I always learn something by watching this UA-cam channel. I'm just a beginner with Rpi, but this show showed me where to use rpi-clone - a great little utility which I looked up, and now I know how to use. Thanks, Jeff!
Not really, much easier and better to keep a bit of your previous cluster for that. Not being x86 is a big issue as lots of software does not work. How do I know this, well my day job is running an HPC system, for a university. Guess you guessed correctly we retained some of our old cluster for this purpose.
This is exactly the setup I'm working towards as well. I have 4 Pis in a Kubernetes cluster with SSDs but I'm running them all with the power adapters and in a little acrylic Pi rack. This video hit at the right time!
I love those little stanley pen screwdrivers. Just perfect for almost all your electronic needs, it's not as fancy as the ltt, but it's definitely one of the most functional and used additions to my laptop bag. I had no idea the raw hex socket fitted the motherboard standoffs! Mind blown!!!
Finally! Some more regular Raspberry Pi model videos! As much as I also like the compute module videos, I have yet to get one, and all I have currently are regular Pi models to use.
Thanks for marking it as sponsored even though they didn't pay you. If only other youtubers realized that the free equipment, early access, and other benefits are essentially payments.
UA-cam's own description of that 'paid sponsorship' badge says as much. Sadly, the FCC won't ever be able to enforce the rules for the zillions of smaller content creators. I try to both mark it with the 'sponsorship' badge (even if no extra payment) _and_ make it clear my relationship with the company in the video, because honesty/transparency is the only way for viewers to actually make a judgement about the content itself. I also publish my own guidelines here: github.com/geerlingguy/youtube
Great looking product. My only gripe is the USB jumper being left as the green pcb, which against the black enclosure just detracts from the visuals. Will be keeping an eye on this product for future revisions for my own lab
Yeah that seams like a oversight on the part of the lower PCB designer.. There are pads on the PI that give you USB so they could have just added some more of those pins to interface in that way instead of that jumper. It just looks janky and unprofessional in my opinion.
Well yeah, don't print a 1U enclosure out of PLA. ASA has a heat deflection temperature of like 85-105C. If the air inside your server is above 80C, you've got much larger problems.
Melting / deflecting is one problem but what I meant is that I don't want an exploding capacitor or a shorted component heating up a PCB trace to ignite the plastic. Industrial electronic enclosures are made from fire retar dant plastic for that reason
I really enjoy watching you build clusters of pi because it feels like you're making a mini data center. I also want to build one but I don't have usecase for it 😅
Every time I see you mention ansible. I'm reminded that is yet another thing I need to learn. This time maybe I"ll take some time and take a look. Love the video, I use a 3D printed pi-rack today as well. I do like this and other options like it a bit better especially the idea of hot swapping them easily. Take care, and see you in the next video!
You look like you're doing better Jeff; I hope you are, and from someone with digestive issues, I hope you're also *feeling* better. :) On a technical note, it would be nice if a future revision of the standard Pi included pin headers for USB so that various add-on boards could interface with the USB bus internally versus having to have male-to-male dongles on the outside.
I'm hopeful there will be some additional interface to get more IO, more easily, on the next model B boards. They are so great for so many things, but they always look a bit odd when used in any non-hobby scenario.
@@JeffGeerling I think there should be no such additions on the next model B, but rather a model C for such things, so that the price won't be such a constraint. Pi model B is meant to be as it is now while maintaining a price low enough to tinkerers, education, etc. But i think us enthusiasts (i am also an educators, so i understand the price constraint well) wouldn't mind paying more to have some extra stuff. Also, model C could hapily break the form factor. Like a bit larger, with all the IO on the same side, a sata interface and/or NVME, and why not some PCIE connectivity (even trough NVME). I mean, i like the pi form factor, but it is quite limiting in some applications. We have 0 and CM4 for compact, A is dead for now, B for general use while remaining cheap, and C could be more power user oriented. But perhaps the model C's role is already fullfilled by the CM4 + the right carrier board. Perhaps the pi foundation should just release more carrier boards? I hope the current carrier board form factor is not what the one for the CM5 MUST be, that they are not bound by it!
I agree so many of those male to male U's put out a ton of RFI also. My biggest complaint with the Pi4B though has been the 2 micro HDMI ports. I don't know anyone that uses dual display with a Pi, most of the Pi's I know about run headless. The ones I know of and have hooked to displays all the junky adapters cause more trouble than a second HDMI could possibly be worth. Honestly with the prices right now and the annoyance of the form factor and micro HDMI's unless a Pi is absolutely necessary I use and recommend used 1L office PCs. Personally partial to the Lenovo M93p right now they go for about the same as a Pi4B by the time you get all the kit for it, More horse power, More ports, takes real SATA drives, DP standard which has good adapters to HDMI but if you look you can find em with a secondary HDMI port already optioned. Only drawback are they are a bit bigger and idle consumption is a bit more but you get a more powerful machine for it. However with Proxmox on one with an i5 it could take the place of several Pi's making the power use a wash so long as x86 is fine for what you're doing.
Glad to see you back! Hope you are feeling better. Love this project but like you mentioned, the blade project looks even cooler (pun kind of intended)
Thank you for pointing out that the LTT screwdriver needs a bit that can work with board standoffs. The exposed pins on the USB-USB adapter makes me extremely uncomfortable. I want to just reach out and put a piece of electrical tape over it.
I'm waiting impatiently for the PXE pi poject!!!! It’s one of that ideas I dreamed of for years, but never attended to study enough to realized to (I have prioritized other projects).
