A homelabber/sysadmin midlife crisis

Meanwhile...
looks at old Thinkpad and raspi
- I have been an IT professional since 1995. Never have I ever had a personal PC that wasn't either a refurbished laptop or some sort of Frankenstein abomination that I put together from whatever was on sale and upcycled parts.
  
  I have been an IT professional since 1995. Never have I ever had a personal PC that wasn’t either a refurbished laptop or some sort of Frankenstein abomination that I pit together from whatever was on sale and upcycled parts.
  I've been in the game for about the same amount of time. I stopped doing that about 15 years ago when I saw that the electricity I was paying on older gear was equaling or exceeding the cost of buying newer, faster, and lower power consumption hardware.
  
  I swear it folk have the shittest hardware and jankiest setups and create more problems for themselves than any user ever could.
- You can get old servers on eBay for surprisingly little money, like this PowerEdge T410 for $200. Add some drives, install TrueNAS SCALE and you've got a good home server platform.
  
  Also a space heater for the winter and some white noise so you can sleep better!
  
  Isn't that a bit like buying an old truck instead of a year old Miata?
  Afaik those CPUs use so much juice when idling ... sure, you dont get all them lanes or ECC, but a PC at the same price with a few year old CPU outclasses that CPU by a lot & at a fraction of the running cost (also quietly).
  Just something to keep in mind as an alternative, especially when you don't intend to fill all the pcie bussy (several users with several intensive tasks that benefit from wider bus to RAM & PCI even with a slow CPU).
  \ Ok, and you miss out on some fancy admin stuff, but ... it's just for home use ...
  
  I have a ThinkServer with a similar Xeon, running proxmox -> Debian, so I was looking like "huh, interesting" until I saw the internals.
  Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck all that. Damn it Dell, quit your weird bullshit. It's just a motherboard, cpu, cooler, and ram. Slap in intake and exhaust fans. Figure it the fuck out.
  E: and it better have a goddamn standard psu, too. Fuck yourself, Dell. I've seen your shit.
- Hey, are you me?
  
  Hey! What Thinkpad do you use?
  I use a W520.

I hate this meme and yes absolutely

Is it really a midlife crisis when you're just buying the toys you ways wanted because you can finally afford it?
I built a ridiculous computer with RGB everything a few months back... It's dumb as hell but I always wanted one and at this point why not?
- Sorta. But I think the problematic part of a midlife crisis is the irresponsible reckless behavior (say unaccounted for big expenses) that affect the people around you. If you're not doing that then pop off, have fun, life is short!!

It's not a midlife crisis!
I actually desperately need this, my current server's just not specced right for the 2 dozen VM's I still want to add.
- VM's I still
  So each VM has their own iStill? That's a new $2ooo gadget from apple?
  Not sure I'm parsing the apostrophe correctly. They're still not for pluralization EVER, right?
  
  when pluralizing an acronym you add an apostroph

Mid-life crisis? I'm in my mid-20s!
- Who's gonna tell him?

That's not mid-life, that's entire-life.

Why not both? My homelab supports car related activities.
Probably why I don't have the Porsche though.
- I went the route of modest homelab with some mini PCs/Pis/NAS, and a decidedly not modest sim racing rig.
  I like to say that for my midlife crisis I bought all the cars. I'm very funny.

- I don’t know who needs to hear this, but your internal use only web-app for syncing your garage door with your media sever don’t need all that
  
  YOU DONT KNOW ME
  
  Lies
  
  Yea! He just needs a single dual proc server with 1TB of RAM like mine instead!
- I have 4 DL360s with 96GB RAM each to run a K8s cluster with a handful of containers
  If someone is paying you to host those and covering your costs, go wild! However, as a hobby you may be spending $925/year or more for electricity to run those in the Midwest. $1,387 if you're living in Boston, $1,850 if you're living in California.
  In one year you may have been able to buy more new power efficient hardware from just what you're spending on juice.
  
  I am sure there are people who spend more than that in a year on their own hobbies.
  
  Curious how you calculated that? What system load is it based on? Idle? Max?

makes same sound
Gento fans go brrrrr

The more you're willing to do yourself, the cheaper the car gets.
It's basically a hobby meant for sysadmins and they don't even realize it!

Por qué no los dos?
- Opportunity cost

I watched my father go this way and I shan’t let it happen to me! I’ve bought a motorcycle like a normal fat, middle-aged man.

I recently purchased a blade enclosure.
I might be in this meme.
- And how many of those could you buy for the money one of these cars costs? You might be in this meme, and this meme may compare things that fulfil the same purpose (crisis-wise) but that price difference is one not to be dismissed.
  
  The image I chose for this meme was from a store listing where this was going for 100k
  Lots of server/computer hardware can get really up there in price. Just a single Nvidia H100 (The gold standard GPU for AI training) is currently going for ~60k

Me who finds really cheap eBay hardware:

Hmm which depreciates faster?

at least a home lab can do things. people who's entire social life and personality are dedicated to internal combustion bullshit are depressing. vrroooom vroom vroooooom is not a replacement for actually having a life.
I love the self identifying vrooom vrooooooom downvotes rofls. you guys need to find a better hobby.
- You DON'T unDerSTAND I must go vrrroom vrrroom on city streets regardless of pedestrian safety or my wife will remember my dick doesn't work.
  
  the wife left him years ago lol....

Some of these cases are so expensive. I am wanting a Super Micro CSE-836 style case to upgrade my NAS and I have an eBay alert I set a few years ago when I couldn't quite justify spending the money. Turns out I should have because even used the prices are going up and up.
- Been a few years since I looked, but HP's DL line used to be reasonably affordable.

A super fast car is a toy, fast electronics are useful tools.
- Sure, but from some point up enterprise-class tech stops making sense for home use.
- A super fast car is a tool to make me happier. Not that I'll ever be able to afford one.
- The Miata and the BRZ/GR86 aren't fast though.

I broke my laptop's screen. It has been serving as my homeserver for the past 10 years.

I mean... Cars suck..