I'm upgrading the Pi cluster in my homelab—that's these four Rasbperry Pis.
They're at the heart of my network, and they run Pi-Hole, a webserver, Internet monitoring,
backups, and a private VPN.
Today I'm not upgrading the Pis, I'm just switching how I run 'em in the rack.
I started off my Pi cluster running in this little standalone setup with the Pis sitting
on top of a network switch.
Then when I got my first rack for my homelab, I upgraded to a 3D printed rackmount that
let me hot-swap Pis.
Then MyElectronics sent me this kit, which is more heavy duty, but leaves the Pis exposed
in the back.
That's great for airflow but not for protection.
But this week UCTRONICS sent me this box, which has their new fully-enclosed hot-swap
Pi Rack Pro, which is probably overkill for most homelabs... but I mean... have you seen
the rest of this rack?
This video isn't sponsored, and UCTRONICS actually didn't even ask me to make a video,
but since they sent it to me, I'm putting the little 'sponsored' badge on.
So let's get started by shutting down the Pis.
I'm running four Pis and well, technically they're not in a cluster right now, they're
just running their own things, all configured via Ansible.
And using Ansible for everything means it's also easy to shut 'em all down.
I just run this Ansible command and it'll shut down all the Pis at the same time.
I've been experimenting with Kubernetes for years, but networking in particular has been
a hassle for things like PiHole and Pi-VPN, so right now each Pi does its own thing.
Like this first Pi is running my internet-pi project.
It runs Pi-Hole, Prometheus, and Grafana, and runs DNS and internet monitoring for the
rest of my network.
Because of all the data that's written to it, I've been nervous about how long this
microSD card'll last.
I mean, I have backups, and the setup is all automated, but it's annoying to have to restore
things.
I use these nice SanDisk Extreme cards, and they've held up really well, but one thing
I wanna try out for this Pi especially is booting it off an SSD instead.
Even a cheap SSD can be better when the Pi needs to write a lotta data, because even
the best microSD cards just aren't built for lots of writes over long periods of time.
And UCTRONICS said their new enclosure should make that problem easier for me.
With my old setup, getting an SSD plugged into one of these front USB ports would be
a nightmare.
With this new rack, supposedly you can mount an SSD directly under each Pi if you want.
I'll test that out when we get there.
Now a quick aside: long-term I might even do pixie-boot, where you boot the Pis off
the network from a NAS, and don't have a microSD card or SSD at all, but that's another video
for another time.
You might also wonder how these Pis are powered, since there's no USB-C cable plugged in, and
I just have the network plugged in on the front.
Well, each Pi has a PoE HAT, and PoE stands for 'Power over Ethernet'.
This network switch can provide power and Ethernet in one connection, and the PoE HAT
turns that power into something the Pi can use to run, without any other power source.
It's really convenient, and since the Pis only need a little power, like 7 watts, I
can use these really thin patch cables.
If you need more power, these cables aren't great for that because the copper wires inside
are tiny.
But they're perfect for a Pi cluster.
If you're interested in any of the parts you see here, I'll have links in the description.
So anyway, now that all the Pis are shut down, I'll pull out the old rack and I'll go through
putting together this new enclosure.
[screwdriver ratchet sounds]
I'm gonna go ahead and use one of my kids tables for this since I don't have a better
work surface over by my rack.
It looks like they even customized it with my name here, so that's kind of cool.
Here's the actual unit.
So each Pi gets one of these little sliding trays that you can hot-swap.
And one of the complaints I did have about the MyElectronics unit was that these little
plastic pieces could break off easily—they just kind of snap in and out—and I actually
had that happen on a couple.
So it's nice to see that on this one, it has captive thumb screws.
When you're paying this much money for one of these things, these are the little quality
of life improvements that you expect.
So this is a SATA adapter hat that basically provides power for the SATA drive and a mounting
place for it.
It looks like there's a little bumper sticker here.