Yo Jeff!!! You, your father and Explaining Computers are the only things left on UA-cam that does't SUCK!!! LOL Thanks for that! Hope you are feeling better! Cheers! Judson & Buddy! THE Golden Hound Dog of OHIO!!!
8:07 - DNS redundancy is highly desirable. As an option, run PiHole on another raspberry and set up Gravity Sync between them. It made my life very easy. I have one DNS spinning on a virtualization environment, and the second on a separate Raspberry pi.
That's likely what I'll do, my plan is to build a new router "someday" (not sure when that day will be), and it will run routing/DHCP and DNS as a 2nd Pi-Hole.
I looked at Gravity Sync, then Adguard Home with Adguard Home-Say c, and ultimately moved to an Adguard environment as the syncing was a lot better, and I've been very happy with the result.
That's a really nice case and a fair price for what it is. I hope they read the comments here as there are some good improvement suggestions. Great Vid as always, and happy to see that you are still Jeff! ;o)
This is so close to perfectly designed, it just needs a little shove to perfection. The ventilation is a problem yeah, with all 4 under any real load that little box will get hot. BUT a bigger problem in my opinion is the exposed pins on the back of the USB bridge PCB, those have exposed 5v right next to a load of sensitive IO and can easily be shorted together by bumping them with anything conductive, that means any metal, certain kinds of cloth, dust, or even some errant forehead sweat, and those are all known dangers with an active rack, and it only takes 1 good short to kill the USB 3 controller on a Pi4.
I have one of the other pi rack configurations from uctronics, the one that holds them vertically with base plates. I would strongly recommend avoiding that version specifically, as the screw holes for mounting the pis get deformed after a couple uses.
Pretty cool. A quick way to improve ventilation may be to drill holes and mount fans in the back of the enclosure for the pi's. Provided theirs enough space
Wow. That is really awesome! It also seems like a lot of fun to have something like this in your cluster. Lots of tinkering and all the technology to learn from. I have quite some Pi's lying around, might consider getting an enclosure like that in the future.
This is neat, really like the power button and screen, not to mention access to almost all ports and SD card on the front, but I rather use up 2Us of rack space for vertical Pis than 1U of just four horizontal. Feel like you can get more density with that than this, even with all the extra stuff thrown in
I liked this product, the Pi Cluster Rackmount Kit. I'm not sure the price is in the right ballpark - it seems a little steep. I would definitely consider this, as long as the following was done: (A) all screw holes were properly aligned - when I purchase a product like this, I'm paying for perfection. (B) There needs to be much better ventilation and at least an option to add two fans. By watching this video, I would say this rackmount unit is in the beta phase and needs some work. If they clean it up, I would definitely buy it at a lower (reasonable) price point. Thanks for the video - it was very well done!
Love the videos! Here’s an idea: setup a bunch of micro sd cards in raid and write a bunch to it until something fails. I bet they last longer than we’d think. Would also be interesting to see performance over time and how hot they get and such.
Loved this video. At the moment I run 8 pi4 mixture of 2gb and 4gb with mixture of Poe and Poe+ hats 1 x asterisk box, 2 x pi hole boxes. 1 homebridge box. 1 home assistant box. 1 x Bonjour gateway box and 2 x hot swap boxes. They all run under Ubuntu 20.04 except the home assistant box. Currently the all back up to a local Synology box then replicate backup to the cloud. I have been looking for an affordable case this looks great but probably a bit too expensive for me just now. I am looking at migrating the Ubuntu boxes to pxe boot from the Synology this will help me sleep better at night, I have piloted one box successfully and am looking to start moving the hosts over this next weekend. Thank you, over the years you have been a real inspiration to me and my ip project. When I started with a pi 2 and asterisk test bench.
Good luck with UTronics. I purchased this about a year ago and within a month the POE power supply started dropping voltage to the point it will no longer power the Pi. The cooling fans also die very quickly. After 2 weeks one of the fan's bearings failed. Swapped it and got another 3 weeks out of the new one. I tried contacting them and admittedly they were helpful and sent me replacements but after the second RMA I gave up. After 3 months or so I scrapped the whole thing entirely.
This unit doesn't come with any PoE power supply, I'm using Raspberry Pi's own PoE HATs with it. They do make a ton of different products though, maybe one of the other models has an issue with heat or power. So far it hasn't been an issue with the SATA HAT after a few days at least.
Hi Dustin Thompson, the default POE HAT is 802.3af which can only source 5V/2.5A power and is also impacted by the POE switch capacity, RJ45 cable quality, and on-device peripherals (USB hard drive for example). All of these factors might cause low voltage caution signs. And we keep improving UCtronics products according to customers' feedback, we will release a POE+ HAT very soon to support 5V/4A, keep tuned.
The irony... I just finished designing a new Pi 4 mount for a rackmount setup (finalizing the Pi mount itself, then onto the rack) with an OLED display yesterday. I'll have to send you one when I get them finished.
Yeah, Ivan's working on fan modules for the back, which use 40mm PWM fans connected to a controller board per 2 blades. It looks like a pretty nice solution.
I enjoyed this new video. I'm running two of these (5-bay) with the 12-bay 3u also. Their SSD mounting adapter is kinda pricy for that 12-bay (12 x $20). But you don't have to boot off of SDCards. You can boot from (cheap?) 120/240GB SSD. Which somehow I had 20 new of for some weird reason. I love your network Internet-Pi scripting, BTW. I removed the Pi-Hole and such and modified it a little to be a small NMS. I like being notified when my network goes down or slows down. :) Keep up the great work, Jeff!
