- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
EDIT: i had an rpi it died from esd i think
EDIT2: this is also my work machine and i sleep to the sound of the fans
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Mine is my 6th gen i5 gaming PC stuffed into an early 00’s tower server chassis. It’s got an ebay IT mode HBA hooked up to a bunch of drives I pulled from an old Lefthand node we were recycling.
I wonder how easy it is to get used server racks, and how cheap they are 🤔
I reckon the electricity is the real killer (and the noise!)
And heat
Definitely the noise. Jesus Christ the noise…
I found one on craigslist. Half rack fully enclosed with door on front and back for $200. Had an UPS in the bottom that didn’t work… it just needed new batteries lol.
Have a truck on hand to pick up and you can find a bargain.
You can get them pretty cheap if you’re patient.
Personally I use the IKEA alternative. It works really well.
I meant with the servers too, not just an empty rack.
Missing a Raspberry PI 4 setup which hosts a print server, an RTP server with two surveillance webcams and no password, and also seeds a terabyte of torrents over the local flower shop’s unencrypted WiFi.
Wow, that was a journey… :)
Racks? None
Screens? Attached
Fans? Full blast
Oh yeah, it’s server laptop time
Some people actually have the services they host get used by other people.
Imagine asking “why?” instead of “why not?”
Money? Noise? Power consumption?
Heavy-duty applications? Lots of devices in the home? Reliance on PoE? There are plenty of reasons to use big equipment, it’s not just for show.
I couldn’t run multiple game servers off of a laptop the way I do on my spare Ryzen 9 5900X. I also have it transcoding media and it has 30tb of storage, of which I’m currently using over 2/3s for media/steam cache.
I also have a 24 port switch because I have a whole family here each with their own PCs, consoles, etc… I host the odd LAN as well and it wasn’t really any cheaper to go smaller for when I don’t need all 24, so I just popped it off. I also need two APs on different channels just to accommodate all the wireless devices + IoT shit.
Who says it’s overkill?
That said I literally started selfhosting on a Thinkpad W520. With the full 32 gigs of ram it ran ESXI great. Plus you can’t beat a built in UPS.
I was going to buy a mini PC to run along with it when I needed more, but I just opted to take old desktop parts and combine my NAS with everything else.
Doing something scrappy with an old laptop is cool. Hey, built in UPS if the battery still works!
Doing something powerful and reliable with server class hardware is also very cool.
If it is meeting your needs, I’m happy for you.
Sorry to tell you I never had a battery
I just got a Nas with 4hdd and 4 nvme. That’s pretty solid for my current needs. Scale your hardware to your needs. I won’t be maxing out my setup maybe ever. I’ll just update to newer hardware every 5 or 6 years and call it good.
Poverty computing takes more balls. Like yeah, you got a nice Plex server and you can play Skyrim at max setting because you can afford a big NAS and a nice graphic card - no skills needed. I’m spending two hours trying to get the Sims to work on a fifteen year old laptop that I don’t think can even run a DE or running Puppy Linux off USB while waiting to afford a new hard drive.
I’m currently using a ryzen 5600u mini-pc, which is more than enough for what I do. Although it’d be cool to have something more server-like. The thing is: those notebook cpus are very efficient and low energy consumption is a priority for me.
I just have an old laptop with a tui screen saver on it to prevent burn
also, the ssd doesn’t work with linux so i have to put the os on a usb stick
Try booting your installer without UEFI - I have an old x99 WS IPMI board I spun up with NixOS and has so many issues using the EFI / UEFI installer.
Admittedly that thing pulls 60w at idle, so promptly turned it off 😅
nah, it’s not uefi. linux straight up doesn’t even see the drive when it’s in the pc. according to archwiki, all laptops in its series work perfectly with Linux except for this one. the SSD does work externally in an enclosure though, so I’m using it for storage.
Ahh man that’s a pain, my old notebook has no sata and only 32gb of emmc (which I’m tempted to remove and add a larger chip), but it’s only being used for my 3D printer so it’s not really a pressing need yet.
Btw you can set it up to turn the screen off without sending it to sleep. I use a screen lock to do this, but other things probably work too
People who are proud of their gear post it.
You seldom hear from the folks running a half dozen VMs on a laptop.
You seldom hear from the folks running a half dozen VMs on a laptop.
That’s probably me. Blame it to working with automation systems that span from the early 90s to present day.
You seldom hear from the folks running a half dozen VMs on a laptop.
That’s probably me. Blame it to working with automation systems that span from the early 90s to present day.
PTSD flashbacks of trying to get CFEngine configured for deploying Windows 2k, Redhat 3 and Solaris 8 lmao.
I used to sell a product that OEMed CFEngine. My condolences.
I want to hear from them because that’s the setup I’m aiming for.
Where are you all discussing your shit so I can eavesdrop and steal ansible playbooks?
it’s the reason people post pictures of their cyber truck which can’t move when it snows while my ford has been plowing out neighbors since '97.
I feel so seen rn
We use containers now btw
My home lab is my windows gaming PC running containers on a Ubuntu VM as a guest os in Hyper-V.
We are all over the shop.I wish I knew how to do that. Can’t get my VMM or Virtual Box running well.
I run a cluster of VMs that run kubernetes and manage those VMs with containers that run Terraform and ansible. Along with baremetal RISC-V workflows and ASICs.
A tool is a tool and one should pick what works for them.
Why? Wouldn’t the VMs add extra complexity? Couldn’t you just run the containers on the machine?
I’m one of those people with an overkill setup.
Do you have experience with kubernetes or kubectl and DR or ASICs? Not everything should be a container or can do what an ASIC is built/designed for.
If I want a three node cluster for redundancy and speed I’ll need three baremetal machines. Or one hypervisor hosting 3 VMs that run my cluster nodes. I think there is a knowlege gap. Check out these links if you have more questions.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/architecture/
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/kubespray-deploy-kubernetes
https://rudimartinsen.com/2023/12/29/kubernetes-cluster-on-vms-2024/
Also some things cannot run as a container due to having architectural differences. These are specifically designed chips for prototyping and software development.
https://www.ijert.org/asic-design-for-a-32-bit-risc-v-processor
Lastly we all have different needs for our home labs. I have to research new tech and processes for my job. It’s a lot of political overhead to get some stuff working on company hardware. I’m very lucky to have a good relationship with systems and storage so that I can buy older retired hardware to run at home. This is not everyone’s usecase and that’s fine.
I keep my laptop in a bookbag thanks.
Modern tech is so wasteful. Why’d you ever need all that stuff for.
Back in the day I used to host all my stuff on a dinky little router (ASUS Wl500g, 300mhz 32MB RAM) with a powered USB hub and a spare USB HDD hooked to it. It handled downloading torrents overnight, hosted a few websites, an FTP/SAMBA server, an image/screenshots hosting and galleries for me and my friends, including that one script that generated a GIF of all my epic gamer stats on each access, a couple of bots, sent me weather reports via SMS, hosted a webcam to be used as IP security camera, and also a dumb printer so that it could be used by anyone on the network, besides working as my actual router.
When it died* I moved all that stuff to an old UMPC. And nowadays, I host my shit on $30 smartwatches with Termux.
Meanwhile, one of the commercial projects I’ve been working with lately, which is basically just a glorified image dump, with all the modern bells and whistles, doesn’t even launch if the machine has less than 32GB RAM… smh
EDIT: * It was the HDD that died, the router itself is still chugging along, but with less duties as just a network switch for less demanding appliances
Please tell more about those watches
W&O X9 Call. It’s a terrible watch, basically just a shitty android phone inside of a knockoff applewatch case. It runs Android 9 on 2" screen, 4GB RAM and 64GB of space (didn’t even test that one tbh), battery life - nonexistent (less than a day). But I’ve been looking specifically for stuff like this and bought a load of them at wholesale for like $28.5 a piece… and the specs didn’t even exactly match between all of them. Loaded them up with cheapest plans for IoT devices, installed termux, nodejs and moved some of my personal scripts over to them. One app/script per piece, no need for VM’s or containers 🤣 And they got their own links so firewall is also not necessary.
None of them have static IP’s accessible from outside though, so for stuff I need public access to I jam that into the remaining RAM space on one of the few of my $1/mo lowendboxes that I’m using primarily as VPN servers. Got them all on tailscale, so I could theoretically use Funnel to route traffic from public internet to those watches (haven’t tried yet). And still to figure out some way for them to failover onto each other’s internet because the plans are extremely limited, will probably have to learn android app development for that when I get to it.
There is also HK Ultra 2 which I believe is essentially the same thing, and I saw a few other variants on the market without even a brand name, so the only way to find them would be to search for “sim card” or sorting smartwatches category by bad reviews first 😂
Ah, and also a disclaimer: I am not promoting this as a viable way to host things. This is just my personal exercise at hobo engineering
Because we forgot optimization in a world that celebrates maximalists and constant upgrades to feed shopping addictions that make people feel more in control of their space in a world with less and less opportunities for self determination.
When I remember I was the cool kid for having a 4GB flash drive that could fit all of my call of duty game and homework and I look at the 560GB games now that aren’t even as fun to play I think we have made some mistakes along the way that instead of prioritizing the experience of life we prioritize the ease of it.
Working hardware is working hardware; form factor doesn’t really matter.
My primary DNS server is a rpi.
Mine was my SOs grandmother’s Pentium PC from like 2003 until something just stopped in it. Like can’t even tell what is wrong with it cause it’s just inconsistently down and then back up.
So now it’s a small PC I got from eBay that came with like a free monitor and keyboard and stuff for like $60
That sounds like storage failure.
I actually ran into something similar with the RPI 2 weeks ago. It was running incredibly slow, certain file directories refused to load, DNS resolution was failing 1/3 of the time and was super slow when it did work…
Pretty sure the 6 year old sd card finally gave up.
Having a script automatically write a bootable backup of the SD card to an SSH server once a week makes that recovery super easy. Literally just write the last backup to a new card, swap them out, and all’s well again.
