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Hi Richard. Thanks for the comment below. The blower is an electronic compressed air duster. You can use any compressed air canister; we use the rechargeable electronic ones in our warehouse due to the volume of prepping and cleaning our techs perform. As for the rectangular vac, you can use any handheld vac with a slim nozzle, like a Dustbuster. The idea is to capture dust in hard-to-reach places and dust blown into the air, so it doesn’t settle back into the machine. Hope that helps!

— TechMike

what is that blower 1000 thing? thanks for the guide

— Richard M Brown

Hi Joanne. Thanks for the comment below. It’s me. Hope all is well. Need a vacation to visit sometime!

— TechMike

Not too sure. Hard to tell from the photo of him from the back. But I think I was his Boss on his first part time job after school we hen he was around 14 years old! Is that you, Michael?

— Joanne H

Thanks for sharing this tip below, Austin. Good to know.

— TechMike

More tips:
If you are in a NIC-connections limited environment, you can piggy back the DRAC onto the LOM NIC. The OS will share the NIC with the DRAC and you can add a separate MAC address reservation for just the DRAC in your DHCP

— Austin Locke

Great
Thank you

— Louis

Chris, thanks for the comment below. For whatever reason, we almost never receive any R900-series servers in our reseller pipeline. So we are extremely unfamiliar with that model’s features and architecture. That said, we’re going to add it to the post. Thanks again for the catch! P.S. I did a quick look at the R930 specs, and it looks like that model supports Split Backplane as well.

— TechMike

Split mode is also supported on the Dell R920.

— Christopher E Young

I don’t want to see or deal with my electric bill either so I use the auto-pay feature and never see a bill — problem solved :) In actuality, the power consumption is generally low. I only turn on all servers at the same time for short duration performance characterizations (e.g.: 30-60 minutes) and usually only a few times a month. I don’t really notice an increase in my electric costs. A good analogy is owning a top fuel dragster; you probably don’t care how much the fuel costs for a short 4-second 1/4 mile run, even as she burns ~1 gallon of nitromethane per second.

— Adrian Michaud

To your comment below, Lee, we were thinking the same thing, hence our question about solar or wind power. I guess you can’t have an off-the-charts homelab without the juice to run it!

— TechMike

I do not want to see the electric bill on #1.

— Lee Wilbur

Hi Jim. Thanks for asking below. You are not alone in this query and we expect to announce a repair kit soon. You can visit our site periodically or sign-up for our weekly newsletter where we usually announce these types of new kits. Thanks!

— TechMike

Where do we get the clips from?

— Jim

You got it, Steven. Thanks for the kind words below!

— TechMike

Mike,

The blog emails are quite welcomed many times it confirms my selections and others, provides insight on what might be a better solution.

I realize we aren’t a large customer just wanted you to know I wasn’t MIA and appreciate the information received.

— Steven Giuliano

Thanks for your comment below, pricemc1. We wholeheartedly agree that HPE’s paywall on their firmware updates are poor form and a major ding on their brand. And yeah, for many HomeLab users — even small business users — that subscription cost can be a dealbreaker. We would love to see HPE drop that paywall but we suspect it is such a lucrative revenue stream from their large corporate customers, it will probably never go away.

— TechMike

Agree with your conclusions but have to give the overall win clearly to Dell if your buying these servers for a home lab or second hand business use case. The fact that HPE started charging for certain firmwares is really the main reason why Dell is so much better for these use cases. I should never have to pay for firmwares that fix things. Thats like saying I should pay for recalls on a car. You would never pay your car’s manufacturer to fix things that are defective.

— pricemc1