Cool. Built my own little cluster for five PI's and a 5VDC PSU. It is 3U, all the connectors are on the rear though, much cleaner front that way. Been running a Kafka cluster for a couple of years now, ~4 I think(using ssd's).
I see your using the LTT screwdriver. Cannot wait to get mine. Also I cannot wait for your PXE boot video. You will never go back after making the switch.
I love it. The spirit of a homeland is excessive overengineeing so this serves the purpose perfectly I would like to see ventilation though.. not sure how I’d power it
Beside the already mentioned temperature and ventilation problems, i think they should improve the IO shield of the PI (e.g. the huge gap above the ethernet jack) and provide these USB to USB adapters with black PCBs before i consider buying it...
I really like the ability to insert the Pi sandwich as hot swap-able. Very nice. I would like to see some ventilation on the top, and air flow for edge to edge with a fan or 3... $300 isn't bad for the extra capabilities the trays give you.
Sounds like they where responsive to his suggestion. Hopefully they'll revise the design. Until then I bet just taking the case to the drill press and putting a pattern of holes in it for passive cooling would mostly fix it and it wouldn't be to hard to mod in a 40mm fan or 4 if wanted/needed.
Dual 40mm on one end and some vent holes on the other end would be best for that surely. Even close off the holes on the rear so that it's a fully flow through design. Not sure why it would have been missed by the manufacturer in the first place.
I always love your content Jeff! Ansible and most of kubernetes may be above my head. (I am running Truenas scale on my home server but I'm just learning) But I love learning with your vids and it strokes my inner nerd every time you drop new content. Love the channel and keep it up brotha! And so glad to see you are feeling a bit better as well!
I have a pretty large set of Wera Kraftform Micro screwdrivers in Torx, Hex, Phillips and slotted. Call me old fashioned but I like having separate drivers for micro projects.
For rackmount stuff, it's nice to have one driver with all the bits, just because moving a tray or sleeve full of mini drivers can be annoying. But at the electronics workbench I do use my little jeweler's kit most of the time.
Still watching this, but I had to pause for a laugh when you introduced the new enclosure. I actually have the non-pro version of this kit and it's worked out pretty well though I've not finished setting it up as yet, I still need to get a PoE switch, shorter cables, mount the last 2 pis, and get my pis all configured. One note I've had thus far is it's worth considering replacing the fans that the PoE HATs come with, because they've been kind of rattley/noisy IME. Quick edit: If you've not heard of them, you might want to look into RackStuds instead of the traditional cage nut & bolt mounting. I've really enjoyed using them in my racks, completely toolless and very secure.
I've considered using Rack Studs, and they do seem great for smaller devices like this... but since I like just standardizing on one thing, everywhere, I settled on some decent cage nuts and am sticking with the screws-some of the equipment in the rack is over 100 lbs and I can't trust the studs with that :) But who knows? I do like the idea of using them for network equipment which is often a bit lighter.
@@JeffGeerling I feel you there! I use them on all my network equipment, I'm trying to recall what I've done with my servers so far, I think I've not used them there only because most of the (all second hand) servers I have came with toolless rails. That said, I installed the full shelf in the bottom of my 48U rack that's supposed to hold my UPS (which is also TBD) using the included bolts and cage nuts. That said, my newer wall mounted rack for my networking kit is 100% rack studs :)
Glad to see a fellow Pi Engineer Review the Linus Screwdriver on a video in live time. I'm okay with bulk myself, but sometimes setups require a sideways screw driver for how tight certain setups have to be for microcomputer builds.
I don't understand why UCTRONICS didn't make any consideration for cooling in that case. And their answer to whether they'll revise the design is "lol idk". Amazing.
An interesting solution and appears to be well conceived. Concerning the misalignment of the holes, it seems to me that the order of assembly is a little off. If I understand correctly, once the SSD is plugged into the carrier board, any tolerance allowances start to accumulate leading to the misalignment as everything is tightened. Perhaps the SSD should be loosely mounted onto the baseplate first, and then the PCB plugged onto the SSD? This should allow enough play to then align the PCB mounting screws before cinching everything down. It's good to see you firing on all cylinders again Jeff.
What part is actually hot swapable? I have drives that allow me to remove and replace members of an array without downing my server or appliance. I have redundant power supplies that will let me remove and replace a power supply without downing the server. All I'm seeing with this is a tray that allows you to power off a unit and remove it with all services ceasing during the process. Regarding the heat, you might try tapping the holes for fans on each side and see if the holes alone offer enough air movement without installing any fan first. Neat project. I have been relying on more virtualization than dedicated hardware for various services.
The only down side to all this projects requiring more and more raspberry Pies is, that the Raspberry Pi Foundation isn't able to produce them as cheap and as quickly as the market demands them :/
Speaking of those monoprice ultra thin patch cat6 cables, they are good for up to 30w. I run Panasonic PTZ cameras on them all the time and they are POE+ and draw about 28 watts.
Great video!! Big fan. I recommend trying something called a Raspikey - they fit in the sd card slot but uses EMMC - a lot more reliable than a SD card, we have replaced all SD cards in our pi with these Raspi keys at work and haven’t had trouble since.
