What's with the overkill hardware setups?
What's with the overkill hardware setups?
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
106 comments
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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.
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People who are proud of their gear post it.
You seldom hear from the folks running a half dozen VMs on a laptop.
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We use containers now btw
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I keep my laptop in a bookbag thanks.
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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?
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I feel so seen rn
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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.
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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.
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To be completely fair, it's hard to overstate the durability of an old Thinkpad. They're so ubiquitous, Linux compatibility is almost guaranteed. Then, after the battery goes, attach it to a UPC and ride that setup for another decade at least.
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Racks? None
Screens? Attached
Fans? Full blast
Oh yeah, it's server laptop time
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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
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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.
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Please tell more about those watches
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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
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BRB just making a backup
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My first services were running on an old laptop from 2006/2007 standing on an old leather chair in a corner of a room. The laptop was standing on four old and used skateboard wheels so there was some space between the laptop and the leather.
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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
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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 😅
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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
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Imagine asking "why?" instead of "why not?"
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Money? Noise? Power consumption?
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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.
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I also host my stuff on oscilloscopes.
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That pic looks very much like the corner of a memory validation lab I worked in at one point. Wouldn't surprise me at all if someone who's really into server hardware had a home setup like that.
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I have setup like that because i do a lot of repairs and I've yet to acquire minipc for server purposes, plan to buy n100 fanless one, for now i have rented vps for 2 years for selfhosting purposes
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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.
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Sorry to tell you I never had a battery
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Overkill is underrated.
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I just bought a whole new 8th gen Intel setup to be my main PC. So I could use my 4770 as a Plex server.
Nothing ever dies in my house, Just Machines for the machine gods.
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My (family's) Homeserver is my dad's old gaming rig from ~2014
I just put an 8 TB Hard Drive in it and set it up as a combination Emby Server and ghetto "NAS".
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Wow look at Mr FancyPants over there, your server has a screen, I just got something (RPi) the size of a matchbox! /s
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I have an overkill hardware setup because it’s fun. No I don’t really need 4 servers in a Proxmox cluster with 64GB RAM each.. but it’s cool lol. Besides the hardware was just gonna become ewaste anyway, I’m repurposing it
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How did you get multiple 64 GB RAM sticks that would've been ewaste?
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It even has an integrated UPS.
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Yeah, right, like UPS would be here this quickly (ba dum tss)
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I never received the battery
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this is also my work machine and i sleep to the fans whirring
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Yes my Plex server is a W520 and it shuts itself down at night because it's in the bedroom and the fans are too loud.
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No, for me I love it, like how some sailors can't sleep without the sound of the engine
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I had a spare gpu lying around so I didn’t need integrated graphics
Then next thing I knew I had 16tbs of data
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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.
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Wow, that was a journey... :)
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Sometimes it's fun to go nuts!
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Top right are oscilloscopes, doubt it has anything to do with hosting
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Speak for yourself
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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.
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I just found what server #loops run on.
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I mean you aren't going to host 100tb of porn in that laptop.....yet 😘
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Don't even have 256G installed in that thing
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If I didn't need a large amount of storage I'd totally do this. As it stands it's hard or prohibitively expensive to get 30TB of storage connected to a laptop with reasonable read/write speeds.
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I wonder how easy it is to get used server racks, and how cheap they are 🤔
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I reckon the electricity is the real killer (and the noise!)
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Definitely the noise. Jesus Christ the noise...
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And heat
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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.
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You can get them pretty cheap if you're patient.
Personally I use the IKEA alternative. It works really well.
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Just because you can afford to lose your weird niche fetish porn doesn't mean I can afford to lose my calendar and contacts
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I went overkill because i had money, no hardware i could dedicate and wanted flexibility for my volatile interests. So overkill (except storage until i upgrade) that i plan sharing it with my family (when i set it up properly) I could have made a less overkill choice but that way i probably wont need to change my setup for some game
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Less power is more power!
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All my gear is stuff I've saved from the dumpster at work except my hard drives and my UPS. I'm using the IKEA end tables instead of racks (I think they are called lakka?). My jbod chassis is huge and very loud, but it was free. I dropped cables into my basement and I only hear it when I'm down there.
I started off with just a desktop tower full of spare parts, but over time it's slowly become a pretty impressive stack.
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Some people actually have the services they host get used by other people.
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What's with it is probably "I'm doing this because I love hardware."
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Angry Thönkpad whirring intensifies
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Is that the award winning IBM Thinkpad™ running Linux?!
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It's an earlier Lenovo, sire.
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Let's be real though, What's someone doing with three oscilloscopes
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An experiment because someone once thought "you know what would be better than two oscilloscopes?"
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Viewing multiple signals, signal generation, digital signal analysis.
You may be able to do most of that with the newer one on the top of the stack; but it's nice to have backups/spares to use or just to put things on separate screens.
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Sometimes one or two just don't have enough channels. The bottom one doesn't look like a scope though. It may be a spectrum analyzer, but it's hard to see.
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Mad scientist shit.
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Man crazy fun is to be had with sillyscopes
Build your own breadboard with ICs and you can play doom on it.
Well kind of. But dude, you can get all sort of crazy ass signal information from your circuits with em. Like watching SPI devices talk to each other is wild.
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Playing Doom.
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How are you going to know the internet is working with thet few blinking LEDs?
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I just upgraded my daily driver laptop to a new desktop, so now I'm using the laptop as a home server. Much more powerful than anything else I could afford.
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Best I can do is Samsung galaxy A71 with lineage os.
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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.
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I just have a dell optiplex sitting in the corner running Proxmox. then I can spin up whatever I need.
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Embracing constraints makes you learn fast. I bet you could teach enterprise sysadmins a few things about performance monitoring and optimization.
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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.
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Working hardware is working hardware; form factor doesn't really matter.
My primary DNS server is a rpi.
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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
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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.
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I guess I'm somewhere in between with a bunch of RasPis xD
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I have 2 old dell prebuilt boxes of shit things stacked on top of eachother. I do need some recommendations for storage as I currently just have everything on a single ssd.
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Get a few scrap hdds and fit them in or idk wire the sata cables out of the case?
Then create a raid 0+1 configuration and you now have a couple tb of redundant storage.
Bonus points if you can get even more hdds (use usb adapters maybe?)
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I can probably 3d print something to hold the hdd's and get a cheap pcie sata card. If u got any recommendations for where to get some cheap drives lmk.
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I like my n100 mini and usb drives. A full fat server has little WAF when the selling point is an LLM. The n100 handles all our needs sadly.
A dozen or so LXCs. A dozen or so docker containers. A couple VMs, including a Mint VM to turn my android tablet into a desktop. They were sold as a great little home lab, and that they are.
Then again, it's a year old and I'm only beginning in this hobby.
106 comments