I hope to get this done in the next few days, but I've been dragging my feet on getting the big server moved from the old DSL to the new fiber Internet connection.

The mail server was my bigger concern, at first. There's all manner of auth and DNS and other tweaking that has to go on with mail servers, and so much of it is tied to or considers the IP address. That's been working (with some other fixes and completions) for a while now.

The holidays wrangled their ways in there for another excuse, and now that the dust has settled on the new year, it's time to stop procrastinating.

I've been meaning to also physically clean up my server area in the basement. I've got two rack-mountable enterprise servers sitting on a workbench, waiting for me to mount them in the rack. There was a problem with the location of the rack, as it was in the garage, holding some things off the floor, while the network and servers are in the basement. Since we rebuilt the garage last fall, all my excuses went away and I repainted the rack and moved it into the basement. The space where the servers live is pretty unkempt, and there really isn't room for the rack down there, but once I get the servers on the rack, there should be more space to start clearing the mess in the mini-office down there.

After moving the rack, I tried to prepare for at least one of the servers (and actually thought I might be able to get away with resting the 1U on top of the 4U) by putting its rack kit on the rack. Unfortunately, even though I bought them together, it seems the rack kit I bought to hang my Sun Fire X4600 M2 isn't intended for that server. Nor does it fit the Sun T5220. I've searched, and since the server is well past its EOL, the only thing available seem to be reclaimed, and are all more expensive than I paid for the servers.

Undaunted, I started looking at rack shelves that could support the 80-pound beast, and the slightly smaller lesser beast. The servers are sitting on a wooden workbench now, so basically a shelf. They're solid on their tops and bottoms, so that should be fine. While looking at the options, I found some "edge rail shelves," instead of full-width shelves. They claim to be just as strong and are as highly reviewed as the others, but about half the price, and a third the weight and metal. They arrived yesterday.

My plan is to remove the old attempted rail system, and replace it with one of the shelf sets. I'll mount the big server there, about knee high since it weighs a ton, doing what I can to make the server stay in place once it's mounted. I'll then add the other shelf set and mount the little server, probably over the big one. Neither server has "ears" to secure to the rack, since they're meant to be used with the sliding rail kit.

Once the servers are mounted, I'll move the network bits to also be on the rack. I've got a bunch of non-rack gear, those book-sized switches and such, that I'll probably rest atop the server on top. I've got a bevy of UPS that I'll probably set on the bottom of the rack, although it is an open bottom, so I might need one of those full-sized shelves after all. I think there's enough frame around the bottom to rest them on, otherwise I'll find some wood in the meantime. The servers and network gear all plug into the UPSs, and one or two Ethernet lines, and the UPSs plug into the wall. I do have two other servers that aren't in rack-mount cases, so I'll probably need a shelf for them, or to find cases to put them in and mount them on the rack.

Thinking really long term, I should replace the Sun servers with contemporary gear. I've had them for over 10 years, and they were old then.

The T5220 has an EOL version of Solaris, and there's no more support for Linux on Sparc anywhere, so it is really on its last leg. It's old enough that there aren't really any contemporary software systems I can run on it, so it's just dragging along a MySQL database (about 3 major versions old) using most of the server's 64GB (so much more "a lot" when I got the server), and a bunch of shared file space on its RAID drives.

The X4600 M2 isn't quite as out of touch. It's capable of running contemporary Solaris on it, but I've been running Linux instead. It's got eight quad-core CPUs of marginal speed, compared to more recent processors, and 128GB of RAM, which is still a lot for most systems. The way it hyper-threads is not as efficient as a single CPU with as many threads (or more), although it is way cheaper. It's part of my container system, so I can move the servers it's running to the other servers easily enough. It doesn't have generous disk space, either, since the firmware I could get doesn't support the 300GB drives I got for it (that are the same as the other servers' drives, so I've just held onto them as spares, since the other server's full), so it's just working with the 146GB drives I was replacing with the bigger ones. The thumb drive I use for backups is bigger than this server's space.

I don't need to build another 32-core system (especially since those processors are like a grand), but could put together a few 8- or 16-core systems for less, and with the containers still do the necessary work. Mostly I've been hosting my own mail server (which I'm kind of getting tired of), and cheesy websites, and the storage and databases necessary beneath them.

I've also started tinkering with self-hosted AI, so what I need is a fairly robust box with lots of RAM. Sadly, the 8 quad cores and 128GB on the X4600 M2 isn't robust enough. The 8-core Ryzen 7 with 32GB I have works just fine, although I might toss it a bone with a little "better than nothing" GPU and more RAM. Or I might make a similar system, but with a little more beef and room. I'm not sure I want to try to put the web, database, mail, AI, and other servers together without some deeper planning.

First, I need to clean the space. Then I need to get back to typing.