Tag: Upgrades

Reducing power usage part 2

Since posting part 1 of reducing power, I received the order of my ASRock and have re-used the hard drives from the previous Shuttle I had. The Shuttle wasn’t loud by any stretch, but the ASRock is incredibly quiet. To the point where I have to check it’s still running!

After previously being impressed with how long my hard drives have lasted, one went pop during a power failure. That’s a bit disappointing, but the drives are only Western Digital Blue’s which are just generic consumer desktop disks.

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Reducing power usage part 1

A good 7 years ago, I bought a Shuttle SX38P2 Pro which has been running pretty much 24/7 ever since. Recently the PSU fan has been struggling, but I can’t complain for the time it’s been in use. Over those 7ish years I’ve suffered a single drive failure.

# smartctl -a /dev/ada0 | grep Power_On_Hours
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 081 081 000 Old_age Always - 13972
# smartctl -a /dev/ada1 | grep Power_On_Hours
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 015 015 000 Old_age Always - 62738

As the fan was struggling, I contacted Shuttle to ask about replacements but received no reply. That was disappointing, but I guess understandable as the model has been discontinued (I didn’t think the cooling was model-specific though).

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Unifi Protect

I decided to buy a Unify G3-Flex. I’m already a user of some of the SDN products that Ubiquity have in their range, and was interested in their video offering. The G3-Flex was the cheapest way to get in to the range so I figured it was worth a punt.

Sadly, the video controller (pretty much required if you want the nice functionality, or if you’re not going to create your own) doesn’t support ARM so you cannot install this on a Raspberry Pi. That’s disappointing as you can install the SDN controller on a Pi fairly happily (for how much longer is open to debate. It feels as though the Cloud Key is the preferred option for Ubiquity going forward. Won’t lie, don’t want one.) There is also an NVR you can buy if you don’t want to build your own controller. For one camera costing $79, it made no sense to splash out $365 on a controller when I can build my own for free.

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vSphere 6.7 Upgrade – PSC’s

I’ve recently upgraded our environment from vSphere 6.0 (shush, it’s still in support until March 2020). Fairly standard setup really, a couple of vCenter’s, a couple of PSC’s (to allow ELM), and several hosts. We also ran the HTML 5 Fling as nobody wants to use that god-awful web client which was forced on us for some reason. Yes, it’s been years. No, I’m not over it.

I won’t go in to how to perform the upgrade, that’s well documented and often repeated already, I’ll just point out a couple of things I noticed.

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