most of my time has been taken up between my day job and a never-ending stream of repairs around the house.

Nothing exciting, just figured it was about time I put something here before people started auctioning off the furniture :v

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Testing IPXWrapper in The Cloud

Posted in Software Development on 27 May 2020 at 21:39 UTC

At the end of the last article (In September 2017 actually), I had a fully automated regression testing system for IPXWrapper. In September of 2019, after two years of not touching the system and doing a little work on IPXWrapper itself, I felt it was time to install Windows updates in the VM images... and that's where everything went wrong....

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