Gadgetory

so with all the posting I've done on social media and YouTube things like our Norco cabinet here and our surveillance server and our other servers and all that stuff people have been hounding me what are you actually going to do a tour of the server room and it's finally here I've been putting it off and putting it off and putting it off because I keep making little changes and upgrades and tweaks but it's at the point now where everything is pretty much up and running so today I'm going to be putting some finishing touches on it in terms of cable management and well actually closing up the side of the cabinet here and giving you guys a tour of all the equipment that we've got in the Linus media group server closet the Logitech G 303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with delta0 technology and RGB lighting to match your setup check out the link in the video description to learn more so I want to start by responding to one of the criticisms people had of our server room when I first started posting pictures on social media and that was that we didn't have any backup power as the savvy among you will know it's extraordinarily important really for any machine but especially for a server to not lose power unexpectedly so a UPS and in fact we actually do have a number of them for total in the cabinet here a UPS not only acts as a battery backup in the event that there's a sudden power loss to the building it also acts to smooth out the incoming power which is good for the well the life expectancy of any of the hardware that is hooked up to it so there is one issue though the ones we've got here were refurb units that were sponsored by General Electric and it turned out that we had some issues with the batteries in some of them the good news though I've got my three replacements right here ready to install ah yeah so while I'm pulling these out I guess I'll give a bit of an explanation for how the the room came to be number one originally there were actually supposed to be two cabinets in here one full height and one half height right next to it so I thought I could just kind of set and forget the back of it and then not worry too much well I have needed access to the back of this server cabinet pretty much every other day this is my brilliant system right now for controlling any of these computers I got my monitor down there I got my keyboard mouse here soap so this is ridiculous so I learned a couple of things number one is that the 24 you cabinet that I have out there is never coming in here and number two I need a better system for using a monitor keyboard and mouse on these servers so this is a trend net something-or-other KVM and this was sent to us by RAC solutions.com to hold a keyboard and mouse and well mount them and tuck them away so I'll show you guys that in a minute the one thing that did thankfully work out was the cooling solution for the room I had originally planned to not hook it up to the air conditioning this passive air intake and that ducted fan up there actually replaces the air in this room about once per minute and it has turned out to be just fine thankfully so with the construction going on while we were moving in as you can imagine dust in this room has been a freaking nightmare I have taken every single one of these servers out three times since first installing them and dusted them and I'm probably going to have to do it once more in the future I'm going to put some kind of a filter on this and along the bottom of the door but in the meantime now it's not nearly as bad now that the construction is no longer going on in the warehouse outside and now that we've sealed the concrete floor Oh so with the new UPS is installed in order to minimize downtime for those guys in there while I switch all the systems over to it I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna get my KVM set up first before I mount this to the wall this is really cool it's got a little magnetic closing thing on the top it goes onto the wall a little something like that comes with some mounting hardware keyboard mouse and yeah all that's left is to make sure it fits yes we're good maybe I have to use deep scan mode there should be a stud next to the I need to know where it is okay well fine I'm just going to go with drywall screws because this is already too much work so that is going to be pretty tight my friends pretty tight indeed all right don't tell me I hit a stud awesome the hell what are the odds I went to mount the is this thing with all drywall screws and I hit wood all four times so I don't need them at all so I'm just putting the wood screws right in all right now let's double-check the door oh so tight awesome my good buddy Taryn here asked me however shall you keep the keyboard in place when you close the door surely that will happen to which I replied they thought of that this my friends is a strip of industrial-strength velcro you're not gonna filter them out no I'm not going to velcro the mouse down but haha so cool all right so now Oh oh crap let's try that again ah there we go look at that there's little cable management holes I can take my mouse wire and keep it in place with this not too shabby okay so next step then monitor mount okay well this old samsung seems to work so I guess we'll uh we'll go with this puppy okay so the first thing we need to do is take it Inc off the included stand we could also look at the instructions put the thing on the thing for like this alright now we gonna wall mount this puppy okay I guess right about there - media group we put the ball in and eyeball it all right let's see if we managed to stay in the drywall this time the heck oh you tripped the breaker oh yeah whoa maybe this is like standard practice maybe it's plywood behind this whole thing I'm just not aware of that okay I think it's just fine back there that's cool so now this baby goes on there for the final step you put the monitor on just kidding guys oh wait I did do it upside-down yeah yes it's amazing they even let me have power tools I even thought to myself when I was test fitting it wow it's really weird that they have you put the hooks on the bottom and then put the thumb screw in on the top it seems like it'd be a lot easier if you think the other way around oh alright so the next step is to figure out how and where to mount our kvms okay so that's interesting the issue is that these are not going to make it around to the backs of these computers unless I take this side cover off on the other side which which is an option I think I think I'm gonna do that there's a zip tie on there there you go we're good so this is just gonna come off and go with the other one that I also have not ever put on yet oh yeah I just hold this here you know what let's plug into the main storage server how high works so now all that's left is to finalize the position for this puppy these this is supposed to go in the rack but I didn't want to take up any rack space with it cuz as you can see it's fairly limited at this point so I was thinking I'll just put them on this way but the holes pretty much don't line up at all I can only do one at a time so we're gonna try that we're gonna hope for the best this thing isn't too heavy we'll see how it goes is your KVM earthquake safe mine's not wish I'd gotten a drill get on my level now looks uncomfortable doesn't it getting on my level oh thank goodness okay realistically that's not going anywhere so now I'm gonna run around and plug all this stuff in and then I'm gonna let everyone know that the servers are going to be down for a little bit so uh hang tight right about yeah yeah okay so we can actually check all of them okay cool all right so the KVM solution totally works all that's left now is to shut everything down do some cable management and I'll get you guys a tour of exactly what everything in the rack is uh hey can you guys save your work we're gonna have a network outage for about 20 minutes everyone likes it when I work on the server room all right let's go shutdown so I'm going to get a call from the security company telling us that our security system is shut down wow it is astonishing how much quieter it is in here with none of these systems running so let's get the set up of doom the crap out of here oh so frustrating so I moved a bunch of these power squids in here and now I need them out and we just got to do a little bit of cable management back here and then we're actually in a pretty good shape what is this perhaps it is important what can you unplug it why are you sure yeah okay so that goes there then this goes here meet oh oh son of them cable management you want it done nicely or do you want it done fast I'll shoot no don't turn on not now okay um Oh balls okay things are turning on randomly now so that it's gonna go right there uh yes it's okay I am just uh I'm just plugging it back in now oh shut up I need a longer cord all right let's power on all the ups one two okay that is too long for where it's running to what the crap is this there we go okay so I think we're gonna call the front good enough she does close except for this cable that I have running out of the room to allow the LAN show but what are you oh yeah that's another that's another one that runs up the room yeah so we'll fire Fraser back up next I guess the vault is ready to come back up the surveillance system is back up so now that we've got everything pretty much good to go I do need a better solution for some of these ethernet cables running out the front door but we're calling it good enough for now I'll walk you guys through everything that's in here so this is our MRV this is provided by our Internet service provider they figured it'd cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 fortunately we don't have to buy that we just lease it these are the terminations for all of our cat 6a wiring throughout the entire building yes we are full cat 6a even where it doesn't make any sense thanks to a small miscommunication between my wife and the builders this is our Cisco router which we will actually be replacing because this puppy is a little bit difficult for us to configure since none of us are Cisco certified and you got to do it all of you at command line and because it's a little bit older and underpowered for the gigabit that's one thousand up one thousand down connection that we have in here so we'll be replacing this with a PF sense blocks fairly shortly this is our 48 port gigabit switch with a couple of 10 gigabit SFP+ ports over here this is our 10 gigabit switch this is the the heart of most of the servers and the editing den where everyone has a 10 gig Ethernet connection hmm this right here is the surveillance server which you've seen before it's chock-full of WD purple drives a seuss WS board all that kind of reliable awesome stuff this is our first UPS so this handles most of the networking gear and then this is our 24 SSD server it has 24 960 gig Kingston SSDs in here in raid 50 so this is a raid 5 this is a raid 5 this is a raid 5 and they are all striped together from within windows this does most of our file server duties for any of the projects that we're working on it is equipped with an ass Rock motherboard it's next 99 board but we threw a Xeon and ECC memory in there anyway because it's a workstation board that does support those particular parts it's got a redundant power supply in it now was something that I didn't get around to till quite a bit later and it's got dual ten gigabit ethernet onboard so this is one that actually has a trunk connection so it's capable of 20 gigabit per second with multiple people hitting it at the same time this right here is a Newton server this is our aprox I think it's about a hundred and eighteen terabytes or something like that this is the vault the archival server whenever we're done working on something it goes off of Wanek and on to the vault this one only has a single ten gigabit connection because frankly we don't need to access it that often and this this is the really fun machine I'm going to have a full video on the way that this server has completely changed our video editing workflow in the near future here but this is fraser server it has dual 18 cores he owns 128 gigs of ram to tighten blacks and oh yeah it's actually at through a raid card and about a 20 terabyte raid array in there now as well so what happens here is whenever we ingest footage it crunches it and makes it easier to work on then when we're done our videos this crunches them to the finished formats that we upload to the various video sites that we upload to and this is a very cool little piece of machinery and it's the only one that actually extends outside the room so this is the workstation that's actually hooked up through Thunderbolt U and USB 3 to that server in the room and what we do here is we take all of our media so you can see we've got this fancy-pants Thunderbolt card reader we've got an active star tech USB 3 cable leading to this Thermaltake dual drive dock and I'm actually going to pick up another one of those so that we can have quite a few SSD docks on our fs700 and our Blackmagic Cinema cameras all shoot onto SSD and then we've got this Cal digit Thunderbolt breakout box here that we use to run our peripherals and then we're using a pass through to a DisplayPort monitor so this is where we actually interface directly with that machine in that video will be coming hopefully some time pretty soon because we made some pretty amazing discoveries with respect to video editing workflows and how they can be improved so simply put battle nation.com is a place to go and vote on your favorite enthusiasts grade PC components and determine with your fellow enthusiasts which ones are the best so the contest is running for a total of six weeks with weekly battles between different product categories so be it headsets which is this week with the G 633 from Logitech as the current frontrunner or be it completely other categories like keyboards which are coming up next week's video cards displays all that kinds of cool stuff so you might be asking yourself well what is the benefit of voting well there saw no benefit other than Oh at the end of each week the top 10 participants on the leaderboard are entered to win the item that won that week's battle and at the very end of the competition the top 50 are entered in a draw to win the ultimate gaming PC so you can check out full details at battle nation com which is linked in the video description so I think that pretty much wraps up this video guys I hope you enjoyed it if you didn't though you know where that button is but if you did like it hit that like button get subscribed and maybe even consider supporting us by buying a cool t-shirt like this one giving us a contribution through our community forum which is definitely joined by the way or even just changing your amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code the instructions are up there so I think that pretty much wraps it up then if you're looking for something else to watch I did a build log with my son that in my you know unbiased opinion is pretty darn cute so you can check that out in the meantime peace and I'll see you later