 My server rack at home always starts out neat and tidy. And then all it takes is a project where I've got to attach a DVD drive to my system here and a failed router that I just throw a replacement in for there. And some contractors who come in clear the fiberglass in my attic, leaving fiberglass fibers all over the front of my servers. And all of a sudden it's a complete and utter mess again, but not this time. This time sponsored by Pulseway, makers of the software that allows you to monitor not just your servers, but really any Mac, Windows or Linux machine. I am going to be completely properly cable managing this once and for all accounting for the next few projects that I have coming. I will even be, yes, making my own ethernet patch cables. Look at this. Isn't this adorable? Watch. See? Out goes this. In goes that. Step one is to give everything the old safe shutdown. I always do this. I turned off the desktops already. So now I've got to issue the shutdown command to my unread server here from my phone, but we're good. System is powered off. Just as I released that screw, I realized something. This server is not mounted on rails. It's just sitting on top of the UPSs. I better pull that out first. I do have rails for it. I just never installed them. Oh, wow. You can see I was using the top panel of this case as a filming plan at some point. That would have been a while ago. Looks like because it's fiberglass, so the strands are quite long compared to regular dust, we actually ended up with almost nothing inside the system itself. So the specs of this server are kind of unusual. I've got a 9900K processor in here. And the reason for that is I ran into this weird issue where Plex, if you want to transcode a 4K Blu-ray and also have subtitles baked into it, it's like a single threaded task that's super inefficient. Like 32 gigs of RAM. I've got a graphics card in here for GPU decoding. Couple of HBAs to power the drives here. I think it's around 150 terabytes total storage. It's a couple of cache drives. And finally a 10 gigabit NIC from a Quantia. And a redundant power supply, just in case one of these modules fails. All I need to do then is just clean off these drive caddies. And oh, that's interesting. So it's only the ones that don't have drives in them that have a bunch of buildup. That makes sense, since those are the ones that are gonna be getting the most air flowing through them. Something I do have an extra of in case of failure is a hard drive. So this is a cold spare. And the keen eye among you might have noticed that I'm using Seagate archive drives which use shingled magnetic recording. Now it's cheaper and more efficient use of the platter but it has a right speed penalty. And as you might've noticed in WD's recent scandal where they were shipping WD Red shingled magnetic recording drives without telling anybody they are not ideal for RAID. But don't worry for my use case, it's fine because I'm not using RAID, I'm using UnRAID which has parity and data redundancy but it does not use stripes across the various disks. So that means that I'm all good with these. I get around 220 megabytes a second writing to the array and then a little faster reading off it. Ooh. I'm sorry. Oh, shoot. It's good for finding your keys when they're missing. LTT store.com. I used tennis balls to hold up the UPS's at the back. I had to find the right number of tennis balls to support them. The answer is five. It's not stupid if it works. Flat ethernet cables, these have a terrible reputation. With that said, all I was using it for was like my Sonos hub thing, so. New rule, any cable that I don't know where it goes, I'm not gonna plug it in anymore. At least two of these, I have no idea what they're for. Also, gross, that'd be bleh. I'm actually gonna be adding some stuff to the server cabinet. Oof. Some new switching gear from Ubiquiti and that kind of stuff. So I wanna move it up so I can salvage two more U's of space. This thing really is awesome. You see you can adjust the length. Says the first connection that I can make here. So we're going into one of the non-power over ethernet ports because it doesn't have to deliver power to my other switch, obviously. Just the two Ubiquiti units, so a router and a switch, and then we've got these three U's that we could theoretically move these up into. I'm gonna leave mine on top because I quite frequently end up, well, like plugging optical drives into it and stuff. So that's just gonna stay. Are these cat footprints? For those who are wondering, I'm rocking a 3900X 12-core processor. I've got a Titan RTX over there. And then I've got this weirdo gigabyte, I think it's a one terabyte NVMe SSD in the PCI Express slot down here. I'm running some super old 64 gigs DDR4 2666 RAM. Not a great pairing for that processor, I know. And then I'm still using the AX1500i. This thing is going strong from the original build as well as this super cool custom reservoir D5 pump. And then of course, the X570 Aqua from ASRock. It's one of the few motherboards on the AMD side that supports Thunderbolt, which is really nice to have. If you can run a Thunderbolt cable through the wall, use a Thunderbolt dock. You've got 40 gigabit per second of I.O. for all your capture cards and all that kind of stuff that I use over there. Yvonne's rig doesn't really need to be touched. It's a 60- It looks terrible compared to yours. Well, it doesn't have water cooling. It doesn't need water cooling. It's messy. There, tuck that there. You know, we can, well, we'll clean the filter. All right. You weren't even gonna clean my filter. Well, yeah, I was gonna clean your filter. Clearly doesn't get cleaned as often. It's fine as it is anyway. 