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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Gallery 69

A two color relief print with a blue and pink rainbow roll

I meant to post this back in February but things have been hectic. You may know I run a Free Little Art Gallery called Gallery 69 where we (surprise!) give away art for free. Well, it’s mostly been my art because I’ve made a lot and have it on hand. If you scroll through old posts though you will find other artists who have contributed.

But here’s the thing… now more than ever, we need more diversity.

I’d like to help curate a gallery that includes artists who may currently be underrepresented. Listen, I’m an old, white, straight man. I want to help share art from those who are not old, white, straight because face it, we’ve had it pretty good for nearly, well… forever.

It’s not much, but we’ve all gotta do whatever we can. I will write blog post about the art and artist, put the art in the gallery, and try to pay some cash to artists.

Thanks to a (small) budget from a few friends I have a little bit of money to do this, and I started talking to one artist but they never got around to sending me any art. I had offered money and even offered to make physical prints of their digital work, but hey, sometimes email go unanswered, people get busy… I get it.

So I’m about to email a friend, and I’ve written this post to help hold me accountable.

Finger crossed this works… I’d like to help where I can, and this seems like a simple thing, so let’s do it!

(And if you want to help support this effort, get in touch with me!)

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HP Z420 RAM…

When I got the HP Z420 Workstation it had 4 sticks of RAM for a total of 16GB, except it got an error booting up and removing one stick seemed to fix it, though being down to 12GB seemed a little low since I plan to run a number of applications via containers. I took a gamble and ordered more RAM. I got these A-Tech 8GB PC3-12800E ECC sticks from eBay for $20.

As I’ve previously mentioned I’ve never built a PC, and my experience working on computers is (mostly) in the Apple world. I learned about ECC (Error Correction Circuitry) RAM and I did some reading on A-Tech. Consensus seemed to be that A-Tech RAM is cheap because they are most likely rebranded sticks from well-known brand name RAM manufacturers that may have failed one of their quality control tests. Eh, I figured I’d give it a try.

I added the two 8GB sticks in, and actually put all the RAM in the slots in the order specified for the machine. Things ran okay for a day but when using the system through the web interface it locked up… I had to hard reboot it, something I haven’t had to do at all since I got it running. I figured maybe the new RAM was the issue but the RAM testing stuff I looked up was for Windows… I didn’t know how to do the test with TrueNAS, which isn’t very supportive of just installing random command line stuff.

Folks recommended MemTest86+ which boots right into the testing application. Nice!

The MemTest86+ ISO was tiny, under 7MB! It flashed to a thumb drive almost instantly and I booted up to the testing. I had pulled out all the ram except the two new 8GB sticks and tested for hours. It passed everything. I rebooted, ran everything again for a few hours and all tests seemed good. I then rebooted back into TrueNAS and it’s been running without issue for a day now… but I will keep doing some testing to be sure.

There is a chance that the difference between the 8GB and 4GB sticks is causing issues, so I am hesitant to add the smaller ones back in… I will probably just run with the new 16GB total for now and if needed I could always get two more and kick it up to 32GB total.

Oh! I learned one more thing about TrueNAS. I guess it will use most of the “free” RAM for the ZFS cache but that will drop down as applications need the RAM. This is much different from my OpenMediaVault NAS which has 16GB of RAM and shows 12.91GB of free RAM…

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HP Z420 Progress…

Hey, I don’t know anything about computers! Just kidding, but when it comes to “PC hardware” it sometimes feels like it. We got past the previous setbacks and progress is being made. One thing I forgot to mention in the last post is that I could not get all six drives to mount. I thought it was a bad SATA cable so I ordered three more.

About those SATA cables… The computer had four, I ordered three more, and I had that crappy one that destroyed the SSD which I could not use, so I thought there was a bad one but it turned out there was not! No matter, I needed the right angle ones anyway. (So now I have 6 brand new ones along with the four that came with the computer. Good to have spares I guess.)

So what happened was that I did not realized the computer actually had 10 SATA ports! Yeah, not 6, but 10. Though there only seems to be power supply connections for 6 drives, so… But here’s the thing, two of them do not seem to work. So while I thought I had a bad SATA cable, or a misbehaving drive, two of the ports do not work. (The two bottom white ones.) I switched to the two block ones slight above the white ones and all six drives showed up!

