29 ms·

Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms

• nullindividual 3y ago
  Good for you! I get a feeling that there are fewer and fewer individuals learning the basics (or sometimes not-so-basic) of hardware and operating systems. It is invaluable knowledge, even when working with PaaS. For instance, having experience with IIS since NT4 and Apache since the 1.x days is invaluable in diagnosing Azure Web Sites.
  • ksec 3y ago
    Most dont even have a PC that they assemble themselves. They have very little idea of the internals. Nor do they follow and read enough about hardware news and articles. These PC could be used as Server. While not professional rack based ones, but you will still need config them. A lot of these basic understanding and fundamental learning experience is gone. We are not far from Front End developers that dont understanding anything about HTML and CSS but only React.
    • mplewis 3y ago
      We hear this every day on this website and it's just not true. Making computers accessible to people makes it more likely that they'll get into hardware enthusiasm and assembling a desktop from parts.
  • al_borland 3y ago
    Even people actively in the industry don’t know. About 10 years ago I was working in a datacenter and one of the severs needed some hardware replaced (new ram or something). The guy who ran the team that used the server (who sat maybe 50 yards from the server room for many years), asked if he could watch me do the replacement. He had never seen the inside of a server before and was curious what it was like. This blew my mind. I didn’t get how he could be so close to it for so long and never see it. He made it sound like he never even saw the inside of a home PC as well. At the time it wasn’t like there was a lot of protocols in place. He could have walked up to one of a dozen people and asked for a tour on any given day and gotten it, no questions asked. Not to mention random servers sitting around the cube farm for whatever reason. He just never thought about it before that day.
    • yardie 3y ago
      I provision servers for a living and usually the only times they get physically touched are when we rack them and the 2nd and last time is when we unrack them. Occasionally, one will have a hardware replacement. But for the most part a server runs continuously for 3-5 years. Even a memory upgrade involves unbundling so much cable (power, network, storage, KVM) that it's easier to rack a new one with more memory. I'm not surprised your team leader, if of a certain age, hasn't seen the inside of a modern server. We push our datacenters further and further out into the countryside. My annual trip to our DC was a 4 hour drive and even then it was just to do annual inventory.
      • al_borland 3y ago
        In a modern datacenter I totally get it. I’ve visited one of our current data centers and had to get a lot of clearance, and go through several layers of security. I couldn’t even drive in the parking lot without my name being on the list and proof of my identity. Most people will never get that chance; I have a lot of co-workers who have asked and were all denied. However, at the time, in that office/datacenter, the barrier to entry for him would have just been asking and 2 minutes of his time (or however long he wanted to look around). The computer rooms were on the way to the bathroom. That place was all pets, no cattle, so we were constantly doing whatever it took to keep the hardware running. There was no shortage of opportunities.
• imetatroll 3y ago
  Very cool to see! I find it interesting that being young you didn't automatically gravitate towards Linux. It is IMHO much more interesting to use than windows, is free in a variety of ways, and gives you the power to customize as much as you desire. You did join the light side after all however so all's well that ends well :)
  • qup 3y ago
    gkrellm might have single handedly brought me to Linux. So much bling
    • anthk 3y ago
      In my case was WindowMaker converting it into something totally alien to a NeXT; it was unique with it's GTK themings, translucid RXVT's and yet running much faster and stable than Windows.
• imetatroll 3y ago
  As for taking your servers with you. You don't have to! Use tailscale (or wireguard). Just downgrade your hardware a bit beforehand perhaps in order to decrease burden.
• more_corn 3y ago
  If you ask your university nicely they may provide rack space for you. Universities love when students take initiative and build/maintain servers. My university had a student apprentice program where students provided technical expertise to departments as a work study program. And my colleague in the program had a deal with the CS department where they hosted his game server for him. Since he was learning valuable server administration skills and working with other students they approved it. It’s an easier sell if you ask to put it in the DMZ and if there’s some benefit for other students.
  • mattl 3y ago
    Few 16 year olds are at university?
    • sceadu 3y ago
      He makes a comment about graduating and moving to university in the blog post.
      • mattl 3y ago
        I don’t know about Switzerland but that’s at least a few years away?
        • tehbeard 3y ago
          Then it just shows they've got better planning timescales than most clients I deal with.. (so much last minute bullshit right now with Christmas next week...)
          • mattl 3y ago
            Ugh. Tell me about it.
        • varun_ch 3y ago
          I'm in the graduating class of 2025, which is closer than it appears.
• abrookewood 3y ago
  Nope, my son has them (5 in total) stashed under the stairs where they still manage to generate enough heat & noise to make me question the placement. Still, pretty chuffed that he's managed to do it all himself.
  • chupapimunyenyo 3y ago
    Nope what? What do you disagree with?
