Amateur Linux Hour

  • 🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
Would a Lenovo TS430 make a good server for Swizzin? I'm looking at one used that's $40 with no hard drives, but has 16gb of ram and a Xeon E3-1240 V2. I can get a 2tb drive for $20 and get more over time. https://www.lenovo.com/co/es/data-center/servers/tower-servers/ThinkServer-TS430/p/77LS7TS430M


Question: if i want to have a bunch of drives together in the same data pool where it's largely transparent and stable, but if a drive fails I just lose the data on that drive and nothing else, should i use ZFS or mergerfs or something else?
 
Last edited:
Betonhaus said:
Would a Lenovo TS430 make a good server for Swizzin? I'm looking at one used that's $40 with no hard drives, but has 16gb of ram and a Xeon E3-1240 V2. I can get a 2tb drive for $20 and get more over time. https://www.lenovo.com/co/es/data-center/servers/tower-servers/ThinkServer-TS430/p/77LS7TS430M


Question: if i want to have a bunch of drives together in the same data pool where it's largely transparent and stable, but if a drive fails I just lose the data on that drive and nothing else, should i use ZFS or mergerfs or something else?
Click to expand...


If the drives are old and on their last legs (assuming $20 for a 2tb means they are) you are begging for trouble with something like ZFS. If you ever need help with its quirks, you will need to need to get it from server gorns who are going to shit on you with a religious fervor that you dared to run their holiest of filesystems on straight-up jank.
 
SilentDuck said:
If the drives are old and on their last legs (assuming $20 for a 2tb means they are) you are begging for trouble with something like ZFS. If you ever need help with its quirks, you will need to need to get it from server gorns who are going to shit on you with a religious fervor that you dared to run their holiest of filesystems on straight-up jank.
Click to expand...
The server by default comes with no hard drives. The seller lists that they will sell a 2tb hard drive for it, but I was planning on just using my existing drives for now.

So I'll just use mergeRFS then? It's ultimately just a media server, and the OS and important files will be on good drives that I trust. If I use a system where a failed drive just means that those files get lost while everything else is intact, Sonarr and radarr will let me redownload what I want to keep easily enough
 
Betonhaus said:
The server by default comes with no hard drives. The seller lists that they will sell a 2tb hard drive for it, but I was planning on just using my existing drives for now.

So I'll just use mergeRFS then? It's ultimately just a media server, and the OS and important files will be on good drives that I trust. If I use a system where a failed drive just means that those files get lost while everything else is intact, Sonarr and radarr will let me redownload what I want to keep easily enough
Click to expand...

Should be adequate for what you describe.
 
Betonhaus said:
But what about the used Lenovo ThinkServer TS430? Is it good hardware?
Click to expand...

People seem to favor them for their price. Linux support is where these proprietary enterpriseish machines usually excel. Lenovo vs. Dell vs. HP stuff like this will be proprietary inside. From proprietary plastic thingies, to proprietary PSUs and a lack of expandability. Lack of CPU upgrade path or strange results ie, over heating with no suitable cooling solution, finicky RAM, etc) if you want to try to max them out some future day. Cheaper they are more likely it is because no one wants to deal with them.
 
SilentDuck said:
People seem to favor them for their price. Linux support is where these proprietary enterpriseish machines usually excel. Lenovo vs. Dell vs. HP stuff like this will be proprietary inside. From proprietary plastic thingies, to proprietary PSUs and a lack of expandability. Lack of CPU upgrade path or strange results ie, over heating with no suitable cooling solution, finicky RAM, etc) if you want to try to max them out some future day. Cheaper they are more likely it is because no one wants to deal with them.
Click to expand...
That makes sense. The price seemed low and the seller isn't very forthcoming on details. Based on what is being omitted I'm thinking all the hard drive hot swap caddies were pulled out and tossed.

I'm probably better off cobbling together a desktop PC server part by part from AliExpress

...or i can recognize that this is just scope creep from trying to figure out how to add more storage to a laptop running as a server. I'll get a cheapo esata adapter off Ali, but shop around for an actually good deal on an old computer i could use.

Plus I forgot I had an old 750gb HD connected to my Wii U which i was able to just plug in and alleviate the space.
 
Last edited:
...yup.

For those sitting in the back, it's common practice when disposing of old servers to just yank the old hard drives out and shred them. However, those hard drives are almost always screwed onto little hot swap trays that also go into the shredder. So all those really nice looking old servers that are dirt cheap? They're useless because you can't put hard drives in them, unless you track down that exact style of hard drive trays.
 
Betonhaus said:
...yup.

For those sitting in the back, it's common practice when disposing of old servers to just yank the old hard drives out and shred them. However, those hard drives are almost always screwed onto little hot swap trays that also go into the shredder. So all those really nice looking old servers that are dirt cheap? They're useless because you can't put hard drives in them, unless you track down that exact style of hard drive trays.
Click to expand...
While I'm thankfully in a position of having an old server trays and all, you've got my noggin joggin' about 3d-printing adequate replacements for any future acquisitions. Something that ensures the drive inserts without risk of pressing too hard on components, and stops it from dangling and snapping a connector, shouldn't be too hard to toss together in FreeCAD.
 
Is there a centralized resource for finding with distros have a certain package, and by what name? For example, if I wanted to add a find_package(jsoncpp) call to a CMake file, it would show me which distros have jsoncppConfig.cmake in one of its packages?
 
Friendly Primarina said:
Is there a centralized resource for finding with distros have a certain package, and by what name? For example, if I wanted to add a find_package(jsoncpp) call to a CMake file, it would show me which distros have jsoncppConfig.cmake in one of its packages?
Click to expand...
That doesn't sound impossible... I'd you had a list of all the repositories used by default for each distro you could do an apt or rnf lookup on each one and list which ones have them and under which locations.

Seems like it's been asked before
 
  • Like
Reactions: Friendly Primarina
crowabunga said:
While I'm thankfully in a position of having an old server trays and all, you've got my noggin joggin' about 3d-printing adequate replacements for any future acquisitions. Something that ensures the drive inserts without risk of pressing too hard on components, and stops it from dangling and snapping a connector, shouldn't be too hard to toss together in FreeCAD.
Click to expand...
It would be nice if the trays were standardized so you could buy them cheap, but I'd settle for an online list of 3D models for each style to print your own.
 
Betonhaus said:
That doesn't sound impossible... I'd you had a list of all the repositories used by default for each distro you could do an apt or rnf lookup on each one and list which ones have them and under which locations.
Click to expand...
Wow, I'm an idiot. I meant to post this in the Linux thread. Sorry everyone.
 
SSeSear
crowabunga said:
While I'm thankfully in a position of having an old server trays and all, you've got my noggin joggin' about 3d-printing adequate replacements for any future acquisitions. Something that ensures the drive inserts without risk of pressing too hard on components, and stops it from dangling and snapping a connector, shouldn't be too hard to toss together in FreeCAD
Click to expand...
Search for it on Thingiverse
 
  • Informative
Reactions: crowabunga
Well, tonight I'm picking up the Lenovo ThinkServer. Even if the drive trays are missing I can get them off AliExpress for not too much, and it otherwise looks to be a really good deal. I'll run memtest and do a bunch of checks before buying parts for it tho
 
  • Like
Reactions: 888Flux
Betonhaus said:
Well, tonight I'm picking up the Lenovo ThinkServer. Even if the drive trays are missing I can get them off AliExpress for not too much, and it otherwise looks to be a really good deal. I'll run memtest and do a bunch of checks before buying parts for it tho
Click to expand...
One thing you may find is those server type systems are not optimized for quiet. So depending on where you want to put it you may want to do some fan swaps. But at least that's far easier to do in a tower style case than a 1u or 2u rack case.
 
  • Like
Reactions: indomitable snowman
If it helps, Fujitsu towers are quiet by default. They were very popular with cheapskate companies on a budget. One can usually pick them up for cheap/free because they're not wanted for labbing and lack well-refined IPMI like iLO/iDRAC offers.

Of course, if you're looking to scale up with many drives and want to plop an OS on it with extremely long-term support, you'll want old HP Enterprise gear instead but it's worth noting that if you don't use HPE hard disks, the LEDs will not indicate drive health properly and Smart Storage Administrator will constantly give a warning about the lack of authenticated disks, buggering your monitoring.
 
davids877 said:
One thing you may find is those server type systems are not optimized for quiet. So depending on where you want to put it you may want to do some fan swaps. But at least that's far easier to do in a tower style case than a 1u or 2u rack case.
Click to expand...
The Lenovo TS430 is supposed to be "whisper quiet" but that might just be relative to other servers. I'll find out tonight when I get it and test it
 
This thing has two PSUs and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them.

Also yeah it doesn't have hard drive trays, but I got a 3gb sas drive which it supports so I think I can just have it loose until the tray from Ali comes in. It comes with four hard drive bays but there's room for a second block of hard drive bays for the future. After supper I'll take a closer look at it, as I have no idea how I'm going to run memtest or install Debian if it doesn't have a gpu
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back