The Arcology Garden

New Homelab Build

Contents

The Build

The goal is to have a 4U homeserver which is not much louder than my desktop is (that is, basically quiet except for harddrives and low constant fan whir) which can take all the services which were running on Fontkeming and put them in my living room with all the work I have done on productionizing The Wobserver.

Part Qty Total Cost
Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ v1.20A 1 124.00
Xeon E5-2697 v2 (12 core, 24 threads, 2 CPUs) 2 79.99
8x32GB A-tech DDR3 ECC RAM (256GB total) 8 143.92
Noctua NH-D9DX 3U CPU coolers 2 144.76
Aresgame 1000W modular ATX PSU 1 79.99
Rosewill RSV-R4000U 4U Rackmount Case 1 189.99
15U 4 Post rolling server rack 1 159.00
CyberPower 4POSTRAIL 1 36.59
958.24

So a thousand dollars, thereabout, gets you a server with 256gb of RAM and 48 hyperthreads @ 2.8ghz; this doesn't include the cost of storage, which I already sort of spent toward a few months ago - those drives and some others I have around will go straight in to this server.

The whole kit

2025-07-07_21-55-09_9c1e7eea89d31fb2606836ce172c5e6051919c3935e4806cd26715954e5e7d88.jpg #+CAPTION: two 4U computer chassis in a black rolling 19U rack. The top chassis's locking front panel is flipped down. On top are a bunch of random shit

On top of the rack I have my network gear and a power strip on a rack-mount shelf. All of this is organized with Gridfinity Modular Storage System modules to route the power cables under the gear and fix the networking gear in a compact, organized fashion.

2025-07-07_21-55-19_2adb2b1cd85c8143e616c310b763b9333396aded06ae09bec739c3028b15879c.jpg #+CAPTION: the bunch of random shit, sitting on a rack-mount shelf. At the top you can see a modem, a router, and a switch; a hue bridge is seen on its side, and a power strip. All of the network gear is organized with 3D printing "gridfinity" stuff

Next work

DONE migrating

from a minimal nixos install w/ hardware-configuration lined up w/o /srv mount it's something like uhh:

  • pull ssd from old host, stick it in new host, boot

  • rsync /var/lib stuff

  • pull the /srv disks and install them in the new host

  • boot up, zfs import -f the disks to save heartache when morphing

  • `morph deploy` the server manifest

  • update http forwards on my edge host

DONE server rails arrive tomorrow

DONE rearrange corner to fit the rack

DONE rack it

DONE consider buying another 4U case for my desktop

DONE order a rack-mount shelf to put network gear on

WAITING new UPS or BBU??? (my current shitty consumer UPS is full up)

DONE stick the kill-a-watt in front of the server

NEXT move morning-run services on to it, decomm synology

CANCELLED port matrix-synapse over from my wobscale server

CANCELLED replace ~all the shitty nginx frontends on the wobscale server with some iptables buffoonery?

see The Wobserver's Edge Server