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The HP MicroServer Gen8 is a great low-cost solution for someone (like me) who doesn’t like all the wonderful NAS bullshit out there. For example, with the addition of the P222 Raid Controller, you can use SAS drives – of which I have way too many.

Currently I have around 200-250TB of SAS drives. I will be using my 4TB HDD SAS drives for this project.

Unlike the P840 Raid Controller, the P222 is a half-height PCIe Raid Card, which is thus officially supported within the MicroServer (as it doesn’t have any PCIe full-height slots). Meaning the P222 it is! (Which sadly I don’t have, so time to go fishing!);

I’ll be using these items for the project:

• HP MicroServer Gen8 which I got from eBay (£156~)
• P222 Raid Controller
• PiKVM V4 (and a VGA to HDMI adapter)
• C13 “Kettle” Cable.
• My 42U Server Rack (where the server will be placed).
• A 1U shelf (for the rack, to be added in the future).
• 128GB USB Stick – You don’t need this much but anything above 16gb would work fine. I use ventoy thus why I have so much!
• Ethernet Cat8

I won’t be including the price of the drives in the total cost for this project, however I purchased them for bulk for around £2.51/TB.

Of course, this will use a lot less power than a normal rack-mounted server – which is where the selling point is for me, personally. Since who wants to pay £40 in electricity a month for an over-complicated NAS? Well, me but you see the issue. This will dramatically save me storage for me!

The PiKVM allows me to sit back, and relax. Plug in the server, place the drives and the P222 Raid Controller, add power for the PiKVM – and maybe add the optional ATX board so I can control power (etc) directly from the PiKVM.

So, what are the specs?

Specification	Value
CPU	XEON E3-1265L V2 @ 2.5GHz (3.5GHz boost), 8 Core This is an upgraded spec, however I do have the original Celeron G1610T @ 2.3GHz!
RAM	16GB ECC DDR3
RAID CARD Support	HPE P222, or H222
Native Storage Support	SATA, Additional RAID Card required for SAS 🙁
Network	2x Gigabit ethernet NICs
Drive Bays	4, 5 if you use an external HDD too (I won’t be doing this)

The general Price Range of these Gen 8 MicroServers go for around £100 to around £300 when second hand.

TL;DR

• Native SAS support? No (B120i = SATA only)
• With extra controller (e.g., P222/H222)? Yes
• Backplane? Compatible electrically, just needs SAS controller
• Power/thermal? Should be considered, but feasible

Software

To save on time, and frustration, I’ll be using NextcloudPi with some modifications. For example, I will be re-enabling root login.

I will be using Debian 12.

Features

• Nextcloud Hub 10
• Apache 2.4.25 with HTTP2 enabled
• PHP 7.3 :/
• MariaDB 10
• Redis Memory Cache
• Automatic redirection to HTTPS
• ACPU PHP Cache
• PHP Zend OPcache enabled with file cache
• HSTS
• Cron Jobs for NC (nextcloud)
• Sane Configuration Defaults
• Preinstalled popular apps such as Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Tasks (In my installation I’ll be changing this up).
• Emoji Support
• Postfix email (Sending only/SMTP)
• Setup Wizard
• Nextcloud Pi Web Panel
• NCP-Config Terminal Tool (CLI?, well more of a TUI but you know)
• WiFi Ready (MicroServer Gen8 doesn’t have wifi).
• RAM Logs
• Automatic Security Updates (Active by Default)
• Let’s Encrypt Certificate for trusted HTTPS (I’ll be using NGINX Proxy Manager instead)
• Fail2Ban protection against brute-force attacks
• UFW Firewall
• Dynamic DNS Support for:
  • No-IP.org
  • freeDNS
  • DuckDNS
  • spDYN
• dnsmasq DNS server with DNS Cache
• ModSecurity Web Application Firewall
• NFS Ready to mount your files over LAN
• SAMBA ready to share your files with Windows, Mac and Linux
• USB Automount
• Remote Updates
• Automatic NCP Updates
• Automatic Nextcloud Updates
• Update Notifications
• Nextcloud Backup & Restore
• Nextcloud Online Installation
• Format USB drives to BTRFS
• BTRFS Snapshots
• Automatic BTRFS Snapshots
• Scheduled Rsync
• UPnP Automatic Port-Forwarding
• Security Audit with Lynis Debsecan
• ZRAM
• SMART Hard Drive Health Monitoring

Platforms & Installation Methods

There are many methods for NextCloudPi installation, such as:

• LXD Container Images
• Proxmox VM Images
• Odroid HC2/HC1/XU4/HC4/C4/C2
• Rock64
• RockPro64
• Orange Pi
• Banana Pi
• Debian Armbian SBCs
• Raspberry Pi 3 and later
• Or, on a Debian-based distro.

I recommend using a Debian-based distro. For example I’ll be using Debian 12.

