House (and other) Stuff

If you've been wondering on the sporadic nature of my posts lately, here's the reason.... in the flesh/brick.....wood. Whatever! What it comes down to is that the house is still a big deal in my life. When you move into a much bigger house, it isn't just a bed of roses..... there are a number of thorns in there as well. Without concentrating on the negative; let me give you an idea what-all has been eating up a lot of my time.

Yep.... that's grass.... as in we didn't have much of it in the back due to the trees that we wanted (and got). So we borrowed a tiller and.... tilled up the yard back there, along with several sprinkler heads. We planted some shade tolerant fescue, replaced sprinkler heads (4, 3 of which were my fault). Plus there was the little aside of digging up 15 (!!!) hedges. My father-in-law had already cut the limbs off, but I got to dig out the rest with a pick-axe..... Hi Ho!!!

I also got to put in some new (aka working) solar path lights. We also did about 5 hours of yard weeding while trying to get rid of the old appliances, lawn mowers and other random non-working items that the previous owners left us during the neighborhood garage sale..... and NO, we did NOT sell the garage. Did I mention that we spent "Labor Day" ripping out the downstairs carpet? It was a lovely time.

On Saturday afternoon, I drove up to IKEA in Frisco and bought some of the "Lack" floating shelves for my son's room, then spent the evening and some of the next day painting and installing a closet system while he was out of town on a camping trip with the Scouts.

Sunday afternoon was mostly taken up with planning a backyard shed for the lawn equipment and picking up a set of unfinished cabinets that will occupy the back wall of the upstairs game/media room. The shed will allow me to get the lawn equipment out of the garage to I can finish up in there since we tend to be the odd folks that expect to park our cars inside. The cabinets (and the book cases that go on top of them) will allow us to finish getting everything else out of the boxes which currently reside in the dining room. Of course, getting the shed done will allow me to set up my tools in the garage to I can finish the "unfinished" cabinets. I don't know why, but my wife seems to take a dim view of my using my power tools to sand wood in the house. There are a few other things in the works as well, including.....

We have one of these Hot Tube/Gazebos out in the back yard which came with the house. We're not hot tube people. We don't know if it works. We don't want to fix it. It won't fit through the gate. I'm in the process of getting a friend to take it off our hands without ripping down our fence!

There is a pile of bathroom lighting fixtures next to the pile of sink fixtures that await installation. Call us obsessive, but we'd prefer to not have the Addams Family style pieces that came with the house. I think, both Home Depot AND Lowes (maybe IKEA too) will have us on their Christmas Card list this year.

Oh, by the way..... yesterday..... Columbus Day was the "Fair Day" for our school district, besides it being the hottest day of the month..... we did our once every 5th year trip to the State Fair of Texas. It was miserable. So miserable, the kids wanted to go home by 2pm! So yeah, we've had our hands full.

So There Was This Computer Case on Craigs List......

This could be a title for my spare time! To me, Craigs List is like a flea market or garage sale that never closes. Living on the outskirts of a sprawling metroplex like Dallas makes it both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you can just about find anything, on the other, it can be just about anywhere. In the case (unintended pun), of this case.... it was in the far northwestern reaches of Carrollton! If it wasn't such a phenomenal deal, I would've let it pass. But it was $25 (the guy let me have it for $20 since he gave me bad driving directions), and I was headed up that way to go to IKEA to pick up things for my son's room anyway, so..... after a Saturday morning of daughter soccer, and a funeral, I found myself driving up to Frisco.

Did I forget to mention that it's huge? Oh yeah.... it's really big! There are 4, 5.25" bays, on top of 2 drive cages that hold 4, 3.5" drives each. And if that's not enough, you can actually order another drive cage to replace a fan that sits on the floor behind the bottom one, or move the bottom one back in case you want to put a big water cooling "rad" up front. The possibilities are pretty much endless. As it sits, you can put in 8, 3.5" regular HDDs, plus install one of those 5 in 3 cages in the 5.25" drive spaces, giving a total of 13 hard drives, AND still have room to have an optical drive as well! This case can be configured to hold a extended ATX motherboard, plus up to 3 water coolers of various sizes and just about as big of a PSU as you can possibly imagine. What are my intentions for this monster?

Although I don't have room for this, I've outgrown the little Silverstone PS07 that the "Spectre" file server calls home. As it sits right now, there are 4 hard drives in it. For a FreeNAS machine running ZFS, 4 drives is pretty much a minimum. As I become more serious about building a really secure storage solution, I need to do better than a bare minimum. Although, processing power isn't a "thing" with these sorts of builds, other issues, such as ECC RAM is, plus ZFS likes a lot of it. Although older server RAM is cheap and plentiful, it's expensive to buy in higher density sticks than current spec RAM in the. These higher needs require more motherboard real estate, thus requiring full sized ATX boards vs. mATX style. 

Based on my research so far, it appears that, what I need is something along the lines of this Supermicro X7DCL as depicted above. Although, I don't have a need for the dual CPU sockets, everything else on boards of this type is just about perfect:

• 6 RAM sockets that'll take ECC
• 6 or more SATA connections
• Dual Ethernet adapters
• PCI-e AND PCI expansion slots

The only thing that doesn't fit? The form-factor, of course! There-in lies the use of another big PC case. This time, it's a Fractal Design XL R2. You might have concluded that the "XL" stands for extra large,  and you'd be right. This version is the second revision or "R2" of the original design. This series from Fractal is of the quiet variety with sound deadening foam everywhere and a solid door which is perfect for a constantly running file server. That it was bought for $20 is just icing on the cake! OK, a little more than just icing since the original retail price ran north of $150! The only "fly in the ointment" will be where am I going to put this thing? It's predecessor, the Silverstone PS07 cased server lived inside of my "side-desk/credenza". However the XL R2, is a 22" tall by 22" deep case, so that's kind of a big question. At least, now that I'm not sharing the office, there are more options!