    • rstat1 3y ago
      Probably referring to the title. "Nope most 16yr olds do not in fact have servers in their room" Or at least that's how I read it.
    • jameshart 3y ago
      Actually looks like a 'nope' of agreement. - Most 16 year olds don't have servers in their room - No indeed, some have them in the cupboard under the stairs Of course, some 16 year-olds, like Harry Potter, have their room in the cupboard under the stairs, so the logic doesn't follow implicitly.
      • averageRoyalty 3y ago
        I know it was a fun point of jest, but at 16 the cupboard was no longer Harry's room and hadn't been for four years.
      • qup 3y ago
        It follows, that's just a third category which agrees and can be prefixed with 'nope'
• westurner 3y ago
  Smartphone in hand, but no Raspberry Pi experience, no server anywhere
• bastawhiz 3y ago
  My first "server" was my dad's old PC, which was moved to the basement and given an 802.11b PCI card so that it could connect to the internet. I pirated a cracked copy of Windows Server 2003 from eDonkey to install on it and built an ASP.Net website in VB. I wanted a domain name, so I used a dynamic DNS client to set my .TK domain to point at my home's IP (with port forwarding on the router—running on 8080 since Verizon blocked 80), updating every ten minutes. I learned so much from the experience. If I was a kid today, I'm not sure I'd run a server in my home, though. For as much as I learned, there's far more that you can do and learn running code on other people's computers. I spent so much time trying to get the thing to just _run_ in the first place that I missed out on learning and doing a lot of the things that having the damn thing in the first place would have enabled. For two years, I taught a class of high school students how to make websites. We used Glitch, and I'm still consistently amazed at how much you can do with very little to get started. I can only wonder what I'd have created if I had what kids today have.
• grimgrin 3y ago
  I love your enthusiasm, varun, and how you're chasin the things that exhilarate you. uni will probably do excellent things for your curiosity, best wishes
• hateful 3y ago
  You should know that a lot of IKEA coffee tables and shelves are the exact width of a equipment rack. You can buy ~$8 rails and turn that table into a rack for that server. though the weight may be an issue. Edit: found one example: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/14/lack-rack-ikeas-cheapest-ta.html https://boingboing.net/2020/08/14/lack-rack-ikeas-cheapest-t...
• patrakov 3y ago
  Please note that hosting a publicly accessible server in your room at home is specifically prohibited by some employers in heavily regulated industries, and if found, this may result in a large fine (enough to cover the company security re-audit cost) and termination. They even prohibit having a public IP on the router, having IPv6 support, having firmware other than the manufacturer-supplied one, and even having access to the router (i.e., it's the manufacturer and the ISP who should be responsible for security updates, for ensuring that there is absolutely no way for attackers to enter the home network by means of routing, and for the fact that you cannot screw that up). Having a server for your own use from within the home network is fine.
  • theideaofcoffee 3y ago
    Won't someone think of the employers.
  • Gelob 3y ago
    What are you talking about
  • hooverd 3y ago
    Which industries?
  • dharmab 3y ago
    I work for an employer subject to ITAR and have never heard of this requirement.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • nicolaslem 3y ago
    I don't know about the prohibited part but that's exactly how LinkedIn got hacked. See https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/ https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/ for details.
  • 3y ago
• starkparker 3y ago
  I love seeing the server on an Ikea table next to a paragraph about how expensive racks are. Did you know about Lack Rack? https://web.archive.org/web/20230131031301/https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack https://web.archive.org/web/20230131031301/https://wiki.eth0...
  • roeles 3y ago
    So that's what it's called! Thanks!
    • tehbeard 3y ago
      Key point from that link; IKEA's swapped the materials round to use a lot more of that honeycombed hollow stuff, which makes it less than ideal for drilling or holding heavy equipment.
      • Qwertious 3y ago
        This is annoyingly common in a lot of furniture, including desks. Anyone who's thinking of drilling their desk to put in a desk-clamp monitor mount: make sure the desk is solid, first!
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    I do! I just haven't had the time to measure everything and find the right screws and table.
    • igetspam 3y ago
      Careful, once you go down that IKEA hacking rabbit hole, it can be hard to stop buying cheap furniture. https://ikeahackers.net https://ikeahackers.net :)
      • tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
        It is cool but Ikea used to be cheap but now they have significantly lowered the product quality and also increased the prices on top of that, atleast in Australia.
• sneed_chucker 3y ago
  It's always interesting seeing people like this online. I didn't start programming until I was 15, and didn't know how to deploy anything for real users until many years later. At 13, I don't think I knew how to do anything useful.
