I've had my 10" rack homelab built for a few months now, but for some reason I simply cannot bring myself to turn it on. I built the system while I was at the tail end of a 9-month illness. I guess in a way I still subconsciously link the hardware to the illness.

The crash

A few months back, the iDRAC on my Dell RX720 server decided it had enough of life. I tried everything I could find to bring it back online, but in the end it simply would not work. This left me with a huge pile of metal and silicon, and several VMs without a home. While I could buy another motherboard for $150, the whole thing cost me$300 four years ago. At the going rate, I stand to make nearly $1,000 by selling the individual parts. I was surprised to learn how much the RAM goes for in those things, and I have 128GBs of it.

Going forward: the-grid

I picked up a 9U 10" rack, a switch, four Lenovo Tiny PCs and a BeeLink ME Pro. I spent a few days getting it all crammed into the small footprint. I come from a standard server rack environment, so this was an experience getting it all in place.

So now I'm just waiting. For what? I have no idea. I'm running a proxmox cluster, the NAS is ready to go, so all I need to do is turn it on and migrate the VMs to the new hardware.

But for some reason, I can't. Of course now I feel bad for spending so much money on something that's slowly becoming obsolete, but that's still not a big enough motivator to push the buttons.