Skiddish
Act 8: The Ryzen Era and Enterprise Escapades
The dawn of 2020 brought an itch for something more potent. I concocted a plan to build a Ryzen-based desktop, complete with a host bus adapter and a disk shelf, intending to bid adieu to both my NAS and Mac Mini. Plus, I had my eyes on some racing games, which had been a PS3-only affair for me until then.
My initial vision was a setup running on Arch Linux. This would allow me to pass through my graphics card to a Windows virtual machine for gaming. Docker would manage various services on Arch, and Arch itself would control all the drives in my disk shelf. A perfect world, or so it seemed. That illusion shattered the moment I powered up the disk shelf. The deafening roar of enterprise-level equipment filled the room. Let’s just say, it was not the kind of background noise you’d want in your living room during family game night.
So, what’s the solution? Go big, of course. I invested in a server rack and a 1U IBM x3550. Oh, and while I was splurging, I thought, why not upgrade my network with some new UniFi gear? The rack ended up under the stairs running a series of VM’s some of which were running docker, others straight services. Serving me, my four housemates, and a few remote users, it was the first time server hosting for more than just me.
By the close of 2020, my server rack hummed beautifully, a good 20TB raw, some xeons, ~100gb of ddr3, all linked in with a usg, and a 24 port network switch. Hosting an array of different services and fulfilling my geekiest dreams. I’d even been cloning machines and convverting them to VMs, what an exciting world!