10 ms·
Reusing Old Hardware
- ChuckMcM 8y agoThe author is not wrong, there is a lot of old hardware out there that is still more than serviceable for many things. But the loaded cost (power, maintenance, space, etc) of running servers at "home" can be way more than the $10 a month for a droplet on Digital Ocean. What I'm saying is that the math isn't as straight forward as it might appear. That said, it is now pretty straight forward to build a 'nano-datacenter' consisting of an enclosure, thermo-electric cooling, rack, switch, UPS, a server providing NAS storage and a couple or 6 servers providing compute. Plug its PDU into the socket where your dryer used to plug in out in the garage.
- mynegation 8y agoI used to have an old computer and a NAS, but they were too noisy. I used the progress in CPUs in a different way: bought one of the fanless ITX sized computers and attached reasonably sized WD passport to it which is spun down most of the time (things are mostly served from an internal SSD)
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI have similarly evolved my setup, initially a couple of 'midsize' towers and a StoreVault NAS, then the computers were replaced with a couple of Shuttle XPC type 'box' computers, then the NAS was replaced with a much quieter FreeNAS box from iXSystems, then the 'services' system (DNS, NTP, LDAP, Nagios, etc) was replaced with a couple of small ARM machines (initially Raspberry Pis but migrated to Odroids for performance reasons). And then the last XPC was swapped out for a fanless 'third height' ITX type system that is designed for home entertainment systems. Realistically all of this could be built into a single hybrid of disk shelf and blade server box. That is something I've contemplated as the 'next generation' of the technology.
- mrob 8y agoWhy thermo-electric cooling instead of more efficient forced-air cooling?
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoor passive cooling with huge heatsink.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoAs it turns out, forced air cooling isn't as efficient as water is for carrying heat. As a result the most efficient way to cool a server is to put a water filled heat exchanger in front of it and let the computer's fans draw air through that into the chassis. And that leaves you with how to dump the heat out of the water, and that is most effectively done (in a small scale) with thermo-electric coolers. You can add scale cooling very effectively by turning on additional coolers. My design is pretty simple, the reservoir tank is on top of the rack and there is a heat exchanger on the bottom and one in "front" of the CPUs. As they draw air through the heat exchangers the water warms and rises to the top where the reservoir is, and the chilling water in the reservoir naturally sinks back down to the bottom where the first heat exchanger is. You can think of it like a rack sized version of the liquid cooler you can put on an enthusiast PC these days. Its quiet, self contained, and quite efficient, while still being able to use forced air cooled server equipment. The goal being efficient cooling in a temperate climate (California Bay Area) that is quiet and can use surplus/old equipment that was originally slated for a data center without violating any of that equipment's assumptions about the environment it can count on.
- mrob 8y ago>that leaves you with how to dump the heat out of the water, and that is most effectively done (in a small scale) with thermo-electric coolers This is the part that sounds strange to me. Water cooling has its advantages, but the heat is almost always dumped from the water by pumping it through a radiator that has fans blowing air through it. What's the advantage of thermo-electric cooling here over the traditional method?
- daurnimator 8y agoIndeed! I used to run various services on my older generation hardware, but I realised that I was spending more than $70 a month on electricity to do so! It's much cheaper using a couple $5 VPSes for services. The only hardware left at home that is on 24/7 is my NAS, which is because 20TB of storage costs too much in the cloud.
- Uberphallus 8y agoHave you considered Google Suite? https://gsuite.google.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/ You'll need a domain name to associate (and handle email, etc), and while technically you need 5 users to have unlimited storage, at the moment it doesn't seem to be enforced and a single user does have it. Currently I'm storing ~50TB for $10/month. At this price and having 100Mbps Internet connection, I only turn on the NAS for local backups.
- cerberusss 8y agoIf you can deal with IPv6, Vultr instances go for as low as US$2.50 -- or $3.50 with IPv4. It's insane.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rocky1138 8y agoI use an old HP laptop/netbook for my personal stuff at home. Running is private git repos, dnsmasq with ad-blocking host, and Syncthing to keep my files handy at all times. I force it into powersave mode using cpufreqd and throttle the CPU to the lowest step. I haven't put a power meter on it, but I can't imagine it's using a ton of wattage. If it fails, there are a few others in my office to take its place.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI love using old laptops for servers, built in UPS and everything.
- rocky1138 8y agoI've been advised to remove and recycle the batteries due to safety concerns. Apparently when they are designed, they are not designed to be on 24/7. My laptop's batteries are toast, anyway, so it doesn't make a difference to me.
- na412 8y agoIt's not so much that they can't be used 24/7, but that Li-Ion batteries really don't like staying at 100% charge (nor 0% either for that matter). If you can configure your laptop to only charge the battery to ~80% or so, you'll extend the battery life significantly. The optimal range for long-term storage is ~40-60% charge.
- kees99 8y agoOlder ThinkPads have a driver to limit battery charge range: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Tp_smapi http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Tp_smapi
- lunchables 8y agoWhat are you using for adblocking? I was thinking about setting up pihole, but I already run bind at home for a private zone and I didnt want to deal with setting up forwarders. Are you integrating adblocking with bind by any chance?
- Jaruzel 8y agoI have an old Thinkpad T23, it's about 15 years old. It can run Windows 7 (with aero off) perfectly well, and also stuff like Libre Office. Linux is not so good on it, due to having to play with the graphics drivers, which I've never really got working. It all falls apart when you want to use the Web. A Thinkpad T23 with a Pentium3 CPU just cannot render Modern Websites at acceptable speeds. Basically if it wasn't for heavy JavaScript websites, most people could still be using decade-old machines for their day jobs.
- accrual 8y agoI love old hardware. I have a Pentium II box I've been upgrading for fun. It dual boots Win98 and OpenBSD from two CF cards, and can serve many contemporary application stacks. It's enjoyable knowing these big old chips can still turn out a lot of functionality even if it's just recreational.
- fuball63 8y agoWhat do you use windows 98 for? I always loved the os and have a box that runs an nes emulator.
- accrual 8y agoSorry for the late reply. I adore Windows 98. I spent most of my time on 95 but 98, especially SE, really polished the experience on a then-modern OS. I mostly use 98 for nostalgia sake, playing old games, testing old software, and observing how things used to be. I find it fun to firewall it off and connect to the internet with IE and old Firefox versions - finding what works and what doesn't. It helps provide some perspective and entertainment. It's incredible how interoperable Win 98 can still be with your modern devices. Eventually I'll upgrade the Pentium II to an AMD K6-2 and see how it goes!
- dfox 8y agoThe main issue with repurposing random x86 hardware is power. This means that anything NetBurst based is just garbage, but on th other hand random Core2 based corporate SFF desktop (which you can get for less than 40EUR) is perfectly serviceable as home internet gateway/whatever server. You want SFF desktop because it is designed to be reliable, it is usually cheap and relatively quiet.
- walrus01 8y agoAnecdotally I see companies throwing out dell and hp 4th gen core i5/i7 sff desktops from 2012-2013, straight into electronics recycling, all the time now. One of those with 8GB of ram makes a totally fine Linux workstation.
- mr_woozy 8y agoAnyone know what happened to Edna? Hasn't been updated in years unfortunately & I'm wondering if it's still safe to run online. https://github.com/thedod/edna https://github.com/thedod/edna It looks like AudioStreamer that OP listed but I prefer to play my music with vlc (or whichever 3rd party player)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mr_woozy 8y agooh so I found this, anyone tried it? https://github.com/thedjinn/nedna https://github.com/thedjinn/nedna
- foxhop 8y agoMy take on this is a small SmartOS cluster running on 3 x Thinkpad T430s - each with the DVD drive removed and two SSDs installed as a ZFS mirror. The whole cluster idles at 150 watts and each node is backed by it's own dedicated battery. Upstream I have about 4 hours on an APC unit which also protects the router and modem from outages. My own little cloud for under $1,200.
- qaq 8y agoNice approach also notebooks with broken screens would be a good option for something like this.
- lpmay 8y agoNice. Do you have any guides you wrote or used that you can recommend? I'm looking at getting SmartOS set up at home as well, but I know I've got a lot to learn.
- foxhop 8y agoIt sort of just works. Get yourself a big USB thumb drive (I use 8 and 16G) and boot off it. You'll answer a few questions to install. I like the Thinkpads because they are so cheap ($200-300) gets you an i7 and 8-12GB RAM. The CPUs are compatible with SmartOS for KVM guests. All that said, I really should write a definitive guide of how to operate SmartOS coming from the linux ecosystem.
- throwaway1X2 8y agoThe part comparing "Intel Xeon E3 1320 V6" [sic] with older "Intel Xeon E5620" as having the same memory bandwidth, same TDP, more L3 cache, etc., so having "the same performance characteristics" is just plain crazy. 1. Xeon E3 1320 never existed. Was it meant to be 1230? 2. Does DDR4-2400 really have "the same performance characteristics" as DDR3-800 (even after accounting for having 3 channels instead of 2)? 3. How can a 3.5 GHz processor be "the same performance characteristics" as 2.4 GHz one (1.5x more)? Add IPC on top of that.
- BearOso 8y agoThe Xeon E5620 mentioned is also from 2010, 8 years ago, not 11. Of course a Nehalem-Sandy Bridge era processor is still relevant. Many people are still using those today, given the Moore’s law slowdown.
- zelon88 8y agoSorry, I have made this correction.
- orev 8y ago3) GHz cannot be used as a speed comparison outside of the same generation of CPUs. A 10 year old 3.5GHz gets nowhere near the same compute power as a modern day 2.4GHz.
- benwills 8y agoFor a lot of basic operations, this is often false. I have an application I'm working on and tested it across three different generations of CPUS going ~10 years back. The code was written in C and the fundamental steps were to: mmap() two arrays of structs from a sata 3 SSD, compare the two, and write the intersection to a block of memory. The data size of each array was multiple gigabytes and the operation took more than a full second. The ~10 year old low powered Xeon L5640 beat the higher-speed ~5 year old Xeon E5-2667 v2, and was only slightly beaten by the 3 year old i7-4790k. In short, they all ran at roughly the same speed. I would say that this is because of the limits of the SSDs, but then I tested by holding that data in memory rather than disk, then ran the intersection. Same result. This is a very basic operation that tests the performance of the CPU and memory. And for operations like these (ie: not using SSE2, AVX, etc), the perceived performance difference to the vast majority of people for a secondary home machine may be negligible.
- xupybd 8y agoI have an old IBM System x3550 M3 running in my attic. It cost me $50 + a new ssd. It's been great fun to play with. 12Gig of ram and 16 threads so it can do more than enough for me. I found it a bit slow for game hosting but for the price I can't complain. I also have a couple of cheap VPS, but having a server on the same network is much snappier and I can throw large files around with ease.
- tushartyagi 8y agoMy new HDD started having problems in just 1.5 years.I just salvaged an old HDD from my dad's 9 year old laptop (Dell Vostro) and used it. This old laptop is what I would go to whenever I was between laptops. It's a C2D, 4GB RAM. I installed debian with i3 and it was good enough for browsing internet, to do random coding stuff, reading PDFs, watching movies (although it would run hot). Also I played a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon[1] on it. Man, I love RCT!! I just might plug in an SSD in it during the next windfall. [1]: https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2 https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kozak 8y agoThe site is "currently unavailable in your country", I can't even read the article. Tell me about openness.
- Double_a_92 8y agoHave fun: http://archive.is/v25ID http://archive.is/v25ID
- dirktheman 8y agoReusing old hardware is all fun and games, but please remember to make regular, offsite (online!) backups of your important stuff. Hardware will fail at some point, and I'm not even talking about the obvious risk of house fires/flooding...
- ahje 8y agoThis. Having old hardware running various services in the basement is handy, saves money (unless they use a ton of electricity), but the second stuff breaks down you will be screwed unless you have a backup somewhere.
- PeterStuer 8y agoSadly many of these old beige boxes weren't very well designed for efficient low power consumption. Always ask yourself whether a Raspberry Pi style platform, or even a jail-broken old phone couldn't run that workload just as well on a fraction of the old banger's power budget. Most often the answer is yes.
- wiz21c 8y agoout of nowhere : is there any effort to build/tune linux kernel (or gnu/linux os) so that it consumes the least energy possible. (besides powertop and alike).
- DerekRobot 8y agohttps://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTweaks https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTw...
- walrus01 8y agoI really would not say that a 2007 Xeon is in any way comparable to something newer. Something that old is just a waste of watt-hours. But if you skip forward a few years, a 2012-2013 quad socket, eight core Xeon machine that was many thousands of dollars is still quite useful. If you want to lab your own xen or kvm hypervisor stuff on a machine with 32 cores and 256GB of RAM you can do it for under $1000, if you know where to look, and can tolerate a 500W load addition to your electrical bill.
- LeonM 8y agoI've been planning to buy a used high-end Xeon server circa 2015, harvest the CPU's and RAM, stick them on a workstation motherboard and add some silent cooling solution. That way i'll have a 20+ core, 128+GB workstation for about 2k euro. Electricity and heat is no issue for me as electricity is included in the rent of my office, and we currently use electric heaters to keep the office warm...
- lunchables 8y agoCouldn't you build a low-end threadripper or really nice Zen system for less with far more power?
- walrus01 8y agoIf I were going to spend $2000 to $2500 USD I would definitely build a new threadripper machine with nvme storage for a development system. But if I had a combination of only $750 to spend, free power, and a place to put something very noisy, I'd totally buy a 4U Dell 32-core server off eBay and use that.
- LeonM 8y agoHaven't done any research yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if a 2 year old high-end Xeon outperforms a low-end threadripper on my typical workload. Also: a 2 year old server can be bought for about 1k, you can't get the core count and amount of RAM new for that price.
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- egorfine 8y agoThis is what they give me instead of any page on their site: "OOOPS… We’re sorry for the inconvenience, It looks like HonestRepair accounts are currently unavailable in your country, but keep checking back!" Way to go. Not in the countries we like? You can't even read our blog. Go away.
- IWeldMelons 8y agoI personaly use Chromebook C710 as my main computer. Works just fine with 6GiB RAM and stock HDD. Never liked cutting edge hardware.