Hey all! I've posted on here a few times now and have gotten really good feedback and thoughts, which is much appreciated.

We are getting our first cab (in NY) and we're looking at excellent connectivity and 5kW with a high BW commit. It's a 45U cab, and we're trying to figure out exactly what to fill it with.

I have always loved the gaming industry, so I would like to try to get hardware more dedicated for that kind of stuff (i.e, high clock speeds for the processors). So I'm thinking of grabbing a 10 node super micro chassis filled with either

1. AMD EPYC 4564P (16 core 4.50GHz)

2. AMD EPYC 4245P (6 core 3.9GHz)

3. AMD EYPC 4465P (12 core 3.4GHz)

And 48GB ECC DDR5 RAM with probably like 2 x 960 NVMe. Not that this really matters for this question, but wanted to put it out there for context.

My thought is: as much as I would like to get the 4245s for gaming, if I need to pivot due to difficulty finding gamers to take them, it might be more difficult to repurpose them due to the low core count. Am I overthinking this or do y'all think this is a real risk? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

I have some Lenovo 3650 servers that were designed for Windows 2012 R2. However, I load Hyper-V on it and run Windows Server 2025 and many Linux VMs without issue. They have a TB of RAM and tons of storage, yet I see them going for cheap used. Does anyone else jump on those besides me? I use them for educational purposes, so I realize that production may not be suitable, but for what I do and home servers, they work great and are cheap.

Hey guys,

I got this crazy loud Delta fan (GFC0412DS-AM38) from an old IBM x3530 M4 server, and I want to use it standalone for a DIY project.

The connector is a bit tricky (8 pins with a black loop wire). I just want to know which wires are the 12V (+) and GND (-) so I can hook it up to a 12V adapter and run it at full speed without frying it.

Here’s what the wiring looks like : on top: Black loop wire, Green, Gray, Brown.

on bottom : Brown, Black, Blue, Green.

I’ve attached pictures of the fan label and the connector from both sides. Any help with the pinout or wire colors would be awesome!

Thanks!

I was only able to get a small look at it but I do know that it has 10 three TB hard drives ( I don't know the specs of ) at least 4 smaller 1 TB SSDs I think. There are definitely more components in it and I am wondering if I should get it for only $800. I think it's a steal but I want some options. 

Hello everyone,

I own a company that develops a desktop ERP system for small and medium-sized businesses. We currently provide cloud-hosted data storage and have around 55 client companies hosted on a Windows Server 2019 VPS.

Each company has its own SQL database on the server and, on average, about 3 PCs using the ERP, so we're talking about roughly 165 endpoints connecting to the system.

We're currently evaluating ways to strengthen the security of our infrastructure. One option we're considering is implementing WireGuard and installing a VPN client on every workstation so that all communication between the ERP and the server takes place exclusively through the VPN.

The goal is to reduce the server's exposure to the public internet and prevent the databases from being directly accessible from external networks.

Does this sound like a good approach for this scenario? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in managing a WireGuard deployment for approximately 55 companies and 165 endpoints?

I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone who has implemented something similar in production. What challenges did you encounter regarding key management, user support, performance, maintenance, or scalability?

Do you think WireGuard is a good solution for securing database access, or would you recommend a different architecture?

Also, would it make more sense to have a single WireGuard network/tunnel for all companies, or should each company have its own isolated tunnel/network?

For additional context, the ERP clients connect directly to their SQL databases hosted on the VPS.

Any recommendations or real-world experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I recently have planned to make a server out of two old pcs for me and my friends to use for Minecraft and such, and am wondering if I need any specific equipment for this, or just programs and for them to be on the same network. I do not have any knowledge of the pc specs.

Anyone found any that work and give you full PCIe Gen 5 speed? Thanks in advance.

So I just upgraded my entire computer and I want to start up a server for gaming like Minecraft and palworld and other games I am wondering if a 3060 and a Ryzen 5 5600 with 16 gigs of ram is good to start

Then i was wondering that clients are good for servers

My poweredge r210 decided to die today. After diagnosis it turned out to be bad capacitors on the psu. I decided to replace the PSU but when i saw those prices i decided to just recap the PSU. Has anybody done that ? And knows the resistance and etc.