Put the extra cable in the Neat Patch for 'asthetics'. The Neat Patch is the equivalent of tossing something in the closet and closing the door so that Mom and Dad can't see it. 😁 We use them at work, and I have a couple at home too 😆
I'm happy to see you posting once again I also just realized you have the same PoE switch I picked up recently If you're comfortable with typically Cisco-like CLI, this switch can offer that over the limited config options QNAP offers out of the box. Great switch if you're running bonds, VLANs, LLAGs, etc. and want 2.5G WITH PoE+/++.
Looks like there's plenty of room to extend the back of the case to put a 40mm fan on each unit. Adding an extension for the usb-c power to a simple usb-c port on the back would make it neat and tidy.
Thank you for sharing your amazing video, very interesting product, I am very happy to learn about my options though your channel. And love to see you back and well-being. God bless you and your family.
It would be counter productive to PXE boot the PIs because if they are all dependant on a server you may as well run them as VMs. The advantage of separate PIs is they run independently of the rest of the rack except for the network itself.
Awesome stuff Jeff! Tinkering more with this stuff is on my list for whenever we manage to afford a house (the tiny apartment can no way hold a half rack, though I do a small stack like you started with...hmm)
Use a small kitchen Rubber silcon mat when working on boards etc No slip as you work on them looks at myself so when have you got up to use one :) OH dang yeah but uno its a tip#
I had an SD card (Samsung Evo) begin to die not too long ago and was terrified bc I haven't been great about backing up my pi. Managed to get the important stuff off it before it completely bit the dust, so now I'm booting from a usb3.0 flash drive. Much snappier
Happy to see your getting better! Thank you for the video, your content is always top of the line and can lear something from it! You inspire me to get my hands ditry with raspberry jam ;) :D
I see you're doubling down on calling this a cluster :) With Kubernetes, I agree, this is a cluster. I run a single Ubuntu server at home with ZFS and (currently) 10 different Docker containers. Although this looks like a fun project, I think for a lot of use-cases a single server makes more sense. I do appreciate seeing your approach, thanks Jeff.
For now I'm going to try one intake on the side, and see if that can move enough air through all the gaps in the front of the case to get the Pis back down to the 50s.
Jeff, I'd be interested in learning more about your career path. I'm in L2 support now, with a deep interest/focus in software development, and you seem to have a pretty holistic view of the modern tech landscape. I'm interested to hear more about how you got to where you are.
Thanks Jeff. I think I would also like to get a DNS running at my local and host my own website. That would be so cool. I like your setup a lot! Thanks for the video and hope you are feeling better and all is OK for now! :)
To those of you who don't use CC, you're missing out! Thanks Jeff for going the extra mile and the laughs
im cc
I would, but I don't have any friends to carbon copy. But, I've been using CC a lot with my MIDI. 😜
What is CC?
@@jakecobelton9876 Closed captions
CC is closed captions.
It's what most people actually mean when they say subtitles.
Respect to the creators who put in proper subtitles.
I always learn something by watching this UA-cam channel. I'm just a beginner with Rpi, but this show showed me where to use rpi-clone - a great little utility which I looked up, and now I know how to use. Thanks, Jeff!
rpi-clone is so nice for the case where you just want to move to a new microSD card, switch to SSD, or switch back from SSD to microSD.
@@JeffGeerling Ah the LTT Screwdriver
That’s makes one of us 🫤
Hope you're doing well Jeff. Great to see more and more Pi-related stuff for professional use coming onto the market .
I enjoy how considerate you are of your audience by explaining levels of detail all the way to sponsors. Thank you for putting in that extra effort.
It’s really really good to see you looking so well Jeff. It’s wonderful 🥰❤️😁 Stay well and keep up the amazing videos sir.
I think this would be really great for university labs to experiment with clusters. They are high enough quality to hold up for years of use.
It might take years to get enough Pi's to put in there.
Not really, much easier and better to keep a bit of your previous cluster for that. Not being x86 is a big issue as lots of software does not work. How do I know this, well my day job is running an HPC system, for a university. Guess you guessed correctly we retained some of our old cluster for this purpose.
@@jonathanbuzzard6648 interesting info, thanks!
Why not just create N VMs? You have a virtual cluster then.
massive waste of money.
Love the touch of adding CC to the video. So often I have to use the auto generated CC and it's always hit or miss...
This is exactly the setup I'm working towards as well. I have 4 Pis in a Kubernetes cluster with SSDs but I'm running them all with the power adapters and in a little acrylic Pi rack. This video hit at the right time!
I love those little stanley pen screwdrivers. Just perfect for almost all your electronic needs, it's not as fancy as the ltt, but it's definitely one of the most functional and used additions to my laptop bag.
I had no idea the raw hex socket fitted the motherboard standoffs! Mind blown!!!
This rack mount is SO FREAKING COOL! It solves all the issues I would have with every other Pi rackmount I've seen.
Finally! Some more regular Raspberry Pi model videos! As much as I also like the compute module videos, I have yet to get one, and all I have currently are regular Pi models to use.
Thanks for marking it as sponsored even though they didn't pay you. If only other youtubers realized that the free equipment, early access, and other benefits are essentially payments.
UA-cam's own description of that 'paid sponsorship' badge says as much. Sadly, the FCC won't ever be able to enforce the rules for the zillions of smaller content creators.
I try to both mark it with the 'sponsorship' badge (even if no extra payment) _and_ make it clear my relationship with the company in the video, because honesty/transparency is the only way for viewers to actually make a judgement about the content itself.
I also publish my own guidelines here: github.com/geerlingguy/youtube
Ah good thing to see you up and running again Jeff. Good news on the blades too cool.
