Post

I wanted another computer as a sandbox, I don't really trust VMs, and fucking chip shortages, so to the boneyard it is. I have a disused ASRock Rack J1900D2Y with 8GB of RAM and a PicoPSU that used to be my mail server. Somehow, at some point, I modded the 1U case to mount the rack ears on the back.

Annoying. So I dig up the original rack ears which I apparently still have, and try to flip things around, except the drive tray doesn't work the other way around somehow. What. Fine. I have a drill and a file. Sorted.

While I'm at it, I splice an INA219 current sensor into the power connection for funzies and hook it up to the BMC's I2C bus. I then root the BMC so I can access it. So then I set about setting up Debian on it on a mirrored pair of Intel enterprise SSDs with encrypted ZFS.

The board _claims_ to support UEFI booting. This was determined to be a lie. Whatever. A problem for later. I put GRML (which is my new favorite rescue "CD" since it also has aarch64 builds available) on a flash drive, remove the case from the flash drive, solder it to a motherboard header cable...

I use metadata v1.0, at the end of the partition, of course. Then comes the part where I get ZFSBootMenu working with SSH unlock. ZFSBootMenu is intended to boot via UEFI, but as I said, that doesn't work, but that's what GRUB is for - I can chainload.

Eventually that works, but I cannot manage to type the passphrase via the janky BMC's Java IPKVM. Fine. I have a file server I already set up SSH unlock with, but that means I'll have to build my own ZFSBootMenu files.

After a while, I finally get that working, only to be immediately prompted for the passphrase a second time (on the screen, via the IPKVM, where I keep failing to type it, and it takes abour 90 seconds to check because I cranked up pbkdf2 iterations) when Debian starts.