server

I test servers on a temporary basis a lot, and many enterprise servers don't have as user-friendly external port indications, or little OLED displays to provide useful information. They're no-frills because they don't need frills, you just deploy them and they run for years.

I often need to gain access to the server's IPMI/BMC interface to manage the server remotely, and it's not always obvious what IP address is assigned if you don't manually assign one via your router and a MAC address.

I could scan my network for the IP address, but assuming I have the server booted and it's a modern Supermicro or other standard system, I can use ipmitool to grab the BMC IP:

On new Debian 12 Bookworm and Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat installs, when I try running pip3 install [something] (whether that's Ansible or some other Python tool), I get the following error message:

Last year, after I started a search for a good out-of-the-box all-flash-storage setup for a video editing NAS, I floated the idea of an all-M.2 NVMe NAS to ASUSTOR. I am not the first person with the idea, nor is ASUSTOR the first prebuilt NAS company to build one (that honor goes QNAP, with their TBS-453DX).

But I do think the concept can be executed to suit different needs—like in my case, video editing over a 10 Gbps network with minimal latency for at least one concurrent user with multiple 4K streams and sometimes complex edits, without lower-bitrate transcoded media (e.g. ProRes RAW).

This is the Compute Blade, and I'm test driving it in a four-node cluster:

I edit videos non-stop nowadays. In a former life, I had a 2 TB backup volume and that stored my entire digital life—all my photos, family video clips, and every bit of code and text I'd ever written.

Video is a different beast, entirely.

Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very lightweight format, compared to RAW) is 3 GB of space. A typical video I produce has between 30-60 minutes of raw footage (which brings the total project size up to around 100-200 GB).

I've been building a Mini ITX 'quiet-ish' server using a Supermicro motherboard and some Noctua fans.

I noticed sometimes the system would start 'revving' the fans up to max power. Then after a few seconds they would get quiet again. The CPU temps and other temps on the system were stable and not worrying, but popping off the server's cover, I noticed LED8 on the motherboard would blink red every time the fans would ramp up:

That LED indicates a 'fan failure' when blinking.

Over on the Geerling Engineering YouTube channel, my Dad and I just posted a video where we installed the ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4RS - AS6504RS at his radio station, to increase their raw network storage capacity from 4 to 16 TB:

In the video, we focused on the installation, though I highlighted the unit's top-line features at the beginning.

In this blog post, I'll quickly recap the main features, then give more impressions of the unit from our experience setting it up, and my Dad's use of it at the station since we recorded the video.

For a project I'm working on, I'll have a Raspberry Pi sitting behind a 4G LTE modem:

This modem is on AT&T's network, but regardless of the provider, unless you're willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for a SIM with a public IP address, the Internet connection will be running behind CG-NAT.

What this means is there's no publicly routable address for the Pi—you can't access it from the public Internet, since it's only visible inside the cell network's private network.

There are a few different ways people have traditionally dealt with accessing devices running through CG-NAT connections:

1. Using a VPN
2. Using a one-off tool like ngrok
3. Using reverse tunnels, often via SSH

And after weighing the pros and cons, I decided to go with option 3, since—for my needs—I want to have two ports open back to the Raspberry Pi:

September 2018 Update: Ansible 2.7 (to be released around October 2018) will include a new reboot module, which makes reboots a heck of a lot simpler (whether managing Windows, Mac, or Linux!):

- name: Reboot the server and wait for it to come back up.
  reboot:

That's it! Much easier than the older technique I used in Ansible < 2.7!

One pattern I often need to implement in my Ansible playbooks is "configure-reboot-configure", where you change some setting that requires a reboot to take effect, and you have to wait for the reboot to take place before continuing on with the rest of the playbook run.

For example, on my Raspberry Pi Dramble project, before installing Docker and Kubernetes, I need to make sure the Raspberry Pi's /boot/cmdline.txt file contains a couple cgroup features so Kubernetes runs correctly. But after adding these options, I also have to reboot the Pi.

Pi Hole is a nifty open source project that allows you to offload the task of blocking advertisements and annoying (and often malicious) trackers to a Raspberry Pi. The installation is deceptively simple (a curl | bash affair), but I wanted to document how I set up mine headless (just plugging the Pi into power and the network).

Set up Raspbian Lite

I bought a Raspberry Pi model 2 B along with the official Raspberry Pi foundation Case. Then I bought a Samsung Evo+ 32GB microSD card (which comes with a full-size SD card adapter), and did the following steps on my MacBook Pro to set up the Pi's OS: