Storage Server 2015 was a roller coaster of a build. There were many things that tried to stop the updating of the storage server, although it ended up working out!

Home Firewall using PfSense After facing some major issues with the network at my parents house, a full blown router rebuild was done. Switching away from the crappy out of the box/ISP provided solutions to an x86 based platform. Using an old Sophos firewall, it was up cycled to its new home. It was removed from its old case, into a larger ATX tower so a better cooler could be used.

Server Build - Part 2 So continuing from Part 1 the build log. Additionally to purchasing the parts for the server, I picked up this pretty neat small LCD with a temperature probe attached. Made by XSPC they are avaliable in a lot of different colours. I got green becuase… I could. Note the additional small fan attached to the chipset heatsink. For some reason in Windows this chipset gets extremely hot, whilst under Linux it doesn’t.

Server Build - Part 1 Back in the Summer of 2013 when I originally built this machine, I used to have a lot of pre-built OEM machines. Mainly Dell Poweredge machines. However their only limit was their age. All the servers I had were either LGA 771 or older and only had an average of 8-16GB of DDR2 RAM. So I decided (after a quick browse of ebay) to build my own.