  • ZainRiz 3y ago
    +1. At 22, working as a full time software engineer at a tech company, I still didn't think I knew how to do anything useful
• treesciencebot 3y ago
  Something that miss is, unless you need tons of IO (in the form of SAS/SATA storage, or old generation PCIe cards), avoiding these huge, noisy and power hungry servers are a lot simpler than people may think. Mini/Micro form factor OEM PCs on the same price point generally come with much newer generation of hardware (instead of a 3rd gen i7, you might get a 8th gen i5) and overall performance is so much better. It’s also so much easier to host and maintain (just plug it near your ISP modem, and forget about it).
  • Dwedit 3y ago
    Had an Intel Motherboard + Atom CPU combo as a File Server once, but eventually had to upgrade it because Atom chips really suck. Eventually want to a Skylake Pentium, which performs much better.
  • BSDobelix 3y ago
    >and forget about it This is exactly what I didn't want when I was 16. I did have a server too, but in the HP ML form factor (less noise than the pizza boxes). Also, ECC is kind of important, and a real HW raid is a nice learning expierience.
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Absolutely. I think that's the practical solution I'll do when I move out. Until then, it's definitely not nearly as fun though!!
    • justinclift 3y ago
      When you do head to uni, maybe see if there's a nearby place which can co-locate your servers? Stuff like this, though "near the uni" would make it easier to access if/when the hardware needs a bit of adjustment. :) * https://www.hetzner.com/colocation https://www.hetzner.com/colocation Note that co-location pricing can be all over the place (from low to incredibly high), so don't get discouraged too early. This website might be useful too, as it seems to show data centers in various countries. * https://www.datacentermap.com/switzerland/ https://www.datacentermap.com/switzerland/ Might be useful for putting together a list of places to investigate. :)
• darkclouds 3y ago
  [dead]
• ykl 3y ago
  This is super cool; I wish I had this level of initiative when I was 16. I'm sure you have a bright career ahead of you!
• hcfman 3y ago
  Excellent! You are off to a good start. You will likely find very few non-16 year olds doing that either. Locally I mean. I’m sure that at least five in this site do :-)
• debo_ 3y ago
  Never owned a "server" per say, but I used to build and sell computers in highschool, right out of my locker or the back of my rusted-out Chevy. Also bought and resold air guns and pellets out of my locker too, I was cyberpunk before I knew what that was. It took me a long time to get internet access because my dad spent a lot of time on the phone, and I could only dialup at really short intervals which were better for BBSing. I was in university before I really had a chance to internet.
• chpatrick 3y ago
  If you don't want a super noisy server in your room you can rent one from Hetzner for cheap. (Cheapest one currently at 34 euro a month https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb)
  • misnome 3y ago
    What teenager has €400/year to spent on virtual servers?
    • chpatrick 3y ago
      One who can afford to buy the one in the article.
      • misnome 3y ago
        Based on what? They bought a cheap used server off of eBay? That doesn’t disappear if you stop paying a monthly fee?
        • chpatrick 3y ago
          > In May 2022, I finalized the crazy decision to get a real rack-mounted server - I got a great deal on used drives (3x3TB), RAM (128GB of DDR3), and relatively powerful (read: power-hungry) CPUs (2xE5-2690) in a Dell PowerEdge R720XD, which I paid for with some bug bounty money I saved up. Plus electricity/internet costs, replacing broken drives, etc etc. You can get a lot of rental time out of that.
    • midasuni 3y ago
      One that has €400 a year or more to spend on powering a 120W server 24/7
      • Symbiote 3y ago
        Parents pay for that, perhaps without realising.
• tonymet 3y ago
  we're in a golden era of home servers really. You can pick up affordable refurbed servers like this, or just run a mini PC. The amount of performance per dollar and per watt is incredible. I encourage everyone to run their own services. Some stuff I've run * Social Media automation with Puppetter * Smokeping network monitoring * Flan for network security scanning * PiHOle / AdGuard DNS Home blockers Get a Pi, a NUC or Beelink Mini PC for ~ $50-$150 and you can run a dozen VMs or docker images.
• derelicta 3y ago
  Ahah I wonder how much of the EFZ you already completed just by doing all those projects
  • fetzu 3y ago
    Frankly, having accompanied a few EFZ trainees, I’d say about 170%…
• ryukoposting 3y ago
  I love stuff like this. When I was 13, my "server" was the old family desktop running a Minecraft server I could access remotely via Hamachi. I really only programmed as a necessity to use Arduino. My tinkering was more of the "take apart batteries and set things on fire" variety.
• shishcat 3y ago
  I'm a 16 year old with a small homelab too :) I used to have all of my services on cloud but since I got a 1G/1G home network and I found businesses decommissioning hardware and deals on local charity shops which source hardware from the landfill and give profits to charity missions, I decided to give it a go and try administering my own phisical servers. Currently running proxmox on 2 machines with one NAS and 14 spinning disks, with some Minecraft servers, personal programming projects, vulnerability scanners, telegram bots, VPSes for friends, android and MacOS building VMs, storage, some ML school projects with the recently added 1050ti, and hosting the infrastructure for my school CTF competition. (Italy btw)
  • daniel-s 3y ago
    This is the really cool thing about the internet. When otherwise would these 2 16 year olds have found each other? They would otherwise have had to go to the same high school.
  • midasuni 3y ago
    Who pays the electric bill? Sounds like it’s in the 50-100USD a month range for those two servers.
    • shishcat 3y ago
      60€ a month (tplink smart plug, calculated on the cost per kwh and other taxes). I try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects
      • burnished 3y ago
        Good on you and all but I wanted to note that its weird how persistently people are focusing on the powerbill. It is a drop in the bucket for many households monthly bills and very cheap as hobbies go. I think my mother would have killed for that deal.
        • mickael-kerjean 3y ago
• Aachen 3y ago
  > I decided to stick with the pre-installed Windows 10 Pro (yes, as a server OS!) simply because I was familiar with it. Hah! Me at 13 was precisely the same, though with Windows XP Pro that I suspected wasn't entirely legitimate but the seller didn't say and I didn't ask. That old thing ran so well for its low specs, it was crazy, I was really surprised how little you needed to run nongraphical software such as a web server, ftp server, database, email, dns, torrents, vnc, samba, openarena game server... I'm probably forgetting things. The only thing it didn't run was Minecraft, it didn't launch even with everything else shut down. Oh yeah, and the game server didn't have the best ping, but that might have been the 10 megabit expansion card as network adapter. Can encourage anyone to buy a second-hand system if you find it fun to self host! Especially a laptop (with the battery removed for fire risk) uses very little energy compared to old desktops, or a raspberry pi (alternative) is also an option nowadays.
• petabyt 3y ago
  When I was 13, I had a laptop 'server' with TeamViewer running, which allowed me to play games and run Windows from the school computers on the TeamViewer flash client. It definitely impressed a few people, but was horribly slow. Later on I learned about SSH, and used that for all my remote management.
• dalore 3y ago
  When I was 16 I started an ISP in my bedroom. I had an 8 port octo serial cable into a computer for people to dial into, and an ISDN line going out. It's how I learned linux. Setup SMTP mailservers etc.
  • 20after4 3y ago
    That's a pretty dope setup. I was running a web hosting company at that age (and likely near the same time period? late 1990s into the early 2000s). Couldn't have done the ISP thing because not even ISDN was available in my area.
• KillerRAK 3y ago
  Keep at it -- your skills will be growing in demand as the cloud pendulum swings back.
• lamerose 3y ago
  [flagged]
• astrea 3y ago
  When I was 16 my “server” was a hand-me-down laptop with a broken hinge that I kept in a drawer in my dresser because I thought it was cool
• indigodaddy 3y ago
  This kid’s got a future.
• utopcell 3y ago
  > Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms ..but some have mainframes [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyiHsfJLEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyiHsfJLEI
• forgetfreeman 3y ago
  Having a server in your room was a hell of a lot more common 30 years ago than it is today. I knew guys who ran BBSs off a spare phone line, one dude that was running a small ISP out of a studio apartment, and several guys running everything from personal websites to file sharing nodes off of dedicated equipment stashed in a back room.
• peteforde 3y ago
  You know, it's certainly less common, but it's not rare like it used to be. When I was in high school in the 90s, I did consulting gigs until I was able to buy a 486 laptop. I was then the only kid in my entire 1200 person high school with a laptop, period. So, let's do some terrible math and assume that about one in a thousand teens in the 90s had servers in their rooms. 30ish years later, I'm willing to be it's more like one in fourty to sixty. Even 1-2% of a population represents a lot of individual 16-year-olds with servers in their rooms. What's really wild is that today they can find each other easily. You're not limited by folks you can reach via FIDOnet.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• xdanger 3y ago
  When I was a teenager I had a bbs running on my computer. When I wanted to play, I just opened the line with a phone so it would be busy if someone wanted to call. Oh the memories.
• nunodonato 3y ago
  Happy to see young people hacking away like this. Sometimes I look at teens, and even those tech-oriented seem to be so stuck in the smartphone/tablet world, that makes me a bit sad inside.
• sesm 3y ago
  Dock’n’Roll looks interesting, but, alas, he didn’t share the source code (or did he?)
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Thanks. I haven't had time to clean up the code, but I would be happy to share it if there's enough interest. :) It's mostly tailored to my use case but it should run fine in most environments.
    • sesm 3y ago
      I think there is a lot of interest in tools like this. Self-hosted and hobby development movement is on the rise, and industry development practices don't really fit hobby developers, we need something more lightweight.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  Oh the days when I was 14, compiling KDE on FreeBSD overnight. