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.
Power costs is a poor tax in the same way skipping the dentist and getting a root canal later is.
Also in the process of power efficiency-izing my lab. It just wasn't a feasible option before, I didn't have the means. I just paid interest via electricity.
Do we need to update Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness to Sam Vimes **‘Compute’ ** Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness?
I swear it folk have the shittest hardware and jankiest setups and create more problems for themselves than any user ever could.
It’s why we’re able to fix all the things. We dogfood shit setups, unsupported configurations, and weird edge cases so you don’t have to.
I don't even restart when installing new software that needs it, I just reload whatever service or dependent software on the fly 😎
It is impossible to pull any enthusiast away from their 7-row Thinkpad
The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like "least maintenance time required" or "maximum computing power lowest energy consumption" (or it's companion "silent yet powerful").
Maybe "I'm fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side" is the real mid-life crisis of techies.
I try do everything with 2nd hand stuff as cheap as possible. This causes me and unbelievable amount of trouble because I have to try get all this ancient shit to work in a spaghetti network. half the time I don't even know what I'm doing I'm just happy to be there.
Yeah, I've been there - it's how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn't just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).
I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.
Anyways, I still keep the "no waste" habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn't want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).
Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is "lower TDP") and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.
Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).
Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it's normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don't really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It's worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).
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.
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.
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 have 4 DL360s with 96GB RAM each to run a K8s cluster with a handful of containers
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.
My point is, you can possibly spend the same money and get better hardware that isn't so power hungry and have a better experience with your hobby.
makes same sound
Gento fans go brrrrr
Por qué no los dos?
Opportunity cost
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!
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
Wow. I did not expect that. Nor people to buy that stuff for private use.
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.
Me who finds really cheap eBay hardware:
Me who digs stuff out of e-waste bins in office building parking garages.
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.
Hmm which depreciates faster?
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