Now there only seem to be six power connectors so six drives connected make sense, but there might be a way to use more of them. Also, I’ve read that the ones that do not work might be disabled in the BIOS, so that’s something to look into. Oh, I guess the SATA ports are a variety of different speeds as well? So I also need to figure that out to use the faster ones…

But hey, I’ve got six drives mounted and used by TrueNAS right now. The front (external?) bay is still a mess, but I’ll work on building something there to hold the drives now that everything actually works. (Well, more or less.)

Huzzah! Six drives. And yes, I did replace the SSD that got destroyed. Ended up with a 128GB since that is still plenty for the TrueNAS system to live on. I’ve got another post coming to talk about using TrueNAS and how it’s going on the software front.

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HP Z420 Setbacks…

I found some 3D models for hard drive caddies and one was not great and the second was not great but okay so I tweaked it a bit. Still not perfect, but good enough for now.

I was able to get the three large hard drives in place and connected. Not bad.

I put the smaller drives into the large front-accessible bay and things looked pretty good…

I figured I would deal with the large front-accessible bay next, eventually building something to properly hold the drives…

And then I noticed the top piece had two little caddies for small drives so I put the boot SSD in there along with another drive.

That’s when the bad happened.

I had this straight (not right angle) SATA cable in my cable bin and maybe it was too stiff, or maybe I pulled to hard on something, but whatever, the SSD I got less than two months ago had the plastic connector housing torn off, and stuck inside the cable end.

I tried to reinsert things and reconnect, but after a half dozen attempts it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to boot.

I’m a bit bummed about the destruction of a brand new SSD. (It was only $20 but hey, $20 is $20.) I have a super-cheap SSD I pulled from the dead OptiPlex that I’ll use for a replacement until I get a new one. (I looked up the brand for the super-cheap SSD and all I could find was comments saying it’s garbage hardware to avoid.)

Anyway, this is just a minor setback, and a small increase in the price of this build. I think we’ll still be pretty close to my original estimate for three 4TB drives in this TrueNAS box for under $180 USD.

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HP Z420 Workstation

Even though I’ve posted about NAS devices as far back as 2005 I’ve never really run one at home until recently. I got OpenMediaVault running and it worked well, so when I was offered a free computer that could fit at least 6 drives I figured what the heck!? Let’s try the open source version of TrueNAS Scale.

Oh, I should point out that in 2007 I said “FreeNAS it looks like a cool solution, and something I may try to play with in the future” and hey, the future is now!? And honestly I still deal with some of the questions I asked back in 2007.

I should note a few things. First, the Z420 is a bit of a power hog but keep in mind I got it for free. So any extra energy cost can be traded for the fact this was zero-cost hardware, right? I don’t know if I will run this long-term but for now I can use it to learn TrueNAS.

The other thing is, you can easily just buy a Synology NAS and stuff it with drives. I say “easily” because they do a good job of building a ready-to-use NAS solution for most people… if you’ve got the budget. I like doing things on the cheap and learning the hard way though. You’re welcome!

Anyway, this post will focus on the HP Z420 Workstation. I’m sure I will post more about TrueNAS, but the installation was pretty simple. I flashed the ISO to a thumb drive, dropped a 256GB SSD into the case, booted it up, and ran the installer. Oh, I did remove one of the sticks of RAM because it showed an error (on the monitor) when I originally booted it. There is now just 12GB of RAM. I may try to re-install the DIMM or maybe get more RAM. 12GB might be plenty for testing though. (I tried to reinstall the fourth DIMM and it didn’t boot. I may give up on the fourth DIMM.)

I got the case open to see what I was working with… I should note I am not a person who has ever “built a PC” though I’ve opened a lot of machines. Tons and tons of Macs, from desktops to laptops and models in-between. I’ve also opened lots of Windows laptops which eventually became Linux laptops. Still as far as “towers” go my experience is with Apple hardware.

I had to procure three more SATA cables and added them to the one I found in a drawer and the two that were in the machine, but I got six drives connected. I popped out the optical drive and multi-card reader thing. Even though there is spaces for six drives I don’t have them in place yet… but they are all plugged in and… hanging about. It works.

I threw a monitor on for the install but it’s still attached for now as I get things up and running. Like other NAS products you pretty much do everything through a browser so no monitor is expected or needed. (Once your hardware actually works.)

I’ll need to 3D print some hard drive sleds (sled? caddy? whatever) and then get the drives more permanently mounted. These are mostly junk drives, old and smallish… I do have two 4TB drives ready to go and may have a third one soon. You really want a minimum of three drives for ZFS and more than that is even better. Again, I am trying to be economical in this project and not just spend a ton of money. If I wanted to do that I’d just buy a Synology box and call it a day.