- My server rack at home always starts out neat and tidy,
and then all it takes is a project where I've gotta attach
a DVD drive to my system here and a failed router
that I just throw a replacement in for there,
and ugh, some contractors who come and clear the fiberglass
in my attic, leaving fiberglass fibers
all over the front of my servers.
Now all of a sudden it's a complete and utter mess again,
but not this time.
This time, sponsored by Pulseway,
makers of the software that allows you to monitor
not just your servers,
but really any Mac, Windows, or Linux machine.
I am going to be completely properly cable managing this
one cent for all accounting for the next few projects
that I have coming.
I will even be, yes, making my own ethernet patch cables.
Look at this.
Isn't this adorable?
Watch, see?
Out goes this, in goes that.
(electronic music)
Step one is to give everything the old safe shutdown.
I always do this, I turned off the desktops already
so now I've gotta issue the shutdown command
to by Unraid server here from my phone.
But we're good.
System is powered off.
Just as I released that screw I realized something.
This server is not mounted on rails.
It's just sitting on top of the UPSs.
I better pull that out first.
I do have rails for it, I just never installed them.
Oh wow, you can see I was using the top panel of this case
as a filming plan at some point,
that would've been a while ago.
Looks like because it's fiberglass,
so the strands are quite long compared to regular dust,
we actually ended up with almost nothing
inside the system itself.
So the specs of this server are kind of unusual.
I've got a 9900K processor in here
and the reason for that is a ran into this weird issue
where Plex, if you want to transcode a 4K Blu-ray
and also have subtitles baked into it,
it's like a single threaded task that's super inefficient.
My 32 gigs of RAM, I've got a graphics card in here
for GPU decoding.
Couple of HPAs so power the drives here.
I think it's around a 150 terabytes total storage.
Couple cache drives and finally,
a 10 gigabit nic from Aquantia.
And,
a redundant power supply.
Just in case one of these modules fails,
all I need to do then is is just
clean off these drive caddies
and oh, that's interesting.
So it's only the ones that don't have drives in them
that have a bunch of buildup.
That makes sense since those are the ones
that are gonna be getting the most air flowing through them.
Something I do have an extra of in case of failure
is a hard drive.
So this a cold spare,
and key note among you might've noticed
that I'm using Seagate Archive drives
which use shingles magnetic recording.
Now it's cheaper and more efficient use of the platter,
but it has a right speed penalty,
and as you might've noticed in WB's recent scandal
where they were shifting WE Red
shingled magnetic recording drives without telling anybody,
they are not ideal for Raid.
But don't worry, for my use case it's fine
because I'm not using Raid, I'm using Unraid,
which has Parity and data redundancy,
but it does not use stripes across the various discs.
So that means that I'm all good with these.
I get around 220 megabytes a second writing to the Unraid,
then a little faster reading off it.
Ooh.
Ah.
I'm sorry.
Ow, shoot.
Well, it's good for finding your keys when they're missing.
Lttstore.com
I used tennis balls to hold up the UPSs at the back.
I had to find the right number of tennis balls
to support them.
The answer is five.
It's not stupid if it works.
Flat ethernet cables, these have a terrible reputation.
But that said, all I was using it for was like my
Sonos hub thing, so.
New rule, any cable that I don't know where it goes,
I'm not gonna plug it in anymore.
At least two of these I have not idea what they're for.
Also, gross.
Dead bee, bleh.
I'm actually gonna be adding some stuff
to the server cabinet.
Some new switching gear from Ubiquity and that kind of stuff
so I wanna move it up so I can salvage two more Us of space.
This really really is awesome,
see you can adjust the length.
So here's the first connection that I can make here.
So we're going into one of the non-power ethernet ports
because it doesn't have to deliver power
to my other switch obviously.
Just the two Ubiquity units,
so a router and a switch, and then we've got these three Us
that we could theoretically move these up into.
I'm gonna leave mine on top 'cause I quite frequently end up
plugging optimal drives into it and stuff.
So that's just gonna stay.
Are these cat footprints?
For those who are wondering,
I'm rocking a 3900X 12-Core processor.
I've got a Titan RTX over there.
And then I've got this weirdo gigabyte,
I think it's a one terabyte MVMe SSD
in the PCI express lot down here.
I'm running some super old 64 gigs DVR-420 6606 RAM.
Not a great pairing for that processor, I know.
And them I'm still using the AX 1500i,
this thing is going strong form the original build
as well as this super cool custom reservoir D5 pump,
and then of course X570 Aqua from ASRock.
It's one of the few motherboards on the AMD side
that supports Thunderbolt, which is really nice to have
if you can run a Thunderbolt cable through the wall,
use a Thunderbolt dock, you've got 30 gigabit per second
of OI for all your capture cards and all the kind of stuff
that I use over there.
Yvonne's rig doesn't really need to be touched.
It's a 60-- - [Yvonne] Why?
It looks terrible.
- What? - [Yvonne] Compared to yours?
- [Sebastian] Well it doesn't have
water cooling. - It looks terrible!
- [Sebastian] It doesn't need water cooling.
