Network upgrade

Added capacity for an extra six hosts on my LAN and now most of my network infrastructure supports 2.5Gbps ethernet speeds. And my janky rack is obsolete now.

The equipment is four TP-Link TL-SG108-M2 ethernet switches which I got from Amazon.

Oh, and I should probably mention that the TP-Link switches come with piddly little adhesive feet, but I didn’t use them, I got some of these big honkin’ ones instead: 25x Rubber Feet Pads Self Adhesive Isolation Feet Speakers Foot Shock Absorption. My logic is that more space between switches equals better cooling.

John's four new Ethernet switches

John's janky rack

Motherboard upgrade from ASUS PRIME B550M-A to ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR

As I said today was computer upgrade day. I made a video of me doing the upgrade, it runs for about two hours: Motherboard upgrade from ASUS PRIME B550M-A to ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR. It was pretty uneventful and so far it seems to have been successful too. Yay.

Upgrading my server today

Well I’ve been procrastinating on, and preparing for, my server upgrade and today is gonna be the day.

Later this afternoon I will be upgrading ‘longing‘ to ‘lore‘.

This will involve:

  • installing a new motherboard
  • removing a BluRay drive and replacing it with a SATA mobile rack
  • installing some new M.2 NVMe drives
  • switching from Ubuntu to Debian
  • importing my old spinning rust ZFS zpool

Fingers crossed. Wish me luck!

Studio upgrade

The computer I’m using to do the recording for In The Lab With Jay Jay is called ‘wonder‘ and it only has six USB ports. I currently have ten USB cameras, and I’m getting more, so I don’t have as many USB ports as I can use. Also ‘wonder’ only has 2TB capacity (non-RAID) for storing the videos I record, which will probably get used up fairly quickly.

So I have been planning an upgrade for ‘wonder’ known as ‘victory‘. My new studio workstation ‘victory’ will have 52TB of RAID storage for video data, 2TB of SSD RAID storage for video recording, 12x USB ports on the back panel, and 4x USB ports on the front panel.

Along with this new studio workstation I intend to get a new camera, a Canon Rebel SL3.

Now all I need to do is save up a cool eight grand!