Great looking product. My only gripe is the USB jumper being left as the green pcb, which against the black enclosure just detracts from the visuals. Will be keeping an eye on this product for future revisions for my own lab
Yeah that seams like a oversight on the part of the lower PCB designer.. There are pads on the PI that give you USB so they could have just added some more of those pins to interface in that way instead of that jumper. It just looks janky and unprofessional in my opinion.
Great to see you're back, hope you're feeling well.
Another benefit of the proper enclosure is not having to worry about 3d printed plastic being next to electronics. Most filaments burn like napalm
I love the smell of napalm
It Smells like victory.
It really depends on the filament, but generally they are not as flammable as you think. ua-cam.com/video/a7l0Aaysy_8/v-deo.html
Well yeah, don't print a 1U enclosure out of PLA. ASA has a heat deflection temperature of like 85-105C. If the air inside your server is above 80C, you've got much larger problems.
Melting / deflecting is one problem but what I meant is that I don't want an exploding capacitor or a shorted component heating up a PCB trace to ignite the plastic. Industrial electronic enclosures are made from fire retar dant plastic for that reason
I really enjoy watching you build clusters of pi because it feels like you're making a mini data center. I also want to build one but I don't have usecase for it 😅
I can’t wait to see the PXE boot guide when you release the video!
It's been a long time coming. Still have some work to do, it's complicated enough that to uncomplicate it for a video takes a lot of extra work!
Every time I see you mention ansible. I'm reminded that is yet another thing I need to learn. This time maybe I"ll take some time and take a look. Love the video, I use a 3D printed pi-rack today as well. I do like this and other options like it a bit better especially the idea of hot swapping them easily. Take care, and see you in the next video!
Love the transparency, and integrity you display - most UA-camrs have something to live up to there!
Hey Jeff glad to see you up and around...hope you get better every day!!!
To be honest: I stumbled around your vids and NOW it is happen - with this project you gain another follower. So pls keep the good work up 👍
You look like you're doing better Jeff; I hope you are, and from someone with digestive issues, I hope you're also *feeling* better. :)
On a technical note, it would be nice if a future revision of the standard Pi included pin headers for USB so that various add-on boards could interface with the USB bus internally versus having to have male-to-male dongles on the outside.
I'm hopeful there will be some additional interface to get more IO, more easily, on the next model B boards. They are so great for so many things, but they always look a bit odd when used in any non-hobby scenario.
@@JeffGeerling I think there should be no such additions on the next model B, but rather a model C for such things, so that the price won't be such a constraint. Pi model B is meant to be as it is now while maintaining a price low enough to tinkerers, education, etc. But i think us enthusiasts (i am also an educators, so i understand the price constraint well) wouldn't mind paying more to have some extra stuff. Also, model C could hapily break the form factor. Like a bit larger, with all the IO on the same side, a sata interface and/or NVME, and why not some PCIE connectivity (even trough NVME).
I mean, i like the pi form factor, but it is quite limiting in some applications. We have 0 and CM4 for compact, A is dead for now, B for general use while remaining cheap, and C could be more power user oriented.
But perhaps the model C's role is already fullfilled by the CM4 + the right carrier board. Perhaps the pi foundation should just release more carrier boards?
I hope the current carrier board form factor is not what the one for the CM5 MUST be, that they are not bound by it!
@@AudreyRobinel True... maybe model B for hobby, model C for power users/desktop, and CM for embedded/industrial.
I agree so many of those male to male U's put out a ton of RFI also. My biggest complaint with the Pi4B though has been the 2 micro HDMI ports. I don't know anyone that uses dual display with a Pi, most of the Pi's I know about run headless. The ones I know of and have hooked to displays all the junky adapters cause more trouble than a second HDMI could possibly be worth.
Honestly with the prices right now and the annoyance of the form factor and micro HDMI's unless a Pi is absolutely necessary I use and recommend used 1L office PCs. Personally partial to the Lenovo M93p right now they go for about the same as a Pi4B by the time you get all the kit for it, More horse power, More ports, takes real SATA drives, DP standard which has good adapters to HDMI but if you look you can find em with a secondary HDMI port already optioned. Only drawback are they are a bit bigger and idle consumption is a bit more but you get a more powerful machine for it. However with Proxmox on one with an i5 it could take the place of several Pi's making the power use a wash so long as x86 is fine for what you're doing.
Very cool rack device for the Pi setups! I like this alot!
Thanks for this Jeff. Nicely done!
Glad to see you back! Hope you are feeling better. Love this project but like you mentioned, the blade project looks even cooler (pun kind of intended)
Thank you for pointing out that the LTT screwdriver needs a bit that can work with board standoffs.
The exposed pins on the USB-USB adapter makes me extremely uncomfortable. I want to just reach out and put a piece of electrical tape over it.
Maybe it could be a challenge in the coming months. How many times can I service the rack without shorting a connection on the exposed plugs :D
Looks like you are doing well! So very glad to see it!
I pulled the trigger and bought the rack mount. Can’t wait to get it setup!
I'm waiting impatiently for the PXE pi poject!!!! It’s one of that ideas I dreamed of for years, but never attended to study enough to realized to (I have prioritized other projects).
Yo Jeff!!! You, your father and Explaining Computers are the only things left on UA-cam that does't SUCK!!! LOL Thanks for that! Hope you are feeling better!
Cheers!
Judson & Buddy!
THE Golden Hound Dog of OHIO!!!
8:07 - DNS redundancy is highly desirable. As an option, run PiHole on another raspberry and set up Gravity Sync between them. It made my life very easy.
