As referenced in an earlier post, I’ve recently replaced my home server. The old unit was an HP N40L microserver (Gen 6?) running SmartOS, and the new server is an HP Microserver Gen 10 running SmartOS the exact same instance of SmartOS. After getting the replacement online, I went back to investigate the failed hardware.

Diagnosis

I read online that other servers of this model and vintage sometime experience power supply failure. This cause seemed to match the symptoms, so I sourced a replacement unit. An exact match would have been $60-$150, but I was able to identify the form factor as FlexATX, 150W, with a 24-pin connector. I found an “FSP 270-60LE” locally wih a 20-pin connector for $30, and it’s working without issue. Pins 21-24 on the motherboard are not connected, but … they’re optional.

Updated Hardware Configuration

With the power issue apparently resolved, I’m able to repurpose the server. It’s compact and has an optical drive, and (probably) won’t need a wired network connection. These are great attributes.

The storage drives were all transferred to the new server, so I added an M.2 NVMe drive in one of the PCIe slots. The other slot got a wifi NIC, and the whole unit is much quieter and lighter than before. Since this system cannot boot from an NVMe device, there’s also a USB thumb drive on the internal USB port.

Updated Software Configuration

I installed Debian 11, chose “guided partitioning” and placed /boot and grub on the thumb drive. The wifi card I had doesn’t have a driver for the stock kernel, so I activated the bullseye-backports repo and installed linux-image and linux-firmware from it. I followed the wifi configuration guidance from the debian wiki, and configured wpa_supplicant for the interface:

/etc/wpa/wpa_supplicant.conf

country=US
network={
            ssid="<ssid-goes-here>"
            psk=<encoded-psk-goes-here>
}

/etc/network/interfaces.d/wlp3s0

auto wlp3s0
allow-hotplug wlp3s0
iface wlp3s0 inet static
        address 192.168.2.15/24
        gateway 192.168.2.1
        dns-nameservers 192.168.2.1
        wpa-ssid <ssid-goes-here>
        wpa-psk <encoded-psk-goes-here>

Updated Use Case

I’m not sure what all this will end up getting used for. It’s on a shelf in my home office, and barely produces enough noise to notice. This will be fun.