so things finally arrived. had a console style vga monitor with keyboard, nics plugged in. i swapped out the cpus – thanks again for the great instructions <artofserver> seriously, go follow this guy, your ocd will thank you. plugged in the nvidia m40 24GB and got to a point a took a big breath and powered it on. take a big breath…post. awesome, the boot processes on these things is still painfully slow – maybe ill find a way to speed that up one of these days. but after minutes i was able to enter the bios and set the boot disk to my proxmox image on usb. the image booted to the graphical install and away we go! now, i wasn’t even sure what to expect, but it seemed to detect everything – nics showed up and i added my network static ip, hdd showed up, i had all the drives available. proxmox doesn’t like onboard raid (so the IT mode HBA330 is really the bomb) i was able to set the 2 SFF hdds in raid 0 (mirror) and install proxmox onto them – i didn’t want to deal with the nvme boot, and the sas drives are 12gb/s so they will be fine. installer did its thing and asked me to pull the boot media and voila! back to the reboot process. what seemed like 15min later…i had a proxmox root prompt, a network address and port for the proxmox management and supersonic fan speed! WTF. power off and back to the internet I go.
looks like thats going to be the first hangup of the dell server. non-dell pci devices default server fan speeds to like 80% if you’ve ever heard a server ramp up that hard, 80% is fucking LOUD! thankfully github came through again. IPMI settings allow you to control fan speeds through the idrac interface over eth. so i did some more digging, enabled settings for the ipmi in bios and landed on this fan_speed.sh file for quieter fans. in a nutshell it monitors cpu temps and ramps up or down fans speeds on 1 min intervals. it works really well. and unless you like your ears blown out it will likely be the first thing you do on your new server. props to this guy <add link here> with a quick copy/paste, a nano fan_speed.sh file creation, quick chmod +x and a ./fan_speed.sh command, fans ramp down – way down. i could hear myself think, and my wife said she wasn’t worried that i was gunna explode the house. for comfort i added the crontab -e details and i was on my way to apt update -y && apt full-upgrade and see wtf this thing could do…