Homelab upgrade: New Raspberry Pi Cluster rackmount

I'm upgrading the pi cluster in my home lab that's these four Raspberry Pi's they're at the heart of my network and they run pie hole a web server internet monitoring backups and a private VPN today I'm not upgrading the pies I'm just switching how I run them in the rack I started off my Pi cluster running in this little Standalone setup with the pies sitting on top of a network switch then when I got my first rack for my home lab I upgraded to a 3D printed rack mount that let me hot swap pies then my electronic sent me this kit which is more heavy duty but leaves the pies exposed in the back that's great for airflow but not for protection but this week UC tronic sent me this box which has their new fully enclosed hot swap pyra Pro which is probably overkill for most home Labs but I mean have you seen the rest of this rack this video isn't sponsored and UC Tronics actually didn't even ask me to make a video but since they sent it to me I'm putting the little sponsored badge on so let's get started by shutting down the pies I'm running four pies and well technically they're not in a cluster right now they're just running their own own things all configured via ansible and using ansible for everything means it's also easy to shut them all down I'll just run this ansible command and it'll shut down all the pies at the same time I've been experimenting with kubernetes for years but networking in particular has been a hassle for things like pie hole and Pi VPN so right now Each pie is doing its own thing like this first pie is running my internet pie project it runs pie hole Prometheus and grafana and runs DNS and internet for the rest of the network because of all the data that's written to it I've been nervous about how long this micro SD card lasts I mean I have backups and the setup is all automated but it's annoying to have to restore things I use either Samsung Evo or SanDisk Extreme cards and they've held up really well but one thing I want to try out for this pie especially is booting it off an SSD instead even a cheap SSD can be better when the pi needs to write a lot of data because even the best micro SD cards just aren't built for lots of Rights over long periods of time and UC Tronics said their new enclosure should make that problem easier for me with my old setup getting an SSD plugged into one of these front USB ports would be a nightmare with this new rack supposedly you can mount an SSD directly under each pie if you want I'll test that out when we get there now now a quick aside long term I might even do pixie boot where you boot the pies off the network from a Nas and don't have a micro SD card or SSD at all but that's a video for another time you might also wonder how these pies are powered since there's no USBC cable plugged in and I just have the network cable plugged in on the front well each Pi has a Poe hat and Poe stands for power over ethernet this network switch can provide Power and ethernet in one connection and the poe hat turns that power into something that Pi can use to run without any other power source it's really convenient and since the pies only need a little power like 7 Watts I can use these really thin patch cables if you need more power these cables aren't great for that because the copper wires inside are tiny but they're perfect for a pi cluster if you're interested in any of the parts you see here I'll have links in the description but anyways now that all the pies are shut down I'll pull out the old rack and I'll go through putting together this new enclosure I'm going to go ahead and use one of my kids tables for this since I don't have a better work service over by my rack it looks like they even customized it with my name here so that's kind of cool so yeah two rack here's and here's the actual unit so each Pie gets one of these little sliding trays that you can hot Swap and one of the complaints I did have about the my electronics unit was that the these little plastic pieces could break off easily they just kind of snap in and out and I actually had that happen on a couple so it's nice to see that on this one it has captive thumb screws I mean when you're paying this much money for one of these things these are the little quality of life improvements that you expect so this is a SATA adapter hat that basically provides power for the SATA drive and a mounting place for it it looks like there's a little bumper or sticker here and it uses these Pogo pins which these aren't the best things in the world for a secure connection but you know they usually work pretty well and I think that they just bump onto the pie what we need to do at this point is Mount the pie to this board and hopefully that should go pretty quickly and of course I'm using the Linus Tech tips this is the stealth screwdriver for this I'm going to switch to the smaller number one bit the screwdriver's been working pretty well it is a little big that's my only complaint for electronics computers things like that it's a little bigger than the screwdrivers I'm used to but it's it's pretty good I do like how the ratchet is so smooth and soft also realizing the LTT screwdriver only has the one size of a hex socket and it's not quite small enough for these so I'm going to use my other driver to try to get these loose we have the first pie ready to go that is a nice satisfying sound to it Jerry has the power button and the OLED installed already now this is a maker disk SSD this was sent to me I don't know maybe a year ago or so by Citron and they make a line of ssds nvme drives things like that for specifically made for the Raspberry Pi Community they come pre-loaded with an OS and everything for this one I'm going to put it in here and then I'm going to transfer the contents of the micro SD card to it so we'll see how that performs over time it says on here that I just slide it in like so that was simply enough and then SD card adapter so it's just a little ribbon cable with a little micro SD PCB in here and it looks like the next step is to mount this onto here with M 2.5 screws for now I'm just going to do the SSD on this first pie because the other pies don't log a lot of data to their micro SD card so it's not a big deal those then we have a Raspberry Pi so I'm going to put the SD card adapter into the pie and the most important thing is to make sure that these Pogo pins line up so I don't know if you can see that well but these need to line up and be on beyond the spots where they need to contact to give power to the pie and power to the board because I'm using the poe hat I'm using these standoffs that will hold it at the right height to plug it into the board put the Peewee hat back on the pie to provide Power and I'll screw these guys back in this point we have the pie and the poe hat installed on the board and underneath you can kind of see it in there is the SSD underneath and I only put in two screws because the screws