I’ve bought an older Dell PowerEdge 2800 server recently. I bought it because I was sick of messing around with consumer hardware for our home system. A real server system has several advantages, most notably I wanted:
- easily swappable drive bays
- many drives bays
- a possibility to access power status and screen remotely (the real screen, even the BIOS)
- modularity and easy access
- PCI-X support for raid controller
An alternative is to buy a NAS, one of these little boxes that are quite common now. But they are quite expensive, and I didn’t want to spend that much money. In the end I decided to buy an older PowerEdge 2800 system that has all these features: 8 hot-swappable SCSI drive bays, PCI-X and PCIe, a BMC/DRAC and a well-designed system in general. Additionally this had the advantage that SCSI systems are really cheap – who wants to have SCSI anyways?
There were only two problems with the system:
- it’s noisy like a 747 at take-off
- I also don’t want to have SCSI :D
So, obviously I had to hack up the system to support S-ATA and be quiet/silent enough to live, like the previous server, in our stairwell. I succeeded, as you can see here:
This system is running a 8-drive S-ATA RAID5. Note that the drives are only cold-swappable though. It’s even more silent than my desktop!
Main howto posts
- Converting a PowerEdge SCSI backplane to support SATA
- How to adjust the fan thresholds of a Dell PowerEdge
- How to replace the fans on a Poweredge 2800
All posts related to this project
- Converting a PowerEdge SCSI backplane to support SATA
- How to adjust the fan thresholds of a Dell PowerEdge
- Victory!
- The battle againt the BMC – Part 2
- The battle againt the BMC – Part 1
- Dell DRAC/Remote Console discoveries
- Those darn fans!
- Replacing the fans on a Poweredge 2800
- Installing Dell OpenManage on Ubuntu 11.04 64bit
- I've bought a server
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I read you article and wanted to know if its possible to reduce my fan speed on a dell poweredge 2800 that is running on window. I have spent some time now trying to figure out the BMC but to no avail.
Could you send me some specific instruction on modifying the bios. I am a very new to server management.
Baller
No it’s not possible to reduce the fan speeds by modifying the BMC only.
You have to replace the stock fans with models that turn slower. My hack only allows to do this, as there’s a threshold in the BMC preventing you from using fans with low RPM.
Read the two posts related to fans linked above under “Main howto posts” and you’ll understand.