The saga of an ancient Dell server, and goodbye OpenSolaris
Having some free time on my hands as a result of being DOGE'd- my employer was heavily reliant on now-frozen NIH and NSF contracts- I decided to take the opportunity to learn more about Kubernetes. I had dabbled enough in it to see its potential for the kind of work I did, but was never able to explore it in depth.
Also as a result of being DOGE'd, I needed to spend as little money as possible on this. Luckily, I had an unused Dell server lying around (I'm a computer person, so of course I have a collection of surplus computers, boards, and accessories in the basement. And someday I'll need that Centronics printer cable). It was over a decade old, and only had 2 gb of memory, but its processor supported VT-x, so it should work as a KVM box, albeit a slow one.
My plan was to install a KVM, then spin up a Kubernetes cluster as described in Kubernetes the Hard Way. After some research I decided to use Proxmox for the KVM. It was free for home use, well regarded, and looked relatively simple to use. In a couple of days, I had this:
 |
But not without a few mistakes along the way.
Resurrecting the dead (server)
I gave the Dell box a good cleaning before powering it up, blasting away the dust bunnies in its interior, including clearing a felt-like coat from the largest CPU heatsink I've ever seen. While people have strong opinions about vendors (to put it mildly), I've always been impressed by Dell's servers and business-grade laptops.
Now, time to give OpenSolaris an honorable farewell.
I worked with SunOS and Solaris systems from the Sun-3 days through the dot-com era of SPARC servers ruling the internet. I ran OpenSolaris on this machine (and am now running OmniOS on its replacement) because the CDDL-licensed version of ZFS is both bulletproof and drop-dead simple to manage. And because I hate Larry Ellison with the fire of a thousand suns.
Time to power things up and see if everything still works:
♫ Won't you give me one last boot... ♫ [apologies to Hikrau Utada]
After a quick check that there was nothing on the machine I still needed, I rebooted into the BIOS, enabled VT-x, and set USB as the first bootable device.
Then it was time to install Proxmox. I downloaded the iso, burned a bootable USB drive with Rufus, and booted the Dell back up. After that I simply followed the installation instructions in the Proxmox administration document. I kept the old hostname and static IP address, so I wouldn't have to tinker with my home DNS configuration, completed the install, and rebooted.
To a blank screen.
The disk the install had found and configured as the boot disk,wasn't the first disk in boot order. Three tries later (on a four-disk machine) I had the order right, and a Proxmox console showing on my browser.
The install had also only used one of the four disks. I used the Wipe Disk and Initialize Disk with GPT controls on the console to clear the other three disks, then allocated the disks as follows:
I formatted one disk as a single partition, and added this to the LVM logical volume, which seemed severely undersized. While I haven't used Linux's physical/logical volume tools for a long time, doing this was pretty straightforward, though tedious enough to remind me why I prefer ZFS' "throw the raw disk into a pool" simplicity.
I created a ZFS pool from the second disk. I'll use this for virtual disks for my VMs.
I carved an 8 gb swap partition out of the lastdisk, and reconfigured the system to use this for swap instead of the swapfile in the LVM volume. I don't expect a dedicated swap drive to turn a system with only 2 gb of memory into a speed demon, but it should give a slight performance boost, and even if I wasn't trying to be frugal I'd be reluctant to put in the effort required to track down compatible vintage ECC DRAMs for this machine. If I can scrounge up a cheap SATA SSD I'll use that for swap, instead.
Now it's time to install my VMs. And discover just how ancient that Dell's processor is.