didn't line up perfectly on this side you can see and so they started stripping so I don't want to strip the screw holes in the SSD but next we need to connect the OLED to the board and the power button also to the board this way right there and a power cable to the power button all right so those are connected and then the last part to connect is our little USB to USB adapter this is kind of a hack that you have to do with these pies because they only have USB ports they don't have Internal Sata or anything like that and I believe that this is ready to go I guess I should probably take this micro SD card and stick it in here so it'll boot off that and one down four to go in the interest of keeping my actual Network online here I'm actually going to work on mounting this rack unit up so that I can at least get my DNS back online because that's what this one is doing and I don't have any DNS redundancy right now I do have to say at least for rack mounting stuff this screwdriver is a significant upgrade for one-handed operation a lot of times I'm doing things in my rack single-handedly I don't have my dad or someone else helping me lift something so having a screwdriver that does have this nice amount of back force and I can do all one-handed is pretty good I mean I don't know I still don't know if I would justify the the 80 bucks for it shipped but it's a pretty good screwdriver all right I'm going to close this up one thing I did notice when you see Tronix emailed me about this box was I looked at all the pictures and I was like well where's their ventilation I mean there's a little bit back here there's these these holes on the bottom and the sides but if you if you put ssds you can see this hole is blocked pretty much completely and uh this hole back here is just for if you want to provide USBC power so there'd be a cable coming through there's not a lot of ventilation on this box so that's one thing that I asked them about and they said that they might do a revision that adds mounting points for maybe 40 millimeter fans or something like that you could put an actual fan maybe on the side hopefully the pies are usually pretty low power don't require a ton of cooling but they do need some airflow so we'll see how that works a lot of screws on the back here there's two on each side and then three across the back I don't think I think I'll just leave off these side screws because it feels pretty secure already and it's not like this case is going to be going in my car or anything you know and possibly the most important part the peel all right so I'm going to plug it in and see what happens I'm pretty sure that this pie is still set to boot off the micro SD card first but some pies you can set them to boot off USB first and I don't know if the SSD in there has an OS on it already I also don't think that the screen will work until I add some software on the pie to make it display what I want and I'm not sure how the power button works either but we'll see in what happens looks like there is a power LED so that's cool it lets you see if it's powered on and there's an SSD activity light and an SD card activity light and the screen comes on but I think it's just going to stay like that until I set the software up on the pi but it looks like I just have three more to go and I should be finished with this and then I'll start getting some test data and see how I like it [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so this isn't going to reach switch back to one of my old longer cables keep things clean so I'm going to switch to this come up into the neat patch and then down to the pie because Aesthetics [Music] one two three all right everything is running I'm gonna go check on the computer if they're all up and and back online it looks like they are they all look like they have the right activity it's funny the SSD LED is on on all three of these even though there's no SSD installed so I guess that just is on and then it blinks off if there's activity or something like that and I'm gonna check if all of them are up by running ansible's ping module that just pings all the servers and make sure they're running and it looks like there's success everywhere so they're all up and running and I'm going to check on their temperatures so I did measure the temperature over the past few days and I also changed my shirt if you also like cosplaying as assistant check out all the colors for this shirt at redshirtjeff.com but I measured the temperatures and while the pies aren't throttling the little whiny fans on the poe hats kick in a lot more now in the open air the pies never got above 55 degrees Celsius inside this box without as much air to breathe they push 60 to 70 degrees it's not bad but I do like silence so I'm going to mod the case with a 40 millimeter nachua fan soon I cloned the OS to the SSD using rpyclone which was super easy and only took like five minutes then I shut down the pie pulled the micro SD card and booted it back up the SSD was working great and hopefully that'll give this pie another few years of life as my pie hole DNS and internet monitor as much as I like the UC Tronics logo on the screens I also wanted to customize that screen so it showed more helpful information the assembly guide has instructions for enabling the power button and getting the screen working so I followed those instructions and got it all working I even automated the whole setup process in this ansible Playbook but I did find a couple little quirks so I reported them to UC tracks I'll probably just write my own script at some point but I think the biggest question for most people is whether this thing is worth almost 300 bucks I think for someone like me probably all the little quality of life improvements crammed into a one-year enclosure are really nice so far the ventilation which isn't even technically a problem just an annoyance is the only real downside to this design I love the hot swap trays I think the SSD hat and front panel features are executed well and the build quality is great it's good enough I'm going to keep running with it for now but who knows what's coming next I hear the compute plate is gearing up for launch and I know the second I can get my hands on some of those boards they'll be cranking up density so I could fit way more pies in one U of Rackspace subscribe so you see my next pie and home lab upgrades and until next time I'm Jeff geerling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 406,812

Keywords: homelab, raspberry pi, cluster, kubernetes, rack, rackmount, uctronics, github, open source, lcd, display, server, ci, cd, continuous integration, servers, computers, sbc, cosplaying, sysadmin, home, basement, ltt, screwdriver, linus tech tips, assembly, guide, install, upgrade, myelectronics, 1u, cooling, solution, network, networking, pi-hole, pihole, pivpn, internet, monitor, grafana, prometheus

Id: akJ97oqmQlU

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022