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I used to desire putting rack mounted equipment in my homelab and actually filled a lackrack with decommissioned servers and switches but quickly found that rac
by smiley1437 6y ago
I used to desire putting rack mounted equipment in my homelab and actually filled a lackrack with decommissioned servers and switches but quickly found that rackmounted equipment tends to have loud, high speed fans which are quite unpleasant to spend any time with.
- jansan 6y agoThis. You don't want to keep that stuff around you. It should be locked up in a server room or at least a closet.
- Tade0 6y agoAnd a well ventilated closet at that.
- kreeben 6y agoIndeed. My rule of thumb is, if you can grow weed in your closet, then it's a good closet for servers.
- kgermino 6y agoCan you explain that? I’m not understanding the connection?
- jacob019 6y agoYou need good ventillation in a closet for both activities.
- skeeter2020 6y agoand lots of power.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JoBrad 6y agoAnd how do you know if you can grow weed in your closet? Well, if you can put a few servers in there, you’re good!
- mnky9800n 6y agoI had a roommate who did this. He did computational neuroscience back before gpus were a thing. It was great for heating the house. Terrible for actually being in the house.
- dmd 6y agoHah. I did computational neuroscience back before GPUs were a thing. It's astounding really. Jobs I ran back in 2005 that I waited days for take, literally, minutes now.
- high_density 6y agowhat about upgrading fans to silent fans? Has anyone tried noctua fans?
- nippoo 6y agoThis is a typical 1U server fan. https://youtu.be/YrU1D4bgn78 https://youtu.be/YrU1D4bgn78 There's not a lot of space left in a 1U server, and to get the right airflow, the airspeed has to be much much higher as what you'd get in a normal ATX case. Can you replace it with quieter small fans, while maintaining good airflow? Sure sometimes. Is it ever going to be "quiet"? Not a chance.
- detaro 6y agoOf course 1U servers are the most extreme case. Having rackmount equipment at home is fine if you can put it out of the way and pay a bit of attention to what you buy - i.e. a 3U or 4U machine will usually have much more normal fans you can swap to quiet ones. Some people also swap fans on 1U switches.
- MasterScrat 6y agoPro-tip: removing the fans from switches make them much quieter! More seriously: most switches will survive fine without fans if you don't use them too intensely (see eg https://www.reddit.com/r/Cisco/comments/3iu57s/home_lab_switches_can_i_remove_the_fans/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cisco/comments/3iu57s/home_lab_swit...)
- IshKebab 6y agoThere aren't any silent server fans. They're small high speed ones (they have to be because of the height restriction) so there's no way you can put a large low speed fan in like you can with a desktop. Plus servers run hotter precisely because they can have loud fans with lots of airflow.
- GordonS 6y agoAren't Noctua fans quite large, like 12cm in diameter? In a 1U chassis, your fan can only be around 4cm in diameter, because they have to be mounted at the back. You can't mount them horizontally, because of course rack units are meant to be stacked close together.
- GordonS 6y agoWith the likes of AMD Threadripper around now, I guess there is even less reason now to have a home rack - a single Threadripper in a standard tower case likely has more compute capability than most home racks from just a few years ago.
- jowsie 6y agoThe main reason now is cost, however it's hard to hit the sweet spot between initial investment and on going electricity costs.
- DrBazza 6y agoI had a colleague back in the very late 90s that lived in a typical British semi-detached house. Under the stairs was a cupboard against the external wall. He decided to make that his server room with a rack and "cheap" second hand kit. To cool it, he drilled through the external brick wall several times and fitted exhaust fans. His hall sounded like standing behind a 747. If it rained, he often ended up tripping the fuses. </end of anecdote>
- nathancahill 6y agoHarry Potter and the Chamber of CPUs
- ashtonkem 6y agoHarry Potter and the Mysterious Case of Tinnitus.
- xwdv 6y agoHarry Potter and the Enormous Electric Bill.
- fouc 6y agoHarry Potter and Reddit Style Responses on HN
- D2187645 6y agoHarry Potter and the Fun Police
- icefrakker 6y agoHarry Potter and the comment threads like this are the worst parts of reddit, please shut the fuck up.
- riedel 6y agoIn our dorm all CS student closets rather resembled server racks. A friend overdid it though as he additionally used 4 workstations as bedposts. In summer he regularly slept in the shared kitchen because in addition to noise the temperature would also be of concern. I don't think the WAF would have been measurable.