I have one DNS spinning on a virtualization environment, and the second on a separate Raspberry pi.
That's likely what I'll do, my plan is to build a new router "someday" (not sure when that day will be), and it will run routing/DHCP and DNS as a 2nd Pi-Hole.
Gravity sync? Cool. Looking up. Right now my piholes are not synchronized automatically.
Thanks for the tip on Gravity Sync ...
I looked at Gravity Sync, then Adguard Home with Adguard Home-Say c, and ultimately moved to an Adguard environment as the syncing was a lot better, and I've been very happy with the result.
@@SchoolforHackers На здоровье)
That's a really nice case and a fair price for what it is. I hope they read the comments here as there are some good improvement suggestions. Great Vid as always, and happy to see that you are still Jeff! ;o)
Am reading, and these are really good suggestions.
This is so close to perfectly designed, it just needs a little shove to perfection.
The ventilation is a problem yeah, with all 4 under any real load that little box will get hot. BUT a bigger problem in my opinion is the exposed pins on the back of the USB bridge PCB, those have exposed 5v right next to a load of sensitive IO and can easily be shorted together by bumping them with anything conductive, that means any metal, certain kinds of cloth, dust, or even some errant forehead sweat, and those are all known dangers with an active rack, and it only takes 1 good short to kill the USB 3 controller on a Pi4.
I wanted to post that the CC is on point! Thank you so much for that! The extra mile really shows up here.
i love how honest you are abput products sent to you i hope more people were like you
I have one of the other pi rack configurations from uctronics, the one that holds them vertically with base plates. I would strongly recommend avoiding that version specifically, as the screw holes for mounting the pis get deformed after a couple uses.
Please contact us, and we can do the replacement for you!
@@UCTRONICS Now that’s some great customer service!
We update our new designs with captive screws now, making them easy to mount, we don't have such potential issues anymore.
Pretty cool. A quick way to improve ventilation may be to drill holes and mount fans in the back of the enclosure for the pi's. Provided theirs enough space
It does make me feel better that Jeff doesn't have DNS redundancy either. Thanks Jeff!
Wow. That is really awesome! It also seems like a lot of fun to have something like this in your cluster. Lots of tinkering and all the technology to learn from. I have quite some Pi's lying around, might consider getting an enclosure like that in the future.
I admire you're strength Jeff 💪 invisible illnesses are hard to deal with. You're a source of inspiration 😎
Thanks. I was all ready to order until you got to the lack of ventilation. I will wait for next revision.
This is neat, really like the power button and screen, not to mention access to almost all ports and SD card on the front, but I rather use up 2Us of rack space for vertical Pis than 1U of just four horizontal. Feel like you can get more density with that than this, even with all the extra stuff thrown in
I liked this product, the Pi Cluster Rackmount Kit. I'm not sure the price is in the right ballpark - it seems a little steep. I would definitely consider this, as long as the following was done: (A) all screw holes were properly aligned - when I purchase a product like this, I'm paying for perfection. (B) There needs to be much better ventilation and at least an option to add two fans. By watching this video, I would say this rackmount unit is in the beta phase and needs some work. If they clean it up, I would definitely buy it at a lower (reasonable) price point. Thanks for the video - it was very well done!
Love the videos! Here’s an idea: setup a bunch of micro sd cards in raid and write a bunch to it until something fails. I bet they last longer than we’d think. Would also be interesting to see performance over time and how hot they get and such.
No wonder I can`t buy a Pi, Jeff has 40% of the world's supply! Good stuff, Jeff.
Great to see you looking well Jeff! I am so tempted to pull the trigger and buy one of these. I’m itching for a new project.
Loved this video. At the moment I run 8 pi4 mixture of 2gb and 4gb with mixture of Poe and Poe+ hats 1 x asterisk box, 2 x pi hole boxes. 1 homebridge box. 1 home assistant box. 1 x Bonjour gateway box and 2 x hot swap boxes. They all run under Ubuntu 20.04 except the home assistant box. Currently the all back up to a local Synology box then replicate backup to the cloud. I have been looking for an affordable case this looks great but probably a bit too expensive for me just now. I am looking at migrating the Ubuntu boxes to pxe boot from the Synology this will help me sleep better at night, I have piloted one box successfully and am looking to start moving the hosts over this next weekend.
Thank you, over the years you have been a real inspiration to me and my ip project. When I started with a pi 2 and asterisk test bench.
Jeff, you're literally one of the best information channels right now. I appreciate your work and I learned a lot about Ansible because of you.
Good luck with UTronics. I purchased this about a year ago and within a month the POE power supply started dropping voltage to the point it will no longer power the Pi. The cooling fans also die very quickly. After 2 weeks one of the fan's bearings failed. Swapped it and got another 3 weeks out of the new one. I tried contacting them and admittedly they were helpful and sent me replacements but after the second RMA I gave up. After 3 months or so I scrapped the whole thing entirely.
This unit doesn't come with any PoE power supply, I'm using Raspberry Pi's own PoE HATs with it. They do make a ton of different products though, maybe one of the other models has an issue with heat or power. So far it hasn't been an issue with the SATA HAT after a few days at least.
Hi Dustin Thompson, the default POE HAT is 802.3af which can only source 5V/2.5A power and is also impacted by the POE switch capacity, RJ45 cable quality, and on-device peripherals (USB hard drive for example). All of these factors might cause low voltage caution signs. And we keep improving UCtronics products according to customers' feedback, we will release a POE+ HAT very soon to support 5V/4A, keep tuned.