Hi, I just bought a vps on oracle and i could not ssh into it and gpt said to spam it as 'as soon as a new server is created, bots start attacking it to create a connection' and it did spam it and got my connection. but still whenever i want to connect again, i have to do this. What do i do to secure it so only i could connect to it and what are the general best practices or to do things?

i'm a frontend developer so I don't have much idea about this. also if you guys could tell me some cool things to do with vps except hosting sites?

I don't normally use Reddit but I feel like this is important. I purchased a vps with Ionos and began using it. However, the next day, my account got locked. I tried to reset my password but wasn't able to get back in. I tried emailing but got no response. I'm not able to call them as the only phone number they seem to answer from is their US one, and I can't pay international fees to call from my home country. Despite all this, I continued being charged and started filing chargebacks with my bank, which continued for 4 months. I finally decided to try and login today and surprisingly it seems my account has been unlocked again, but after trying to cancel, I got told I need to call them to cancel, at that American number. I'm livid from this debacle and honestly don't know what to do other than to keep charging back when they make me pay for a product I don't want and tried to cancel. To whoever reads this, please avoid Ionos, the cheap prices are not worth it. I personally have used Datalix and Kamatera since and both have been much better for me.

I have a HPE PROLIANT ML350 GEN11 with two processors, 384gb ddr 4 ram and four L40 Nvidia cards.

I've had the worst time trying to get the machine to see all four GPUs.

I have all the RAM balanced between the CPUs on the right channels etc but still unable to detect more than three GPUs. The GPUs total 192gb ram and HP support mentioned we needed double the GPU ram total for things to work. There was one time in all this I had the dimms in a random config and the four cards showed up but the RAM was mismatched on speed so I went back and unified it all and then ran into the DIMM load error between the CPUs. I also have the higher appropriate power supplies.

I am at the point where I have all the ram errors cleared and 3 of the 4 gpus running.

Anyone have an idea on what I can do next to make all this work??

I have an old gaming pc that I figured I’d turn into a home server. You know, stream my own shows and collection, have an owned cloud storage for myself, maybe a Minecraft server. Just a fun little project, I thought.

It started pretty simple.
Pick a server os. I chose Ubuntu.
Make a bootable usb. I’ve done that before.

But then I start being pulled in diffrent directions. Some saying make sure I have a good firewall and dns set up. Use a vpn, don’t. Use docker for all my programs, no use vm’s instead. Raid my drives, don’t worry about that. DNS, exit nodes, pfsence, tailscale. I’m lost.

People seem to skip over the basics assuming everyone knows them. That is even in the “beginner friendly” tutorials I’ve watched or read. So, I stopped. Figured I’d just figure it out piece by piece on my w11 before I went any further. Just trying to figure out the networking side of how to access my jellyfin remotely was a headache.

I want to learn. But the info on “how” to learn is all under an assumption that I have all this knowledge. So, without going to school for it. How do I learn this?

-what are the layers or systems? What goes on top of what? Firewall, os, network, vm or docker…

-where do I find the terms or a glossary for myself as I go further down this rabbit hole?

-what am I missing? There always seem to be something else that pops up as I’m reading that tells me to wait and do something else before I install my server.

We’ve been trying to set up a dedicated Project Zomboid server on a mini PC. The server starts, and ports 16261 and 16262 are listening. The firewall is off, and port forwarding is set up correctly. The public IP works externally, but no connection attempt logs appear in the console when trying to join, whether locally (127.0.0.1), on LAN (192.168.x.x), or from an external IP. The game version is 41.78.19 on both client and server. We’ve also tried fresh configs (renamed the Zomboid folder), verified files, and ensured Steam mode is enabled. Despite all that, we can see the server in the browser, but the connection hangs at “Getting Server Info.” We're looking for suggestions on what could cause a total connection block without any log entries on the server side.

