It has been about six years since I last upgraded my co-lo box that hosts a myriad of services and websites for opensource, business, friends, and personal hobbies. Now I have a new machine in place that should last at least another six years. A tremendous amount of thanks goes out to Andrew at NETPLEX for dealing with the inevitable problems that come up when you ship a machine nearly 1000 miles. No matter how prepared you think you are it’s. never. easy. Regardless, the guys at NETPLEX went way beyond the call of duty to help get everything installed and setup so I could proceed with the migration.

The new box came together after I scored a good deal on several 3U Chenbro chassis that included rails and a redundant PSU. The full components list includes:

The Supermicro motherboard has dual SAS2 ports onboard that posed a small challenge for the Chenbro case, but it was nothing a little bit of dremel tool action couldn’t solve. Other than that everything went together well and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I have plenty of room for expansion with six additional hot-swap bays, four additional memory slots, and seven PCI Express slots. This bad boy is running NCP 3.0.1 along with most of the newer packages I’ve been backporting. It should be able to handle quite a large number of zones and VirtualBox VMs among other things.

Here are a few pictures I took after everything was assembled: