Upgrading my server

Throughout my time on Substack and YouTube, I’ve only very briefly mentioned my server and never really dived into the details at all.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous article, I do want this to change, and I have since been devoting tons of my spare time toward my home lab, offensive security, and related projects/extracurriculars, all of which are used on my server.

With the large increase in use, I’m going to need to make some upgrades to my server, mostly regarding networking and memory.

With the server in my dorm now, handling and transferring large files is much more reasonable, and since I will be doing larger projects at my desk, I figured I’d prepare for the transition by picking up a dual-port 10GbE NIC specifically for my NAS.

I don’t have any Thunderbolt NICs that support this speed right now, but it is on my radar to pick one up in the future.

I picked up an Intel X540T2 on eBay. Relative to the prices of other 2.5GbE NICs, the price is pretty reasonable to me.

It arrived relatively quickly, but I had it lying around for a good while since I picked this up before I left for DEFCON. After moving into the new dorm, wheeling my server rack into my space, and settling down, I finally had the time to install it.

It immediately loaded into Proxmox with no issues at all. :)

However, more important than the networking bump, is my RAM upgrade. I will be maxing out my motherboard’s supported capacity of 128GB of RAM. For just $160, this was honestly a steal, and I was able to negotiate $160. I couldn’t be happier with this deal.

While the NIC was immediately detected with no issues, I cannot say the same about the memory. When I first installed them, 32GB of the 128GB were missing, and after a bit of troubleshooting, I’ve concluded I had received a single dead stick of RAM.

It is pretty unfortunate, but I can’t be too upset because of how good of a deal it was. Either way, 112GB of RAM is much better than 32GB, so I’m very happy regardless. :)

A moment of silence for this problematic DIMM, may it rest in peace!

I’ve been living with the upgrades for a few weeks now, and it has been liberating having the resource overhead to spool up beefy VMs at my leisure.

I can finally start pursuing the larger projects I’ve had planned, and I am very excited to document the process and what I learn. :)