My job and other things I guess
31/3/2026
For the past year I have been working at a cancer treatment/research hospital as a Linux sysadmin. Our primary service is a high performance cluster (HPC) providing compute resources for both clinical and research purposes. It has been an interesting insight into cluster computing and administrating Linux systems in a production environment with many users. My previous IT work has been in a Windows environment.
I haven't been the happiest person for a while.
For a while now I have had a 20U server rack in my room. It has a Dell PowerEdge R630, IBM console, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p and a 1320W UPS. There is also an M4 Macbook Pro stored in there as a VPN client for work.
The ThinkCentre is my HomeAssistant instance with a Google Coral for inference, Bluetooth dongle and SONOFF ZBDongle-E for Zigbee and Thread.
The R630 has:
- 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2687W v4 @ 3.00GHz
- 208GB DDR4 ECC Memory
- 2x 500GB SATA SSD's in RAID 1 for the OS
- 8x 1.5TB SAS drives in raidz1-0 for 11TB usable storage
- Frigate with 5 cameras, 24/7 recording
- Jellyfin with live TV and a media collection
- CS2 server
- Various little services and tools
I now have 3 32 inch monitors on a triple arm mount which is nice.
The UPS in my rack is connected to my server which runs NUT. The home assistant machine is a remote client to NUT and is powered off safely along with the R630 as appropriate.
The IBM KVM was a very cool addition. I had originally bought it on eBay, but it arrived damaged. I got my money back from that and it turns out someone I know irl had one kicking around, and that works. So I scored one free plus a spare USB IBM keyboard - which sell for ~130 online.
My mental health has been very low for a while, so I've had no motivation to do projects, just doing my job is hard enough. I'm grateful to get to work from home. Honestly, if I had to travel to the city every day for work I'd have quit by now. I will never attend a job full-time on-site again, it just isn't reasonable anymore.
Oh yeah, I guess that's something I never said on here, I now live in the Melbourne area. Really shitty situation forced me to come here. I miss my old hometown and one (1) person there but if I stayed there I'd have definitely killed myself by now - here it's only slightly less likely.
Anway, here's the server, isn't it cool? Power draw sucks, it sits at around 168W constantly.
ok bye see you next year ( ╥﹏╥) ノシ
