This is a story about all — well, most — of the servers we’ve had at home. I’m a huge fan of The Matrix franchise, so it might not come as a surprise that I named all our servers after characters from The Matrix.
I’ll try to do it in chronological order. But be warned: while my brain is like that of an elephant, I’ll probably still make mistakes 😛
2009, Laptop #1 ( trinity )
I used a leftover laptop as the main server — ideal, with a built-in battery, keyboard, and screen. And even better: very energy efficient! It was a HP/Compaq NC6320 with a Core 2 Duo CPU. I ran Windows XP as the main OS and used RMClock to control its power consumption.
Power consumption at idle was around 25–30W, and performance was… m’kayish.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a photo of the machine in its natural habitat.
2011, Miniserver ( trinity )
In late 2011, I replaced the main server with a new one. I found an extremely energy-efficient machine with insanely low power consumption. People who used this model reported idle usage of just 4W — and under 10W at full load. And it was dirt cheap too!
Specs: Ebox Mini 3350MX. DMP 1GHz CPU (basically a 80486 on steroids). Only 512MB of RAM, and it booted from an SD card!
Performance was a nightmare. And not just that — I even had to rewrite my own software package, jSunnyReports, because this CPU didn’t support some more modern instruction sets. I couldn’t run Java 1.6 and had to fall back to Java 1.5.
2013, Laptop #1 again ( neo )
I needed more CPU power — and definitely more storage. So I planned another upgrade. The energy-efficient me still wanted a low-power machine, but with more CPU capacity and storage. I ended up switching back to the old laptop. A bit more power consumption, but a lot more computing power in return!
2014, Laptop #2 ( trinity )
In 2014, the NC6320 laptop started to fail — frequent reboots and random lockups. It was time for another server upgrade.
Enter the Lenovo E145 netbook: 2×4GB of memory, a 120GB Samsung EVO 840 SSD as the main boot drive, and an external hard drive for additional storage. Idle consumption was around 8W, full load about 16W, and on average it hovered around 11W.
Oh, and it ran Windows 7 — quite stable, and fast enough. Even the Oracle XE database it hosted performed fairly well.
2019, Server #1 ( tank )
After almost five years of stable operation, I decided it was time for another upgrade — this time to proper desktop hardware, as recommended in the Zuinige Server topic on Tweakers (translated: “Energy-Efficient Server”).
Between 2014 and 2019, I also added a Synology DS214 to our network for additional storage and basic server-related tasks. Although you can’t do much with such a low-powered NAS with only 512MB of RAM… it worked! Including offsite backups to a cloud provider.
The new build was based on a Fujitsu D3642-B Micro-ATX motherboard, with 2×8GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe drive for both boot and data, and a Pentium G5400 Coffee Lake CPU — a monster with two threads, doubled thanks to Hyper-Threading. Idle power usage with all USB devices connected: 10W. Full load: about 60W. Average: somewhere around 15–20W. The machine itself, fully stripped down, idled at just 4W. NICE!
And this “beast” was powered by a humble PicoPSU 80W.
One important mention here: I installed Windows 10 Pro as the operating system.
This will become important later.
2023, Upgrades!
To quote Neo in The Matrix Reloaded: “Hmm, upgrades.”
It was time for a few improvements. The machine ran perfectly with 2×8GB of RAM, but after yet another upgrade, an identical pair of 2×8GB modules became available — and since the motherboard had four DRAM slots, it was a clear 1 + 1 = 2 situation 🙂
I also found another Coffee Lake CPU as a replacement: an i3-8300, featuring 4 cores and 4 threads, plus a significantly larger L3 cache — which helps speed up quite a few tasks as well.
Along with the new CPU, I bought a new cooler — nearly silent, unlike the stock Intel cooler, which, although only slightly audible, still managed to be annoying.
2024, More Upgrades!
The workload on Tank kept growing bit by bit. During my search for the “ultimate” CPU upgrade, I came across a second-hand Intel i7-9700T — 8 cores, 8 threads — for a reasonable price. I also found an i9-9900T with 8 cores and 16 threads, but that one was more expensive.
Knowing what I know now, I wish I’d bought the 9900T right away.
But I didn’t. I bought the 9700T.
And all was fine… for a while.
2024/2025, Disaster!
Remember that Windows 10 installation I mentioned earlier? It ran fine for over five years. I always installed updates manually during quiet hours. But somewhere in 2024, Microsoft started pestering every Windows 10 user to upgrade to Windows 11 — because support will officially end in October 2025.
And I really didn’t want to upgrade. I’m not even sure why — it just didn’t feel right.
Was that instinct? A self-fulfilling prophecy in the making? Who knows.