See https://nextcloudpi.com/#supported_systems for more information and installation steps.

The script installs the whole thing for you, however Piping to bash isn’t always the best idea, you can always inspect the code and launch it manually.

There are also pre-installed SD Card ISOs for this too: https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloudpi/releases

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Link to Part 2 (Actual Installation of the system): Not made yet

I’ve recently added a few juicy bits and bobs to my rack. Oh and get this, the Dell PowerEdge R230 is now up and running (yippe yay woo hoo!!!!) With a huge and wonderful 16gb DDR4 2400MHz ram (yes much wow)…

As you can see in the picture, they’re not always online mainly because

1. I’m not a psycho, I’m just mildly insane <3
2. I’m not paying a £400/mo electricity bill thank you very much

With the addition of the DELL PowerEdge R230, the 42u rack now has 11 units occupied (yay?). Now all I’m waiting for is the 32gb DDR4 2133mHz ram and then we’re complete! (All that’s left after the ram, is of course, installing an operating system :3).

I’ll probably go with debian for this one because I’m lazy and uh yeah… just that.

Honestly, I only need a few more parts to get this wonderful device up and running again! These parts are:

• DDR4 ECC RAM
• Outer Dell A4 Friction Rails. I already have some Inner Rails however its not as easy as you’d think to find Outer Rails – yet there are loads of Inner Rails on the market, so I’ll probably end up buying new rails, not much more in price either way.

I’m expecting this to cost me around £80~ish in total since I’ll most likely be getting new rails instead of used since it’s hard to find just Outer Rails by themselves.

Recently I have acquired 18TB in 2.5″ (SAS) HDDs, and have (well, even more recently haha – within the hour), got my hands on 10 4TB (SAS) HDDs for around £103. That’s £2.57 per terrabyte, which in all honesty is a sweet, sweet deal.

I am letting one of my friends use some of my 42 Unit Rack’s “rack space” for one of their servers, and they mentioned that they would like to purchase a few from me so that a bonus I guess?

Either way, my Dell Poweredge R230 will have around 16TB worth of space for a media server, etc etc. Either way, the amount of storage I now have available to me has skyrocketed. Yippee!!

Aren’t I cool? Jokes aside, I have recently decided to add to my lovely collection of what my mum calls “junk”. Such a joker huh?

Above is a computer I have just purchased. I already have some XP machines, for example the Dell Optiplex 745, and a lovely old Toshiba laptop which my mum gave to me a few years back. I did have a Samsung A10 years ago, but I have no clue where that went either.

I have some pretty stupid (as some put it) ideas for this lovely relic:

• Use it at college and really annoy my teachers!
• Get Discord working using a somewhat functional web browser (e.g. Supermium)
• Install stupid software and play around with Windows XP even more.
• Try and get Minecraft working on this stone-age device

Not just this laptop, I have also found a lovely (huge) expansion for my collection. This includes:

• 3 Desktop
• 3 Laptops

All Windows XP compatible – and here’s the fun thing: I don’t have any IDE HDDs, so I’m a bit stuck until I find some decent IDE HDDs.

Once you get used to it, you can – if needed – only use the basic commands within vim and still be faster than your average IDE, or text editor whichever you prefer really.

Above is my installation of vim on my ThinkPad T470p, which is ironically named “thiccpad“. Makes me crack a laugh every time. Now, vim is a wonderful piece of software since it has the option to be expanded more than Windows Notepad (duh), or even just about any version of iOS, MacOS, or Windows – probably.

Either way, using the pretty simple .vimrc file, you can control every single aspect of your vim installation, but for now let’s focus on the basics shall we?

Installation

On an Arch-based distro:

• pacman -Sy vim

On a Debian-based distro:

• apt-get install vim -y

Then simply run the command vim in your terminal and boom, you’re in. That’s the easy part done.

Basic Use (CMD/s)

Congratulations, most people give up and turn off the computer just to leave vim at this point because they can’t figure out that they need to type :q to leave vim, or to quit and save while in a file :wq, or even to quit but not save changes while in a file :q!

Remember! To execute a command, or to enter NORMAL mode, press the ESC or escape key. To enter insert mode, press the i key.

To open a file, you’d simply run :o <path_to_file> , alternatively if you have the plugin called NERDTree, you’d run :NERDTree to open the navigation menu (simples!).

To save to a specific file, use the :sav <path_to_file> command. Fun right?

Plugins, etc blah blah nerdy mumbo jumbo

If you want to use plugins with vim, you’ll need to use a plugin manager, or VIM 8+’s built-in package management feature.

Remember, you’ll need to configure a .vimrc file for any plugins to work, however its really not that hard to configure.

• Pathogen
• Vundle
• Vim-Plug

These are some popular VIM package managers. Personally I use Vundle, but have a look through and pick whichever one sparks your fancy. I’m not going to go into plugin installation within this post (sorry lol)