The irony... I just finished designing a new Pi 4 mount for a rackmount setup (finalizing the Pi mount itself, then onto the rack) with an OLED display yesterday. I'll have to send you one when I get them finished.
It's just a shame that raspberry pi's are impossible to buy now and I would do this project in a flash. Thanks Jeff: awesome setup.
Eyeing on the compute blade surely they will boost space usability on 1U Racks with good ventilation with some Pwm fan modules I guess
Yeah, Ivan's working on fan modules for the back, which use 40mm PWM fans connected to a controller board per 2 blades. It looks like a pretty nice solution.
Really pleased to see you're doing more with what you enjoy, Jeff. Trust you're doing well?
Better than last month!
I enjoyed this new video. I'm running two of these (5-bay) with the 12-bay 3u also. Their SSD mounting adapter is kinda pricy for that 12-bay (12 x $20). But you don't have to boot off of SDCards. You can boot from (cheap?) 120/240GB SSD. Which somehow I had 20 new of for some weird reason. I love your network Internet-Pi scripting, BTW. I removed the Pi-Hole and such and modified it a little to be a small NMS. I like being notified when my network goes down or slows down. :) Keep up the great work, Jeff!
Great content! As soon as you showed the enclosure, I had the same thought about ventilation. Keep having fun
Cool.
Built my own little cluster for five PI's and a 5VDC PSU. It is 3U, all the connectors are on the rear though, much cleaner front that way. Been running a Kafka cluster for a couple of years now, ~4 I think(using ssd's).
Happy to see your doing better health wise Jeff, stay frosty and thanks for the continued quality content!
I see your using the LTT screwdriver. Cannot wait to get mine. Also I cannot wait for your PXE boot video. You will never go back after making the switch.
I love it. The spirit of a homeland is excessive overengineeing so this serves the purpose perfectly
I would like to see ventilation though.. not sure how I’d power it
Beside the already mentioned temperature and ventilation problems, i think they should improve the IO shield of the PI (e.g. the huge gap above the ethernet jack) and provide these USB to USB adapters with black PCBs before i consider buying it...
I really like the ability to insert the Pi sandwich as hot swap-able. Very nice. I would like to see some ventilation on the top, and air flow for edge to edge with a fan or 3... $300 isn't bad for the extra capabilities the trays give you.
Sounds like they where responsive to his suggestion. Hopefully they'll revise the design. Until then I bet just taking the case to the drill press and putting a pattern of holes in it for passive cooling would mostly fix it and it wouldn't be to hard to mod in a 40mm fan or 4 if wanted/needed.
10:35 Those SUPER SHORT Ethernet cables are so satisfying!
Dual 40mm on one end and some vent holes on the other end would be best for that surely. Even close off the holes on the rear so that it's a fully flow through design. Not sure why it would have been missed by the manufacturer in the first place.
I always love your content Jeff! Ansible and most of kubernetes may be above my head. (I am running Truenas scale on my home server but I'm just learning) But I love learning with your vids and it strokes my inner nerd every time you drop new content. Love the channel and keep it up brotha! And so glad to see you are feeling a bit better as well!
I have a pretty large set of Wera Kraftform Micro screwdrivers in Torx, Hex, Phillips and slotted. Call me old fashioned but I like having separate drivers for micro projects.
For rackmount stuff, it's nice to have one driver with all the bits, just because moving a tray or sleeve full of mini drivers can be annoying. But at the electronics workbench I do use my little jeweler's kit most of the time.
I’ve been consuming all these Pi videos to prepare for when they ever go back in stock
heyyyyy, everytime i see Jeff posting a new Raspberry vid ik im gona enjoy my coffee ! keep it up !
Still watching this, but I had to pause for a laugh when you introduced the new enclosure. I actually have the non-pro version of this kit and it's worked out pretty well though I've not finished setting it up as yet, I still need to get a PoE switch, shorter cables, mount the last 2 pis, and get my pis all configured. One note I've had thus far is it's worth considering replacing the fans that the PoE HATs come with, because they've been kind of rattley/noisy IME.
Quick edit: If you've not heard of them, you might want to look into RackStuds instead of the traditional cage nut & bolt mounting. I've really enjoyed using them in my racks, completely toolless and very secure.
I've considered using Rack Studs, and they do seem great for smaller devices like this... but since I like just standardizing on one thing, everywhere, I settled on some decent cage nuts and am sticking with the screws-some of the equipment in the rack is over 100 lbs and I can't trust the studs with that :)
But who knows? I do like the idea of using them for network equipment which is often a bit lighter.
@@JeffGeerling I feel you there! I use them on all my network equipment, I'm trying to recall what I've done with my servers so far, I think I've not used them there only because most of the (all second hand) servers I have came with toolless rails. That said, I installed the full shelf in the bottom of my 48U rack that's supposed to hold my UPS (which is also TBD) using the included bolts and cage nuts.
That said, my newer wall mounted rack for my networking kit is 100% rack studs :)
Damn I miss being able to kneel on the floor and work on my equipment. Miss being young. Really enjoy your channel and the stuff you cover.
Heh, don't worry my legs were in a bit of pain for the past two days :P
Glad to see a fellow Pi Engineer Review the Linus Screwdriver on a video in live time. I'm okay with bulk myself, but sometimes setups require a sideways screw driver for how tight certain setups have to be for microcomputer builds.
