Coyote's Blog

So you've bought some PowerEdge Tower servers but these were originally rack servers. No problem, you thought, as you remove the rack 'ears' and sourced a top cover + feet to turn your T430 or T630 back into a Tower. But one problem remained: On Rack Servers, the front panel is actually shorter by 15mm, leaving some of the internals/electronics exposed to dust and spills. Here's the top of a T630 converted back to 'Tower': Then I realized we were in 2019 and that 3D printing is now common. There are companies on the Internet that deliver your 3D printed CAD files to your door. So, I started FreeCAD's Appimage on my RHEL machine and designed a part that fit the size of the gap and borders I had just measured: The CAD files I created are located here: FreeCAD After a couple weeks, the parts (one for my T430, another for my T630) were received. I had gotten the color wrong but at least they did fit nicely: I didn't have an...

A little while ago, I decided to retire my main workstation (A Dell Precision T7910) and go for a real server with lots of spare bays. I had mostly been using as the T7910 as a RHEL hypervisor and I kept a small dual-boot Windows 10 Pro partition on it for the sole purpose of playing DCS World. After much shopping around, I found a used PowerEdge T630 with 18 3.5" HDD bays. The machine took a few days to get to my home and transferring the H/W between the two systems took about an hour. This included: - all of my RAM (8 * 32Gb DDR4 LRDIMMs) - Two excellent E5-2682 V4 cpus I got from a nice Lady in Shanghai. - An H730P (2Gb) with several 2Tb SSDs and one HDD. - An EVGA GTX 1660 Ti (6Gb DDR6) - A SuperMicro Dual NVME PCI-E card with an 970 EVO drive for KVM guest datastore. - A Quad-1G i350-T4 NIC (internal NICs, external interface, heartbeats). New H/W included a pair of brand new high-wattage heatsinks (up to 160W per cpu), a GPU power distribution board and a pair...

Having recently upgraded the GPU in my Dell Precision T7910, I found myself with this card lying around (ASUS ROC STRIX 1050 Ti Gaming): So I had this crazy thought: What if I tried to use that card in my PowerEdge T440? This would provide a decent (and silent) upgrade to the MSI 1030 GTX currently in the server. One problem was that the card required external GPU power and I had ordered my T440 without the GPU kit, which can only be installed at Point-Of-Sale and cannot be retro-fitted afterwards. I tried using the 1050 Ti with just the power provided by the x16 PCI-E slot but the server failed to recognize the GPU. So I went looking into my T440 (that GPU Kit must draw power from somewhere, right?) and found a white connector on the PCB directly attached to the PSU cage: A close inspection using my Phone revealed something looking like almost like an 8-Pin GPU connector with an informative label on the side: Did you read "GPU_PWR" too? I sur...

A new computer: Dell PowerEdge T440 server. As much as I consider it a very fine machine now, that road wasn't easy. Some of the previous 12th Gen and 13th Gen Tips didn't apply and had to be-revisited. Also. because I was unaware of some of the 'quirks' I ran into some issues after purchase and it took me a while to add in the extra hardware to make the T440 experience more enjoyable. 3rd Party PCI Fan response There is no more a one-size-fits all 3rd party PCI fan response. Instead, this is now done per slot. Look for this in the idrac GUI under 'Hardware Settings': Or, for the CLI-minded: /admin1-> racadm get System.PCIESlotLFM.1 [Key=System.Embedded.1#PCIeSlotLFM.1] #3rdPartyCard=Yes #CardType=NIC CustomLFM=0 LFMMode=Disabled #MaxLFM=310 #SlotState=Defined #TargetLFM=- /admin1-> racadm set System.PCIESlotLFM.1.LFMMode 2 [Key=System.Embedded.1#PCIeSlotLFM.1] Object value modified successfully /admin1-> racadm get System.PCIESlotLFM...