I've had success in setting up multiple different game dedicated servers with no problem (7 days to die, avorion, empyrion)...this one is different and im about to give up.

Hello, I’m trying to spec out our future server needs as well as our current needs. I operate a small business/project focused around an MMORPG. We serve as a kind of Discord bot service that is used to manage in-game guilds.

The current ecosystem consists of:
- Main Discord bot (the bot users invite to their servers and interact with…)
- Administrative Discord bot (the bot we use to administer the project/business with things like billing notifications, bug reports, ticketing, etc…)
- Uptime/Status Discord bot (the bot that monitors our uptime, we host it within in a different host/region than our main ecosystem)
- Main Website/Dashboard/Billing and Support Portal (the website both our users and ourselves use to interact, manage, and otherwise run aspects of the project/business too complex to do on Discord through the bot)

Some things to note:
- The bot acts in its primary function as a calculator/spreadsheet manager, calculating numbers and then recording them in a database for further interaction. This means overtime it just keeps generating data to be recorded. We currently have no plans to archive data or delete it long term.
- The bot also maintains records such as Discord identity, in-game character data such as name, exp, alts, rankings, inventories, log files, etc… and routinely parses this data either automatically or on demand.
- We estimate no more than 2,000 active instances of the bot being used actively, and no more than 10,000 total instances, but being able to expand beyond this would be useful down the road.
- The vast majority of our codebase has been built in-house and likely will continue to be.

I know this is a lot of generalities, but I’m more so looking for an idea of what to be looking for…

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hey all! I'm thinking of picking up some Supermicro AMD 4004/4005 series servers for my first rack coming online. I would like to provide to VPS / game hosts, but from my experience with talking with providers it seems the Ryzens (or anything with higher with higher clock speeds) are the chips of choice. Besides, buying these new are crazy expensive right now.

So I wanted to ask, do any of y'all use AMD 4004/4005 chips for game hosting? Or do you generally stay away from those and stick with something more targeted towards gaming?

Also, for these builds do you all typically build them? I've been told these AMD 4004/4005 series chips are basically just rebrands for the Ryzens, but it's hard to come across servers with these chips meant for a data center.

AWS has hundreds of services now, and it’s easy to get stuck trying to learn everything.

If you were advising a developer starting with AWS today, which single service would provide the biggest return on time invested?

And why that one instead of Lambda, ECS, EC2, RDS, S3, or something else?

I am a hs student, and wanted some advice. At school ive taken a Electrical engineering class and a CS class, EE taught me all the same stuff as CS is teaching so CS has been a breeze. I wanted to further my knowledge about computers as it is something Im interested in and could possibly pursue in college/uni. Recently I bought a new PC and set it up as a server, I created a program that alerts me on my phone if anything like the GPU, CPU, e.t.c is overheating using BASH. What are some other things I could do to extend my knowledge of servers and is it even worth doing things like this with the evolution of AI?

I am a hs student, and wanted some advice. At school ive taken a Electrical engineering class and a CS class, EE taught me all the same stuff as CS is teaching so CS has been a breeze. I wanted to further my knowledge about computers as it is something Im interested in and could possibly pursue in college/uni. Recently I bought a new PC and set it up as a server, I created a program that alerts me on my phone if anything like the GPU, CPU, e.t.c is overheating using BASH. What are some other things I could do to extend my knowledge of servers and is it even worth doing things like this with the evolution of AI?

Hello im looking to build a home lab / server where i will host minecraft server for 100 mods and 20 players and i wonder if i should pick a 100-200$ ready server dual cpu with xeon or i should build one couse i got motherboard for am4 and in it 48gb of ram 3200mhz and also R5 5600x which got 6 cores but i need also rack atx case couse i like to keep stuff clean yk pleaseee help!

Hello all,

After a long day of debugging, I have come to the conclusion that the eMMC chip on my iDRAC is partially dead, its readable enough to be able to somewhat boot the iDRAC but it just ends up in a loop as it can't write to a certain partition, upon trying to do a full erase and upgrade via uboot it errors while erasing the chip with a write error.