- [Yvonne] It's messy.
- There.
Tuck that there, you know?
We can, well we'll clean the filter.
All right?
- [Yvonne] You weren't even gonna clean my filter?
- Well yeah, I was gonna clean your filter.
Clearly doesn't get cleaned as often.
It's fine as it is anyway.
6700K, I think it's got 16 gigs of RAM.
You know, you got my old Titan X Pascal.
Lots of people would give their left nut
for a system like this.
So I expect a left nut from you in the mail.
Don't tell me where you got it.
I gotta put both systems forward in order to put your
mounting hardware in and that means basically all the weight
is hanging off the front of this thing right now
'cause it's empty.
Hey that's not the, hey the printer saved the day.
After a recent experience losing a UPS at the office,
I just though, you know, like why cheap out on this?
So I splurged a picked up two of these APC
1500 Volt Amp units here.
When I was mapping out all of my circuits
at my house recently,
what I realized is that this room and everything in it
is on a shared circuit with a whole bunch of other lights
and outlets in my house.
So what I'm planning to do is have Brian the electrician
come up here and we're gonna put a dedicated circuit
in there for that gear, meaning that it would be nice
to have a little bit more capacity
because when that happens, I'd also like to go back
to my plan of having the VR gaming rig
that's down in the living room actually relocated up here
so we can do like a super clean setup down there.
That is terrific.
No more tennis balls for me.
Thanks APC.
Help, I'm stuck under a server!
(grunting)
Okay.
Now I get to attach these systems properly
for the first time ever, how fun--
(drill buzzing)
Is that.
I always like to get power cable management
out of the way first.
They're just kinda bulky and it's nice to not have
to deal with them when you're trying to do the finer stuff.
Brought both of gaming desktops to the top UPS
and the server to the bottom one.
That means that the gaming desktops won't last as long
in the event of a power outage, but they're just
quite frankly not as important.
This gives me a lot more time to react
and get the server shut down correctly.
I know I said I was gonna do everything really properly
but if you think about it, hot gluing a power bar
to the inside of your server rack isn't really not properly,
like it's, I'm pretty sure that's generally accepted
desk practice material right there.
One aspect of the cable management that I can't fix
by tidying up the rack here is the Fiber connection
that comes in from my garage and the display port
and optimal USB connections that go out
to the room over there.
So I made a new hole but I'm gonna have to run those
again, because right now ever since Collin set it up,
they've just been coming in through this opening
and I haven't been able to close it.
The cat keeps going out there, it's a real pain in the butt.
Here's the other side of that hole.
I totally nailed lining it up.
Now we make a new, more bigger hole.
Well it's hardly perfect but it is literally in the attic
so I'm not gonna stress about it too much.
The good news, is it's a lot cleaner on this side.
So I'm just gonna install one of those little
like brush things here and then we gonna be good to go.
That it a lot better.
Small update,
I am not bothering with the custom cables for everything.
It is
3:00 in the morning.
One thing I'm not gonna cable manage properly
is this ASUS router.
Just 'cause it's gonna get replaced,
so I'm just gonna plunk it right there.
But I mean it's all still looking pretty good
from the front here.
I think we are ready for the big test.
(mumbles)
I am on wifi.
See if the computers work.
Oh, well that's simple.
Mine's up.
Mine is (mumbles) yes!
Okay.
And then yours, we're good.
Keyboard working?
Yes!
Man I am just so stoked with how this turned out.
Check this out.
Magnet mounted dust filter.
Oh yeah.
It's gonna stay tidy this time, ladies and gentlemen.
Of course managing your hardware is just half the battle
and that's where today's sponsor Pulseway comes in.
Pulseway is a real time remote monitoring
and management software that allows you to manage systems
and support users from anywhere.
So I signed up for their free account
which allows you up to two systems from my home closet here
and it means that I can just login from anywhere
on my phone or from a computer and see things like
available memory, processes that are running,
I can open up a terminal and execute commands,
and I can even run automation scripts.
It's pretty freaking sick.
And if you get into their more advanced tiers,
man you can do some amazing stuff.
We're talking full remote desktop access
and this really cool new feature called auto-remediation
where you can bascially set up workflows
that will fix problems for you on their own.
So you can have something like,
actually we had an issue that this would've been perfect for
a couple of years ago where the Dropbox service
kept randomly stopping on one of our servers
that we needed to synchronize all of the scripts
that we put on our teleprompter.
So with Pulseway's auto-remediation,
you can just say hey, if this service stops,
restart the service, and hey, fire off an email over to us
so that we can keep an eye on how often
this bloody thing is failing.
It's super cool.
Don't take my word for it though,
try it out today for free at the link
in the video description.
We've also teamed up with Pulseway and Corsair
to give away a pretty sick working from home
slash gaming rig.
It's a Corsair i140 with a Core i7 9700K
and Nvidia RTX 2080, we'll have those full details
down below as well.
Thanks for watching guys.
If you enjoyed this video, you might enjoy a recent one
where Anthony and I made some upgrades to our server room
at the office.
It's definitely worth a watch.