What's a 'sideways screwdriver'? Never heard of one before
I don't understand why UCTRONICS didn't make any consideration for cooling in that case. And their answer to whether they'll revise the design is "lol idk". Amazing.
An interesting solution and appears to be well conceived. Concerning the misalignment of the holes, it seems to me that the order of assembly is a little off. If I understand correctly, once the SSD is plugged into the carrier board, any tolerance allowances start to accumulate leading to the misalignment as everything is tightened. Perhaps the SSD should be loosely mounted onto the baseplate first, and then the PCB plugged onto the SSD? This should allow enough play to then align the PCB mounting screws before cinching everything down.
It's good to see you firing on all cylinders again Jeff.
Ah, that could be possible, I was 'loosely' following the assembly guide ;)
What part is actually hot swapable?
I have drives that allow me to remove and replace members of an array without downing my server or appliance.
I have redundant power supplies that will let me remove and replace a power supply without downing the server.
All I'm seeing with this is a tray that allows you to power off a unit and remove it with all services ceasing during the process.
Regarding the heat, you might try tapping the holes for fans on each side and see if the holes alone offer enough air movement without installing any fan first.
Neat project. I have been relying on more virtualization than dedicated hardware for various services.
The only down side to all this projects requiring more and more raspberry Pies is, that the Raspberry Pi Foundation isn't able to produce them as cheap and as quickly as the market demands them :/
Speaking of those monoprice ultra thin patch cat6 cables, they are good for up to 30w. I run Panasonic PTZ cameras on them all the time and they are POE+ and draw about 28 watts.
I discovered your channel due to linus screwdriver review. wonderful
All they need to do is cut some Hexagons (the bestagons) on each side like the switch above has
for a home lab setup i recommend rack studs they are awesome
Great video!! Big fan. I recommend trying something called a Raspikey - they fit in the sd card slot but uses EMMC - a lot more reliable than a SD card,
we have replaced all SD cards in our pi with these Raspi keys at work and haven’t had trouble since.
That’s a nice setup. I was thinking about buying that 1u mount but the ventilation made me buy the open air one without the screens
Put the extra cable in the Neat Patch for 'asthetics'. The Neat Patch is the equivalent of tossing something in the closet and closing the door so that Mom and Dad can't see it. 😁 We use them at work, and I have a couple at home too 😆
Spent my Saturday swapping from a 18u to 24u rack and yours makes me now want to fix the rats nest of cables I have....
I'm happy to see you posting once again
I also just realized you have the same PoE switch I picked up recently
If you're comfortable with typically Cisco-like CLI, this switch can offer that over the limited config options QNAP offers out of the box. Great switch if you're running bonds, VLANs, LLAGs, etc. and want 2.5G WITH PoE+/++.
Looks like there's plenty of room to extend the back of the case to put a 40mm fan on each unit. Adding an extension for the usb-c power to a simple usb-c port on the back would make it neat and tidy.
Yes, looking forward to the NetBoot episode. 🎉🎉
Thank you for sharing your amazing video, very interesting product, I am very happy to learn about my options though your channel. And love to see you back and well-being. God bless you and your family.
Thanks, Jeff. Great video and I will check out the UC case.
lol I just noticed the Storinator on your Raspberry Pi rack... my guy doesn't mess around!
Good to see you up and about. You touched on SD cards: one thing I learned from dashcams is that you need to be using High Endurance SD cards.
It would be counter productive to PXE boot the PIs because if they are all dependant on a server you may as well run them as VMs. The advantage of separate PIs is they run independently of the rest of the rack except for the network itself.
PXE just separates the storage from the node, which can be more or less resilient than storage-per-node.
It looks amazing!! I've been working on a DIY version of those, but much more simple, just with the RPI and an OLED 1.3" screen with some information.
Awesome stuff Jeff! Tinkering more with this stuff is on my list for whenever we manage to afford a house (the tiny apartment can no way hold a half rack, though I do a small stack like you started with...hmm)
Use a small kitchen Rubber silcon mat when working on boards etc No slip as you work on them
looks at myself so when have you got up to use one :) OH dang yeah but uno its a tip#
I had an SD card (Samsung Evo) begin to die not too long ago and was terrified bc I haven't been great about backing up my pi. Managed to get the important stuff off it before it completely bit the dust, so now I'm booting from a usb3.0 flash drive. Much snappier
Can't wait for the case mod video. For my current setup I have currently removed the back cover. Otherwise the temps just went too high.
Happy to see your getting better!
Thank you for the video, your content is always top of the line and can lear something from it! You inspire me to get my hands ditry with raspberry jam ;) :D
I see you're doubling down on calling this a cluster :)
With Kubernetes, I agree, this is a cluster.
I run a single Ubuntu server at home with ZFS and (currently) 10 different Docker containers. Although this looks like a fun project, I think for a lot of use-cases a single server makes more sense. I do appreciate seeing your approach, thanks Jeff.
I feel like you could cut intake/outtake for fans to improve airflow. Probably two intake fans on the side and two in the middle back for out.
For now I'm going to try one intake on the side, and see if that can move enough air through all the gaps in the front of the case to get the Pis back down to the 50s.
Jeff, I'd be interested in learning more about your career path. I'm in L2 support now, with a deep interest/focus in software development, and you seem to have a pretty holistic view of the modern tech landscape. I'm interested to hear more about how you got to where you are.
Thanks Jeff. I think I would also like to get a DNS running at my local and host my own website. That would be so cool. I like your setup a lot! Thanks for the video and hope you are feeling better and all is OK for now! :)