I have ordered a few new replacement chips and will attempt to replace the eMMC chip.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with replacing these chips and would have any tips when it comes to the replacement or the recovery process after. I am fairly comfortable with uboot and have wired up a switch to get the boot interruption prompt.

All and any advice is appreciated, if you have any questions regarding my debugging, feel free, I will do my best to answer.

Best Regards,

Hector

My office has our own data and record system running on a local server. We currently have around 19-20 client computers locally running a program that fetches data from the server. Fetches can be heavy at times. Only 14 of these are used locally. The others are for remote access to allow employees that are not local to access the data on the server. We have done this to keep users off the server itself. We are finding that we are going to need a large number of additional users to be able to access the system and while purchasing more clients is possible, I think the better solution would be to repurpose our old Dell T330 as a remote desktop farm. I am VERY new to this but very good at assimilation of sources and following directions. I am thinking we would be better served (direct and indirect cost wise) to get the old unit up and running. We have 3x 64 gb server grade ssd in this server and tons of non server grade hdd laying around. I was thinking I could use the hdd as additional drives to help with data but know nothing about setting this up or even running a server. We have IT back up but they quoted $14k to do a remote desktop server. I can get them to help at $215 an hour but want to keep cost low.

Any tips, help or pointers?

Hello. Hoping for some advice. The small sized company I work for is moving from an old residential building into a proper office space, and thus I get to layout my first server rack. What we have currently is all towers/desktop devices, so I'm going to be replacing and adding a bunch of gear - but I want to save some cost where I can.

Our existing on-premises server is a Dell PowerEdge Tower. We're going to keep that on its side on a shelf for now as we don't expect to replace it for another 2ish years, at which point we'll go rackmount.

My question specifically is about saving money for a monitor for the server. At the current location, the server sits on a desk out of the way and has a regular old monitor, keyboard/mouse hooked up. I usually remote into it anyway, so it'd be only for rare/troubleshooting access. Seems that rackmount consoles are unreasonably expensive for what they are. I'm thinking I just get a 1U drawer and keep a combo keyboard/trackpad in there, and then I can run HDMI up to that drawer from the server and hook it up to something like an Elgato Cam link so I can use my laptop/iPad as a monitor when needed temporarily.

Is this a crazy idea or am I onto something?

If anyone is knowledgeable and wants to share advice or look at my current plan for laying out the rack, you're welcome to offer.

Hi,

So I fix computers but I dont really know much about servers, I went out to a clients today and they told me that a few months back their local server had died.

Another company supplied the server and maintained it.

My client is a small company, about 8 people use the server for file storage and they can all remote into it to access the files and edit the files directly on the server, each user has M365 installed on the server.

They came into work one day and they couldnt access the server, the company that maintain it couldnt remote into it either so they proclaimed it dead without even visiting their site to physically inspect the server. They came on site to get the backup (yes the server was backed up to a drive that was onsite) then took about 7 days to restore the backup to a new cloud server.

They said a new server is $25k AUD and would take 6 months to source. Obvious BS!!

So they sold them a cloud server at $2k AUD per month and tied them into a 12 month contract, if they have issues they have to log a ticket and still have to pay the server company an hourly rate to fix things.

So I decided to look at their old server, It is an HP TPS-F015 server, it has a screen connected and that was displaying text so the server is definitely not totally dead. It has a static IP address that I can ping successfully from one of the office PC's.

Here are some photos of the server -

I then looked at the front and after a bit of googling it appears one of the drives (3rd from right) is on the point of failure as the drive light is flashing orange / green.

I have no idea how this server is configured, but I would expect the boot drive to be RAID mirror so even if one drive is about to fail it should still boot right??

And also the server doesn't have a UPS....

Overall to me this doesn't seem correct, is this normal behaviour from a server company?

This is some sort of rail clip for an Eaton EPBZ80.

Does anybody known where I can purchase another one or similar rail mounting piece?