But every time that annoying Windows 11 upgrade screen popped up, I kindly declined and moved on with my life 😛
Back to the story…
Somewhere around Christmas 2024, I noticed Tank was unreachable. Websites: down. Domotica: down. Everything: down.
I logged in — and saw the one screen I really didn’t want to see:
“Welcome to the Windows 11 upgrade program!”
WHAT THE FUCK!
Yes, seriously. Without my approval, Microsoft decided to force-start the Windows 11 installer — and there was no way to cancel it.
At least, not to my knowledge.
Fine then. Go on with your update.
I pressed OK, clicked through a few screens, and the long wait began.
I started a ping -t to the server to monitor when it would come back online.
After an hour I started to worry a bit…
75 minutes in… still nothing.
And after 90 minutes — finally — ping replies!
Victory?
Yeah… no.
- Databases: Running. Check!
- Shares: Running. Check!
- Domotica website. Down.
- Jsunnyreports. Down.
- All my scripts. Down.
And remember — this server had been running headless for years, shoved into some hard-to-reach alcove. No monitor, no keyboard, no mouse.
So I pulled it out, set it up in the living room, hooked up a screen, keyboard, and mouse…
And to my surprise…
All my scripts were gone from the Start menu. Trying to start them manually? Errors. Dozens of them. Stuff I’d never seen before.
Upgrade gone wrong.
Fine — that’s why Microsoft creates recovery points during major upgrades, right?
Let’s just roll back to the previous state!
Yeah. Right.
Not this time.
Not a single recovery point available.
THANK YOU, MICROSOFT!
No really —
THANK. YOU. SO. MUCH.
2025, Proxmox and more upgrades ( hammer )
So I was at a crossroads: Reinstall Windows? Or break free from Microsoft and move to Linux? Or, more specifically… Proxmox Hypervisor.
I chose the latter, as I was getting more and more fed up with our friends in Richmond. Online accounts, botched updates, TPM 2.0 forcing hardware upgrades — more than enough reasons to say goodbye to Microsoft entirely.
“Proxmox is a free, open-source virtualization platform that lets you run multiple virtual machines or containers on a single physical server — kind of like running several computers inside one box.”
So I started my Proxmox installation and began setting up virtual machines. And since this was a completely fresh start, I decided to give it a new name.
Meet Hammer — one of the hovercrafts from The Matrix.
It felt like the perfect name, since this host will be hosting other hosts!
(Does that make sense? :P)
Hammer now runs 12 virtual machines and one LXC container — all named, of course, after characters from The Matrix. Because consistency matters 😛
The upgrade to Proxmox wasn’t flawless, by the way. The onboard network card didn’t play well with Proxmox — I ran into all kinds of strange errors, which turned out to be common for this specific Intel NIC. Unfortunately, there was no simple fix available.
eno1: Detected Hardware Unit Hang: eno1: NETDEV WATCHDOG: CPU: 7: transmit queue 0 timed out 9782 ms eno1: Reset adapter unexpectedly
So, I upgraded Hammer once again. I disabled the onboard network controller and installed an Intel I350-T2 server NIC — one I knew would work flawlessly with Proxmox.
And while I was at it, I also ordered 4×16GB of RAM: the maximum amount officially supported by the motherboard.
You’d think this monster would consume electrons like crazy. Well… no, actually.
- Idle: 10W
- Average load: ~15W
- Full load: around 50W
Basically the same as the old Pentium G5400 with 16GB of RAM — but now, with way more firepower under the hood.
The ultimate upgrade
And here we are. A stable host, serving multiple VMs — all updated manually with a single Ansible playbook.
All hosts run either Ubuntu or Rocky Linux… except for one.
One VM is running Windows 11 Pro.
Why?
Because I still rely on a few software packages that don’t have viable Linux alternatives. Hence, the Windows 11 VM.
I still have a trick up my sleeve.
Remember that i9-9900T I mentioned earlier? I found an affordable one!
And Proxmox definitely benefits from the extra threads compared to the i7. But that’s not all — the i9 also has more L3 cache and a higher boost clock.
Everything about it just makes my Proxmox host better.
Oh… and maybe I have another trick up my sleeve.
It turns out this board might actually support 128GB of memory — though I may need a BIOS update first.
I started with a Pentium G5400 — 2 cores, 4 threads, and 16GB of RAM.
And I might end up with an i9-9900T — 8 cores, 16 threads, and 128GB of RAM.
All on the same motherboard.
From a modest PC to an absolute beast of a server.
From humble beginnings… to full-blown server monster.
I like it!
Do I really need this upgrade?
The CPU?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The memory?
Absolutely — it’ll make my test bed much more versatile when experimenting with VMs.
But honestly… the i7 might still handle the load just fine.
The upgrade virus flares up again.
(Because I can :P)
Infected Brain out!