[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":101},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-post:en:\u002Fen\u002F2026-09-04-hotel-admin-part-1":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"description":92,"extension":93,"meta":94,"navigation":96,"path":97,"seo":98,"stem":99,"__hash__":100},"content\u002Fen\u002F2026-09-04-hotel-admin-part-1.md","A developer somehow ends up running hotel IT. Part 1: Replacing a server CPU",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":88},"minimark",[9,13,16,19,22,41,49,52,55,58,61,64,72,75,78,81],[10,11,12],"p",{},"There's a hotel whose infrastructure I've somehow ended up maintaining for the past six months, since April this year.",[10,14,15],{},"Sometime in May, after a month of getting my bearings, it became clear that one of the SuperMicro servers could use an upgrade.",[10,17,18],{},"I'm actually a fullstack developer.",[10,20,21],{},"So, naturally, a little while later I found myself figuring out:",[23,24,25,29,32,35,38],"ul",{},[26,27,28],"li",{},"what socket it had;",[26,30,31],{},"which Xeons the motherboard supported;",[26,33,34],{},"whether it needed a BIOS update;",[26,36,37],{},"whether the cooling could handle it;",[26,39,40],{},"and which CPU was even worth buying for this ancient machine.",[10,42,43,44,48],{},"I picked a CPU. To my surprise, a processor for this platform from 2017 (or was it 2018?) cost just 4,000 rubles (?!). An ",[45,46,47],"em",{},"Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6138 CPU @ 2.00GHz",". And it would give me almost five times the CPU capacity. From 4 cores to 20. Not a bad upgrade, right? We also picked up some more RAM: we had 64 GB and were aiming for around 190 GB. Order placed.",[10,50,51],{},"Then came the especially wonderful part: someone also had to physically replace the CPU and memory in the server.",[10,53,54],{},"That someone, of course, turned out to be me as well.",[10,56,57],{},"The server runs Proxmox with all the software the hotel needs. So you can't just shut it down in the middle of a workday. Or on a weekend, for that matter. It's a hotel, after all. 😅",[10,59,60],{},"So there I was at 3 a.m.: server taken apart, heatsink removed, old Xeon out, new one in, thermal paste applied, server put back together.",[10,62,63],{},"I pressed the power button. Wiped the sweat off my forehead like that pilot in the famous GIF trying to land a plane.",[10,65,66,67,71],{},"For some reason, those few seconds before anything appeared on the monitor were far more nerve-racking than any ",[68,69,70],"code",{},"docker stack deploy",".",[10,73,74],{},"It booted.",[10,76,77],{},"And just like that, upgrading server Xeons quietly became part of my stack.",[10,79,80],{},"I've attached photos of the old processor being removed. Ba-dum-tss. Unfortunately, the whole machine was covered in construction dust because someone had drilled a hole in the wall right above the server to run some cables or pipes. I vacuumed it as best I could, but didn't take an \"after\" photo: I just wanted to get it back together and check that it worked.",[10,82,83],{},[84,85],"img",{"alt":86,"src":87},"Replacing the server CPU","\u002Fassets\u002Fimages\u002Fblog\u002Fhotel-admin\u002Fserver-cpu-1.jpg",{"title":89,"searchDepth":90,"depth":90,"links":91},"",2,[],"A late-night SuperMicro server upgrade: a Xeon Gold 6138, going from 4 cores to 20, and a nervous wait for the first boot.","md",{"date":95},"2026-09-04",true,"\u002Fen\u002F2026-09-04-hotel-admin-part-1",{"title":5,"description":92},"en\u002F2026-09-04-hotel-admin-part-1","20kxEVgg3pTiOHbfLHFpfU_quSDqmEKUpl-hXZQjTFk",1788972925286]