Musical Chairs for PCs

June 9, 2025

I just got done doing something of a, maybe quarterly sysadmin larp ritual I’ve made for myself. It involves tearing apart some of my computers, most of which live in rack mount chassis with one just sitting in a mini itx case in the rack.

I’ve always been in pursuit of some utopian dream of just a perfectly sorted environment that just does all the things I need it to in a way I’m convinced it does enough that I don’t tear things apart and reconfigure everything. I’ve always wanted single boxes for mostly single purposes as kind of a baseline. what this showed me is I have a really hard time just dedicating a box to any sort of single existence. Maybe if I had a nice chassis with like 12 hot swap bays or something more specialized, but even my rackmount choices I have are relatively flexible so… I tinker..

combine that with relatively terrible organizational hygiene. I do try. I have set out months sorting things so it’s not a complete nightmare, but I never sustained a system and kept to something. I like playing with dev-y projects and all kinds of stuff so I end up with pools of mostly garbage files with a couple things in them I actually want to save.

I started a wonderful habit of tarballing up everything from a systems home dir from temporary projects and stuff and just throwing them on drives. this is kind of at nightmare status.

What was my “main server” was (and still kinda is) just a shoehorned mess that I didn’t think I would have done but I got to a place of being just pretty over it until I could think of something to do to get this all back in a clean setup. It had my btrfs volume (4x 12tb disks giving me 20tb of storage and 2 sub volumes), and handful of ssds and nvme, my 3080 for streaming steam, some containers (plex, arrs apps, some other little stuff), it was also my pseudo dev server for building websites and my little app projects. and it’s all on arch+hyprland in a 4U rack mount chassis. beautiful abomination.

And it still kinda is. Now it’s my dev+gaming box that also shares out my spinny storage. I left the nvme for games and misc files - it’s just a cheap 2tb so I’m fine with it.

My 2U now houses 4.5tb of SSD to become essentially my NAS, sans video content and archiving, as well as running my permanent containers and services.

I’m thinking with a limited amount of disk space I will need to be very intentional with what I bring into the NAS so I can’t just turn on the auto-download floodgates and create another NAS of Nurgle that the 4U is - I’ve just now consciously separated the two and accepted it.

Moving forward, the plan is to very intentionally (so slowly) get my services back up and running and bring things over into my new proper NAS.

I’ll get into this more later on, but to kind of wrap it up, I did all this now because I actually need to run a crm and invoicing softare for my agency and I want that to be on something like a 10th gen i3 running Debian that should just run forever.

There’s a lot more I could go on about, but this is schizo enough and I just want to get a post out instead of keep trying to edit something and let another week go by.