- MasterScrat 6y agoI have a 14U rack next to my desk. It's doable, but you need to spend time to optimize the noise factor: - If you need many cores but can live with lower clock speeds, you can underclock. - 1U servers will be noisy no matter what. 2U is already more manageable. 4Us are the best. - GPUs will be noisy, no real solution around that. High heat production, and they hinder the air flow, so the front fans will have to spin faster. I physically remove GPUs from chassis when I'm not actively using them. - There are small-size soundproof server cabinets that can easily solve this problem. They're very expensive though. - Depending on the server, you can directly control fan speed at the firmware level. This needs careful control if you don't want to destroy your hardware and/or burn down your place. - The pandemic makes all this much harder. I used to keep things running lightly during the night and full blast during the day when everyone was out of the house. I saved tons of money, compared to what I would have paid on any cloud platform. Now that we're home 24/7 it's not so worth it anymore. Also this is all worth it if you actually enjoy playing with the hardware, in that case the money you put into this brings you both fun and cheap compute. If the setup is a chore for you, don't do it, it probably won't be worth your hourly rate. Fun fact: the noise/space/aesthetics factors are referred to in the community as the "WAF" - Wife Acceptance Factor ;-)
- 127 6y agoYou can always water-cool the GPU, with big radiators. I have no idea about how to do it in 4U, I personally just use off the shelf consumer hardware (mini-ITX, small PSUs, short GPU, etc.) and 3D print the cases. ~10 cm height is perfectly achievable with custom cases and PCI riser cables.
- eptcyka 6y agoThere are no riser cables that are stable for PCI-Ev4.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI’ve never heard of this. Can you explain why? (I don’t use riser cables FWIW)
- bayindirh 6y agoTo my surprise, All the Dell servers we have try to keep the noise at a minimum unless they're pushed to their max. I'm not aware of the any other servers, switches or actively cooled equipment tried to do that. IBM BladeCenter H is the worst offender: "Is acoustic management enabled? No? OK, everything is at full speed, then".
- MasterScrat 6y agoRecent HP servers do the same, and are actually quieter in my experience. But yeah as soon as you put an unsupported HDD or extension card in there, it'll assume the worst and spin everything full blast.
- bayindirh 6y agoTrying to keep the noise is at minimum is a noble thing to pursue I think. Otherwise it's deafening when it's working in the system room. In an HPC environment that doesn't matter much, anyway. Heh.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ashtonkem 6y agoI think that small businesses and home buyers have begun to make noisier (heh) demands for quieter servers. I assume that a sizable percentage of the 1U market is going to small businesses that don’t want their printer closet sounding like it’s trying to take off.
- detaro 6y agoThe more usual small business form factor is less-deep 3-4U cases that can be used as a tower or rackmount (once we go past small NAS boxes). Or shallow 1U with low-power parts for routers/small appliances. "Proper" 1U servers feel more like a thing for larger places, where density starts to matter more. Not sure why so many comments here focus on 1U.
- allenu 6y agoIn the late ‘90s I had an internship at IBM. Sometimes you’d need to go into the server room to do your work and I remember the white noise from all the fans in there being perfect for falling asleep to. Granted, that wasn’t the goal, but if you went in there in the afternoon to get work done, it took all of your willpower to not fall asleep at a terminal.
- noneeeed 6y agoLikewise. I did one at Hursley in 2000 and had to go down there when one of the Linux boxes would freeze up during performance testing and would need a physical reboot. So loud down in that basement.
- z3t4 6y agoServers are optimized for small size. If the rental space cost is not the biggest cost you can build a quiet server that also performs better! eg. something like a noctua nh on the cpu.
- stevievee 6y agoOn decommissioned servers, if there is no variable speed control you can solder resistors to the fans and just monitor temps.
- progman32 6y agoUnfortunately true. I stuck a water cooling system in my home lab machines. Not plug and play as many components expect airflow anyway...
- gbil 6y agoAbout 10 years ago I tried to built my own rack in the basement so noise was not the issue but power consumption was the issue. After connecting a few Cisco switches on my UPS I realized that each one was consuming at least 60-80W being idle which would sum up to a considerable amount of money running 24/7 together with the rest of my planned to be equipment. As I was only going to run this setup for the fun of it, after a couple of months I decided to give the majority of the network hardware away and use gns3 for the limited work I wanted to do
- bombcar 6y agoMikrotik sells an amazing line of high-speed low power switches, but most of the server gear still draws a lot of wattage.
- alexpotato 6y agoI did something similar with an old server a friend of mine acquired from a internet company that had gone out of business. I remember taking out ALL of the fans AND trying to put it under an arm chair and it was still the loudest thing in my apartment. Needless to say, I got rid of it not long after that.
- seized 6y agoOld hardware yes, newer generations are quite quiet when not under high load. But people buy old hardware and then find out the hard way...
- toyg 6y agoFans are a solvable problem: just put a few walls and/or ceilings between you and them. What is not solvable is the power consumption. I got a secondhand server about 10 years ago, placed it in a cellar, played with it for a few months - and then I realized my electricity bill had gone up by 30%. The hardware is probably much better now, if one pays attention, but still, it's a big gotcha.