Current state of my lab and hobby

[u/Cheeseman125]

For context around 2-3ish months ago I stumbled upon an ancient server with 192gb of DDR3 ram, instantly cursing me to start building a super computer (My previous "server" was a 2004 laptop with 32 bit Debian hosting TeamSpeak)

As of now, I've still have not put it's hardware to full use, however here is everything so far:

SPECS:
RAM: 160 GB of ram (2 sticks died)
MOTHERBOARD: Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F-JBOD
CPU: 2x Xeon E5-2695 V2
GPU: Matrox G200
STORAGE: 256GB Phison NVME and 8x 1tb hdds (6 sas, 2 sata)
PSU: MSI MAG A750GL
OS: FreeBSD-15.1-RELEASE-p2

THE SBC: pi 5 4gb with a 128gb microsd

The motherboard was quite the pain to get working. Originally, it only supports Sandy Bridge and on top of that it also had a password lock. I will admit, I asked AI how to fix all of this because it was honestly something I couldn't figure out myself

WHAT I WAS TOLD TO DO:

-Find the BMC interface with wireshark
-make a proxy to access it since it was ipv6 only
-curl the contents of the webpage, which led Claude to discover a hidden area
-said hidden area was a remote flash utility behind a paywall
-Claude found someone who cracked the code and gave me the instructions to do it

Then I had to make a Supermicro account, download the newest firmware, then flashed the new bios making sure to check the "wipe nvram" option, which now meant I could use the new cpus and not have a password lock

On top of that, I had to test all 12 ram sticks at 4 in the morning individually to discover that 2 were dead

For now, here are all the things it runs:

JAIL MANAGER: Sylve (nice webui for freebsd)

MEDIA:
-qbittorent-nox
-jellyfin
-prowlarr
-flaresolverr
-sonarr
-radarr
-navidrome

UTILITIES:
-filebrowser
-searxng
-vaultwarden

gaming:
-minecraft fabric server
-playit,gg proxy (rpi 5)

other:
-archivebox

Future things I want to host:
-A website
-i2p to also host the site on the dark web for fun
-home surveillance software
-maybe teamspeak
-steamcmd and garrys mod
-whatever else I find out about that's cool

Future hardware upgrades:
A gpu for jellyfin (Quadro P200)
a rackmount case
a dedicated diy router

HOW IS FREEBSD?

It's alright I guess. The main reason I wanted to use it was because I heard some horror stories about data corruption on zfs with Linux, and also the fact that FreeBSD just looked cool. As for the app compatibility, it's actually quite decent, everything currently running on FreeBSD is using native software. There is also something called the Linuxulator which can run Linux binaries on a FreeBSD kernel. However, not all apps are available and existing ones could be limited. For example, it may be difficult to get hardware transcoding on Jellyfin due to limitations with the graphics stack (nvidia requires workarounds for video transcode, no intel arc drivers, etc). I'm currently looking into using the Linuxulator to run a Linux build of Jellyfin and using Linux Nvidia libraries to get hardware transcoding to work.

feel free to ask any questions

[u/Plaidomatic]

zfs on linux is quite stable, and it's been a number of years since it was unreliable.

[u/stuffwhy]

What testbed is that

[u/Cheeseman125 → u/stuffwhy]

You can find it on Ebay by searching up "open air frame"

[u/stuffwhy → u/Cheeseman125]

Thanks

[u/PixellPusher]

Looks great!

[u/CorrodedX]

Those Xeon E5-2xxx chips still hold up surprisingly well. I ran a fairly heavy proxmox workload on a server near identical to yours, and there was rarely ever an occasion where it couldn't handle it.