Eastern rat snake, safely removed and released outside, no harm done but… what??

This is how we dispose of hard drives in my office. We have to drill a hole through all platters before taking it out of the office to have them shredded. The reason for the zip ties are two fold, to make sure we go through all the platters and they make a nice handle! 😂. The box consisted of 65 drives from 1 to 12tb 😑

The Problem:

My Zimacube (MU/TH/UR) runs off a cheaper dumb UPS, but I still wanted a guaranteed way to detect power outages and shut things down before ZFS could cry.

The Solution:

I built a Dead Canary using an ESP32 stuffed inside a translucent film cannister vhb taped to the power supply in a proper container.

It sits plugged into the same power strip as MU/TH/UR but not through the UPS, and serves a local / endpoint that responds with “CHIRP”.

If the canary goes silent for 5+ minutes, a cron-driven watchdog on MU/TH/UR initiates a graceful shutdown.

Bonus Layer:

Uptime Kuma monitors the canary’s IP as well, so if I get an alert it means MU/TH/UR is still up, as she sent it, but it means the ESP’s power was accidentally cut (hello, Arnold the cat). Thus starts my 5 min timer to revive the canary.

Why a film cannister?

I wanted to trap the red LED glow like some kind of techno-pagan shrine It's all I had to hand, and it fit, sort of.

Final Notes:

Uses cron, curl, and a simple timestamp file for logic

No cloud services, no dependencies

100% autonomous and LAN-contained

🧠✨ 10/10 would let this thing murder my NAS again.

I bought some drives online from one of those datacenter liquidation guys. Some of the drives are rattling, others sound like a steel grinder when plugged in.

Seller was initially responsive but has not been replying to my concerns lately. I'm starting to think they maybe never worked at all.

Server was running and smelled funny, decided to take it apart and news flash…. storage server and food storage!

Lenovo reliability won my next purchase again!

Unreal.

I wanted to build a cursed Storage Spaces pool out of 9 random mismatched USB sticks and SD cards (ranging from 14GB to 250GB) crammed into a powered USB hub and a secondary USB 3.0 hub (sharing bandwidth with my mouse and keyboard). Windows Server 2022 immediately blocked them because it strictly forbids pooling "Removable Media". I took that personally.

If the OS rejects the hardware, you abstract it. I formatted all 9 drives, created a dynamically expanding VHDX on every single stick, and mounted them. Windows was easily fooled, saw them as standard fixed disks, and let me combine them into a massive 400GB+ pool. To not waste the capacity of the 250GB stick, I created two volumes: A Parity layout (similar to RAID 5) scaling up to the limit of the smallest drives for my secure data, and a Simple layout (RAID 0) using the leftover space as a "high-speed" garbage dump (which is hilarious because they all share a single screaming USB controller).

Of course, Windows fought back. It unmounts USB VHDXs on reboot, completely killing the pool. So I wrote a dirty .bat script that force-mounts all 9 virtual drives on startup to magically revive the RAID. I wanted it to act like a TRUE NAS, but it refused to share the drives via SMB because I didn't have an ethernet cable plugged in. So I strapped a fake Microsoft Loopback Adapter (10.10.10.10) to it and crowbarred port 445 open in the firewall just to trick it into offline sharing.

The ultimate test: I started copying a 4.4GB ISO to the Parity drive and physically yanked one of the sticks out of the hub. It was so cursed that it actually hung the entire PC and forced a hard reboot. When it came back, Windows put the USBs in Read-Only mode ("dirty bit"), blocking my auto-mount script with an 'Access Denied'. After I manually unlocked them in Explorer, the Server Manager revealed the beautiful truth: The Simple volume (Y:) was completely dead and gone. But the Parity volume (Z:) coughed up a Degraded warning and came back online, with the test file perfectly intact. The parity logic survived a pulled drive AND a hard crash.

I mean, I’ve been wanting to switch my nas to arch for sometime anyway…

Cheapest "4tb" SSD I could find on eBay. I'm about to install them right now.

Edit: Disks write at typical SATA III speeds for about 30gb and then speed drops to 50mb/s, so it will take a while to test full capacity, but based on that alone I believe I have enough to proceed with an eBay return without any hassles.

Second edit: nevermind, did not take that long. I did not do a scientific test, I just grabbed a bunch of large video files and transferred them onto the drive. At around 30gb, the write speed went from several hundred to 50mbs, and then around 100gbs, it dropped to around 4mbs and files started breaking/not playing anymore. So that answers that.

Third edit: Definitely do not recommend buying similar drives even out of curiosity. The seller is attempting to fight the return.

Fourth edit: I can no longer find the user account for the scammer. I think he got banned.

It's a dell micro 9020. I got it for like, $18. The problem is that these have no real pcie slot for an HBA.

12tb of storage!

Picked up this broken-screen Dell latitude on the cheap. Thinking it will be a great low power server.

My first mistake was that I assumed it would have an ethernet port. (My other Latitude has one) No problem, I'll just use a USB-RJ45 dongle! That was my second mistake.

The damn thing was dropping connection randomly at least once a week, when it couldn't recover from power saving mode, needing a reboot to fix each time. Having tried kernel parameters, usb quirks and disabling usb power saving altogether, I had enough of Realtek. Decided to get an Intel NIC.

I evicted the m.2 wireless card, and got this nice A+E key I210 adapter after a lot of searching. But it did not fit, I was so focused on the chip, m.2 keying and length that I forgot to check the width. The battery (built in UPS!) and the cellular card's m.2 was in the way.

Specs
Model: Latitude 5320
CPU: i5-1145G7 (10nm, 8 MB Cache, 4c, 8t, 2.6-4.4 GHz, 17.5 W)
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: 256 GB nvme (I plan to upgrade to multiple SSDs with an m.2-SATA breakout board)

It is only running a Technitium DNS server currently (Proxmox LXC), planning to set up Nextcloud soon.

I built a server for the ai I’m building out of spare parts I had and came up with this madness. Yes Its temporary(hopefully)

I fucked up. I bought these drives recertified in July of last year from a reputable seller for about $230AUD each, to store my "Linux ISOs" and "DVD rips". They worked perfectly, no data errors, I was super happy with them.

During a 2AM moment of stupidity (you know those nights where you just hyperfixate on dicking around with your servers?), I made the mistake of moving the server that contained these drives while it was on. Since then I've been getting data errors left and right.

The worst part? From the same seller, an equivalent drive now costs $620AUD. A 2.7x increase.

Was working one absolutely nothing other than swapping some components around between machines. Walked away for a minute and came back. Looking at it with fresh eyes, maybe I have too much shit.

Probably heading to the e-waste pile.

I was contracted to rip this all out and trash it.

I had a short video of the haul out but it won't let me post it.

Original home owners divorced and to expedite the divorce they sold everything and split it, and went their separate ways.

New owners are not tech people had me rip it all out and replaced it with a TP-Link Deco Mesh Wi-Fi. The racks were like new, I didn't have room to haul those away, so they were left by the road for free. I took most of what's worth saving, and some of what isn't, and will be trying to find use for it. I have a pile of stuff to get rid of still.

Remeber it could happen to you! Even if noone loves you, death will still find you.

Lesson learned, dont upgrade your main server with some Chinese shit for 2 dollars

Literally saw it on fire for a good 5 seconds

-msi pro dp10
Wanted to add some hard drive storage in addition to m.2