And it uses these pogo pins, which these aren't the best things in the world for a secure
connection, but they usually work pretty well.
And I think they just bump onto the Pi.
What we need to do at this point is mount the Pi to this board and hopefully that should
go pretty quickly!
And of course, I'm using the Linus Tech Tips—this is the stealth—screwdriver.
For this, I'm going to switch to the smaller number one bit.
The screwdriver has been working pretty well.
It is a little big.
That's my only complaint for electronics, computers, things like that.
It's a little bigger than the screwdrivers I'm used to, but it's pretty good.
I do like how the ratchet is so smooth and soft.
Also realizing the LTT screwdriver only has the one size of a hex socket and it's not
quite small enough for these.
So I'm gonna use my other driver to try to get these loose.
We have the first Pi ready to go.
That has a nice satisfying sound to it.
The tray has the power button and the OLED installed already.
Now this is a Makerdisk SSD.
This was sent to me, I don't know, maybe a year ago or so by Cytron and they make a line
of SSDs NVMe drives, things like that, specifically made for the Raspberry Pi community.
They come preloaded with an OS and everything.
For this one, I'm going to put it in here and then I'm going to transfer the contents
of the microSD card to it.
So let's see how that performs over time.
It says on here that I just slide it in... like so.
That was simple enough!
And then SD card adapter.
So it's just a little ribbon cable, with a little microSD PCB, in here.
It looks like the next step is to mount this onto here with M2.5 screws.
[ratchet ratchet ratchet, no clank]
So for now, I'm just gonna do the SSD on this first Pi because the other Pis don't log a
lot of data to the microSD card, so it's not a big deal for those.
Then we have a Raspberry Pi.
I'm going to put the SD card adapter into the Pi, and the most important thing is to
make sure that these pogo pins line up.
So I don't know if you can see that well, but these need to line up and be on the spots
where they need to contact to give power to the Pi and power to the board.
Because I'm using the PoE hat, I'm using these standoffs that will hold it at the right height
to plug it into the board.
I'll put the PoE HAT back on the Pi to provide power, and I'll screw these guys back in.
[ratchet sounds]
At this point, we have the Pi and the PoE HAT installed on the board, and underneath—you
can kind of see it under there—is the SSD underneath.
And I only put in two screws because the screws didn't line up perfectly on this side.
And so they started stripping.
So I don't want to strip the screw holes in the SSD.
But next we need to connect the OLED to the board and the power button, also to the board.
And this way... right there...
And the power cable to the power button.
All right, so those are connected.
And then the last part to connect is a little USB-to-USB adapter.
This is kind of a hack that you have to do with these Pis because they only have USB
ports.
They don't have internal SATA or anything like that.
And I believe that this is ready to go.
I guess I should probably take this microSD card and stick it in here so it'll boot off
that.
And one down, four to go!
In the interest of keeping my actual network online here, I'm actually going to work on
mounting this rack unit up so that I can at least get my DNS back in line, because that's
what this one is doing.
And I don't have any DNS redundancy right now.
[LTT goes ratchet ratchet ratchet]
I do have to say, at least for rack mounting stuff, this screwdriver is a significant upgrade
for one-handed operation.
A lot of times I'm doing things in my rack single handedly: I don't have my dad or someone
else helping me list something.
So having a screwdriver does have this nice amount of back force, and I can do it all
one-handed is pretty good.
I still don't know if I would justify the $80 for it shipped, but it's a pretty good
screwdriver.
All right, I'm going to close this up.
One thing I did notice when UCTRONICS emailed me about this box was I looked at all the
pictures and I was like, "Well, where's the ventilation?"
I mean, there's a little bit back here.
There's these holes on the bottom and the sides.
But if you put SSDs, you can see this hole is blocked pretty much completely.
And this hole back here is just for if you want to provide USB C power, so there'd be
a cable coming through it.