6,700K, I think it's got 16 gigs of RAM. You know, you got my old Titan X Pascal. Lots of people would give their left nut for a system like this. So I expect a left nut from you in the mail. Just don't tell me where you got it. I gotta put both systems forward in order to put your mounting hardware in. And that means basically all the weight is hanging off the front of this thing right now because it's empty. Oh, hey, that's not the, hey, the printer saved the day. After a recent experience losing a UPS at the office, I just thought, you know, like, why cheap out on this? So I splurged and picked up two of these APC 1500 volt amp units here. When I was mapping out all of my circuits at my house recently, what I realized is that this room and everything in it is on a shared circuit with a whole bunch of other lights and outlets in my house. So what I'm planning to do is have Brian the electrician come up here and we're gonna put a dedicated circuit in there for that gear, meaning that it would be nice to have a little bit more capacity because when that happens, I'd also like to go back to my plan of having the VR gaming rig that's down in the living room actually relocated up here so we can do like a super clean setup down there. That is terrific. No more tennis balls for me. Thanks APC. Help, I'm stuck under a server. Now I get to attach these systems properly for the first time ever. How fun is that? I always like to get power cable management out of the way first. They're just kind of bulky. It's nice to not have to deal with them when you're trying to do the finer stuff. Route both of the gaming desktops to the top UPS and the server to the bottom one. That means that the gaming desktops won't last as long in the event of a power outage, but they're just quite frankly not as important. This gives me a lot more time to react and get the server shut down correctly. I know I said I was gonna do everything really properly, but if you think about it, hot gluing a power bar to the inside of your server rack isn't really not properly. Like it's, I'm pretty sure that's generally accepted best practice material right there. One aspect of the cable management that I can't fix by tidying up the rack here is the fiber connection that comes in from my garage and the display port and optical USB connections that go out to the room over there. So I made a new hole, but I'm gonna have to run those again because right now, ever since Colin set it up, they've just been coming in through this opening and I haven't been able to close it and the cat keeps going out there, it's a real pain in the butt. Here's the other side of that hole, I totally nailed lining it up. Now we make a new more bigger hole. Well, it's hardly perfect, but it is literally in the attic, so I'm not gonna stress about it too much. The good news is it's a lot cleaner on this side, so I'm just gonna install one of those little like brush things here and then we're gonna be good to go. That is a lot better. Small update, I am not bothering with the custom cables for everything. It is three in the morning. One thing that I'm not gonna cable manage properly is this ASUS router, just cause it's gonna get replaced, so I'm just gonna plunk it right there. But I mean, it's all still looking, you know, pretty good from the front here. I think we are ready for the big test. Go.com, I'm on WiFi. Let's see if the computers work. Oh, well that's simple, mine's up. LinusXSix.com forum, yes. Okay, and then yours. We're good. Keyboard working, yes. Man, I am just so stoked with how this turned out. Check this out. Magnet mounted dust filter. Oh yeah. It's gonna stay tidy this time, ladies and gentlemen. Of course, managing your hardware is just half the battle. And that's where today's sponsor Pulseway comes in. Pulseway is a real time remote monitoring and management software that allows you to manage systems and support users from anywhere. So I signed up for their free account, which allows you up to two systems for my home closet here. And it means that I can just log in from anywhere on my phone or from a computer and see things like available memory, processes that are running. I can open up a terminal and execute commands and I can even run automation scripts. It's pretty freaking sick. And if you get into their more advanced tiers, man, you can do some amazing stuff. We're talking full remote desktop access and this really cool new feature called auto remediation where you can basically set up workflows that will fix problems for you on their own. So you can have something like, actually we had an issue that this would have been perfect for a couple of years ago, where the Dropbox service kept randomly stopping on one of our servers that we needed to synchronize all of the scripts that we put on our teleprompter. So with Pulseway's auto remediation, you could just say, hey, if this service stops, restart the service and hey, fire off an email over to us so that we can keep an eye on how often this bloody thing is failing. It's super cool. Don't take my word for it though. Try it out today for free at the link in the video description. We've also teamed up with Pulseway and Corsair to give away a pretty sick working from home slash gaming rig. It's a Corsair i140 with a Core i7-9700K and Nvidia RTX 2080. We'll have those full details down below as well. Thanks for watching guys. If you enjoyed this video, you might enjoy a recent one where Anthony and I made some upgrades to our server room at the office. It's definitely worth a watch.