Hardware
A 2016 gaming tower with four cores, 32 GB and a graphics card, doing a job that needs none of it to be fast.
The machine
The machine drawn from its own inventory, read over the mesh while it was running, rather than photographed. Every part is a link: choose one on the drawing, or use the keyboard, and what it is and does here opens over the page.
Buttons and jacks · power, headphones, microphone
Front panel
The power button, a headphone jack, a microphone jack and four USB ports. This is the only part of the estate anyone in the house touches on purpose, and it is here because the machine sits by the television rather than in the basement.
connected to
One bay · a DVD writer, fitted
Optical drive
A DVD writer, still fitted and still working. Nothing on the estate needs it: the machine was installed from a USB stick and the drive has not been used since. It stays because removing a working part to gain an empty bay is not an improvement.
connected to
One bay · six formats
Card reader
A six-in-one memory card reader on the front. It came with the chassis and belongs to the machine’s former life as a desktop; the estate has no use for it.
connected to
Ten in total · four front, six rear
USB ports
Four ports on the front and six at the back, a mixture of USB 2.0 and 3.1. One of the rear ports carries the wireless keyboard used when the television needs a keyboard, which is the whole of the recovery procedure on this machine.
connected to
One socket · 4 cores, 4 threads
Processor
An Intel Core i5-6400 on an LGA1151 socket: four cores, four threads, 2.7 GHz rising to 3.3. Two generations past what its vendor supports, and comfortably more than the backup server, the watchdog and a desktop session ask of it.
connected to
One fan · the stock cooler
Processor cooler
The cooler the machine was sold with. The processor is never the busy part here — the load is a nightly burst of backup verification and a video stream — so the stock cooler was never a limit worth removing.
connected to
Two slots · both full, at the ceiling
Memory
Two 16 GB DDR4-2133 modules in DIMM_A1 and DIMM_B1: 32 GB, in dual channel, and the most the board accepts. Unlike the primary node, this machine has no headroom left — which is a fact worth knowing before anything else is asked of it.
connected to
One slot · x16, in use
Expansion slot
The board reports exactly one expansion slot, a full-length PCI Express x16, and the graphics card is in it. There is no second slot: anything else this machine ever needs has to arrive over USB or on the board already.
connected to
One card · GTX 1060, 6 GB
Graphics card
A GeForce GTX 1060 with 6 GB, in the only slot. It drives the living-room television and nothing else: its video decoding was measured, found to work, and left switched off, because the services the television actually plays decode in software and never hand the card a frame.
connected to
One drive · 512 GB, solid state
System drive
A 512 GB solid-state drive holding the operating system and the containers. Not mirrored: this machine is itself a copy of something, so a failure here costs a rebuild rather than any data.
connected to
One drive · 1 TB, spinning
Backup store
A 1 TB hard disk, and the reason the node exists: the third copy of every backup lives here, on a disk in a different chassis from the primary node’s. Spinning rather than solid state, which for a copy that is written once a night and read once a week is the right trade.
connected to
Four ports · three in use
Storage ports
Four SATA ports on the board, three of them used: the system drive, the backup disk and the optical drive. The fourth is the only expansion this machine has left.
connected to
One board · ASUS G11CD, Intel 100-series
Motherboard
An ASUS G11CD board with an Intel 100-series chipset. It carries the gigabit network, the audio and the USB controllers, and it is where this machine’s limits come from: two memory slots, one expansion slot, four storage ports.
connected to
Two radios and a socket · gigabit, wired
Network
A Realtek gigabit controller on the board, and an 802.11ac wireless card that the estate does not use. The wired socket carries the household network and, over it, the private mesh: this machine has no address anyone outside the house can reach.
connected to
Seven groups · video, network, audio, USB
Rear ports
The board’s own row: an HDMI output, a D-Sub output, the network socket, the audio jacks and six USB ports. The board’s video outputs are unused — the television is on the graphics card, one row below.
connected to
One supply · no redundancy
Power supply
A single power supply, at the bottom of the case. Nothing here is redundant: if it fails the machine stops, and the estate is arranged so that stopping this machine costs a television and a backup target rather than a service.
connected to
None fitted · recovery is the television
No out-of-band controller
The primary node has a separate small computer inside it that answers whether the machine is on or off. This one has nothing of the kind. Recovery means the keyboard and the television it already drives, which is acceptable precisely because this is not the machine everything runs on.
connected to
An ASUS ROG G11CD from 2016: a consumer gaming tower, not server hardware. It has no redundant power, no out-of-band controller and no hot-swap bays, and none of those are needed for what it does. What it does have is enough memory to be useful, a disk that is not in the same chassis as the primary node's, and a graphics card.
- Chassis
- ASUS ROG G11CD — consumer tower, 2016
- Processor
- Intel Core i5-6400 — 4 cores, 4 threads
- Memory
- 32 GB DDR4 — both slots full
- Storage
- 512 GB SSD and 1 TB hard disk — the system and the backup store
- Graphics
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 6 GB — drives the television
- Network
- Gigabit wired
- Management
- None — no out-of-band controller; recovery is a keyboard and the television
What it does not have
No redundant power: a supply failure stops this machine, and the estate is arranged so that stopping it costs a television and a backup target rather than a service. No out-of-band controller, so recovery means a keyboard and the television it already drives — acceptable on the machine that is not the one everything runs on. No hot-swap bays, no error-correcting memory, and a processor two generations past the last one its vendor supports.
None of that is a compromise: it is the specification the job requires. What matters is that the disk is in a different chassis from the primary node’s, that the machine is awake at half past midnight, and that it can send a message when its neighbour cannot.
The graphics card
The card is the one part with more capability than the job requires, and it came with the machine. It sits on a driver branch kept alive for its generation rather than the current one, which is a maintenance cost accepted deliberately: the alternative is a card that cannot drive the television at all. Its hardware video decoding was measured, found to work, and left switched off — the services page says why.