There's not a lot of ventilation on this box, so that's one thing that I asked them about,
and they said that they might do a revision that adds mounting points for maybe 40 millimeter
fans or something like that—you could put a Noctua fan maybe on the side.
Hopefully... the Pis are usually pretty low power, don't require a ton of cooling, but
they do need some airflow, so we'll see how that works.
There are a lot of screws on the back here.
There's two on each side and then three across the back.
I think I'll just leave off these side screws because it feels pretty secure already, and
it's not like this case is going to be going in my car or anything, you know?
[rack mounting noises]
[ratcheting noises]
And possibly the most important part, the peel.
[rip]
All right, so I'm gonna plug it in and see what happens.
I'm pretty sure that this Pi is still set to boot off the microSD card first, but some
Pis, you can set them to boot off USB first, and I don't know if the SSD in there has an
OS on it already.
I also don't think that the screen will work until I add some software on the Pi to make
it display what I want.
And I'm not sure how the power button works either, but we'll see
[satisfying RJ45 click]
what happens.
Looks like there is a power LED, so that's cool.
It let's see if it's powered on.
And there's an SSD activity light and an SD card activity light.
And the screen comes on, but I think it's just going to stay like that until I set the
software up on the Pi.
But it looks like I just have three more to go and I should be finished with this.
And then I'll start getting some test data and see how I like it.
[funky beat]
[timelapse]
[these captions are the bomb, yo]
So... this isn't gonna reach.
I'm gonna switch back to one of my old longer cables and keep things clean.
So I'm gonna switch to this, come up into the Neat Patch, and then down to the Pi, because
*aesthetics*.
[happy patch cable noises]
One, two, three.
All right, everything is running.
I'm gonna go check on the computer, if they're all up and back online.
It looks like they are; they all look like they have the right activity.
It's funny, the SSD LED is on all three of these, even though there's no SSD installed,
so I guess that just is on.
And then it blinks off if there's activity or something like that.
I'm gonna check if all of them are up by running Ansible's ping module that just pings all
the servers and makes sure they're running.
And it looks like there's success everywhere.
So they're all up and running, and I'm going to check on their temperature.
So I did measure the temperatures over the past few days, and I changed my shirt!
If you also like cosplaying as a sysadmin, check out all the colors for this shirt at
redshirtjeff.com.
But I measured the temperatures, and while the Pis aren't throttling, the little whiny
fans on the PoE HATs kick in a lot more now.
In the open air, the Pis never got above 55 degrees Celcius.
Inside this box, without as much air to breathe, they push 60 to 70 degrees.
It's not bad, but I do like silence, so I'm gonna mod the case with a 40mm Noctua fan
soon.
I cloned the OS to the SSD using rpi-clone, which was super easy and only took like five
minutes, then I shut down the Pi, pulled the microSD card, and booted it back up.
The SSD was working great, and hopefully that'll give this Pi another few years of life as
my Pi-Hole, DNS, and Internet monitor.
As much as I like the 'UCTRONICS' logo on the screens I also wanted to customize that
screen so it showed more helpful information.
The assembly guide has instructions for enabling the power button and getting the screen working,
so I followed those instructions and got it all working.
I even automated the whole setup process in this Ansible playbook, but I did find a couple
little quirks so I reported them to UCTRONICS.
I'll probably just write my own script at some point.
But I think the biggest question for most people is whether this thing is worth almost
$300.
I think for someone like me, probably.
All the little quality of life improvements crammed into a 1U enclosure are really nice.
So far the ventilation—which isn't even technically a problem, just an annoyance—is
the only real downside to this design.
I love the hot swap trays, I think the SSD HAT and front panel features are executed
well, and the build quality is great.
It's good enough I'm gonna keep running with it for now... but who knows what's coming
next?
I hear the Compute Blade is gearing up for launch, and I know the second I can get my
hands on some of those boards, they'll be cranking up density so I could fit way more
Pis in 1U of rack space.
Subscribe so you see my next Pi and homelab upgrades, and until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.