Questions on moving a Server


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I'm planning to move my server from my parents' house to mine.

 

So far I'm planning on:

- running a backup via Duplicacy and the Backup/Restore Appdata plugin (I already do this daily and weekly respectively)

- running a parity check before the move

- noting which HDD is connected to which SATA port

- removing the HDDs and expansion cards and packing them safely for the drive

- reinstalling the components post-move in the same manner they were pre-move

- running another parity check to ensure there was no damage to the HDDs as a result of the drive

 

A few questions:

1) Is there anything else I should be considering?

2) Currently, my server has a DHCP reservation of 192.168.x.y; the DHCP reservations at my house follow a slightly different scheme. Apart from simply creating a new reservation for the server on my router, is there anywhere within unRAID I need to manually update?

3) I run a number of reverse-proxied services on unRAID. Since I run cloudflare-ddns, I take it Cloudflare will automatically be updated with the new public IP (i.e. I don't need to do anything or reinstall LetsEncrypt etc.)?

 

Thanks for any help/advice!

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I appreciate your level of concern with the moving process, and perhaps it is the "right" way to do it (more on that in a second) but I think you are going overboard with the need to dismantle everything and reassemble it when you get to your house.

 

You didn't mention how the server is being moved, driven, mailed, flown, etc, and it doesn't really matter since it's really all the same.  Why are you going to remove all the hard drives?  To protect them from bumping around in transit inside the case?

 

Removing them protects them any more... how, exactly?  When the drive is powered off the head is locked in it's resting position.  Nothing you do to wrap, insulate, or otherwise try to protect the drive is going to be any different than if it was still inside the case and gets a jolt from a drop/bang.  If you have a drive wrapped up in a box and you drop the box, the shock is the same either way.

 

Aside from your over caution, I think you're good to go.  Unraid will get the new ip from your router's dhcp and I believe everything else in unraid will reflect accordingly.

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To expand on what @Energen said, unless you are trying to distribute the weight so that it's less concentrated in the case and instead making many lighter packages, then removing the hard drives SHOULD be unnecessary. That assumes they are mounted properly, obviously if they are only held in with one screw on a makeshift piece of scrap, then remove them. Bare hard drives are especially vulnerable to impact, the simple act of setting one bare drive on top of another can exceed the design specs for instantaneous G loading. If it made a clack noise, you probably went over the limit.

 

However... your heatsink should be either removed or secured. I've seen multiple instances where a heatsink came off the mounts and played pinball inside a tower. In one shipment from Alaska to the southern US, the end result was not pretty, I think the only thing salvageable was the DVD drive.

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3 hours ago, jonathanm said:

To expand on what @Energen said, unless you are trying to distribute the weight so that it's less concentrated in the case and instead making many lighter packages, then removing the hard drives SHOULD be unnecessary. That assumes they are mounted properly, obviously if they are only held in with one screw on a makeshift piece of scrap, then remove them. Bare hard drives are especially vulnerable to impact, the simple act of setting one bare drive on top of another can exceed the design specs for instantaneous G loading. If it made a clack noise, you probably went over the limit.

 

However... your heatsink should be either removed or secured. I've seen multiple instances where a heatsink came off the mounts and played pinball inside a tower. In one shipment from Alaska to the southern US, the end result was not pretty, I think the only thing salvageable was the DVD drive.

Well it'll be a seven hour drive. Personally, I'm willing to completely waste an hour of my time to gain that bit of peace of mind (even if it might be illusory 🤷‍♂️). Besides, what with quarantining, each hour of my time is suddenly much less valuable...

 

As for the heatsink, I use an AIO (probably also overkill for this use-case; but I had it left over from another build). I'm thinking that an AIO shouldn't need to be removed, as it's not a hunk of metal like a NH-D15 etc.?

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