After half-term week, where the hope of getting “adulty” things done gently fades into obscurity, I was chomping at the bit to crack on with #homelab tasks. I had various tasks ahead of me:

• Strip down and attempted to repair #MicroServer MS03
• Install #Proxmox on three MicroServers
• Tidy and organise all cabling at the back of the cabinet
• Factory-reset the #Netgear #firewall

Sick server

A little background: I obtained three #HP #Microserver (Gen8 – N54L) servers on Ebay for a compelling price, each with 16GB memory. The intention was to set up a lower-power #homelab for development and testing.  I also didn’t have a single machine powerful enough, and capable of being upgraded with enough memory, to virtualise this.

The HAL (red) light in the featured image … this is basically the server telling me it’s poorly. I’ve replaced the CMOS coin battery and also tried resetting the CMOS itself using the CMOS reset jumper position and power-cycling the machine, but to no avail. Perhaps the PSU is borked. I won’t know until I can get my multimeter on the pins, and I won’t do that until I have the PIN-out specs from somewhere…

Better cabling

Blowing my trumpet here, but the cable organisation at the back of the cabinet is a million times better. Literally a million. Ok, perhaps a few hundred. I know, I know … “photo or it didn’t happen”. I’ll get around to it.

Other tasks & things

• Proxmox is now on three Microservers – hurrah
• Discovered that #USB sticks can go into ReadOnly mode (the whole stick, not just a partition/mount).  This can happen if the stick is beginning to fail.
  • This discovery was prompted by the fact that I couldn’t install Proxmox on one USB stick. After reading #reddit on the matter, I have decided to reinstall Proxmox to spinning 3.5-inch disc instead.
• Firewall – hooray! No need to find the null modem cable and do this via the console / a terminal on another machine – although that would probably have been fun.
• Giving some thought to the most optimal use of disks. I have so many hard disks, or all ages and capacities. Nearly all of them are SATA; only one PATA drive around now.