Homelab reflections

Picked up a new server for the homelab. It’s a Dell VxRail box with 48 cores, 96 threads, and more RAM than I know what to do with. Absolute unit. Also unbelievably loud.

Getting it running took way longer than it should have. It’s from that awkward generation where booting straight off NVMe is not really supported, so it turned into a bunch of workarounds. Ended up chaining a small bootloader in front that hands off to GRUB on the NVMe drive, which then boots Proxmox through BIOS. Not clean, but it works.

Now the real problem is the noise. The fans sit near full blast because of a few third party PCIe to NVMe adapters, and the system has no idea how to handle their thermals. iDRAC keeps everything aggressive, and this particular firmware does not let me override fan curves manually.

Next step is to take control of it myself. Plan is to intercept PWM and tach signals, feed safer values back to iDRAC, and run the fans lower while still reacting to real sensor data. Bit hacky, but so is everything else about this setup.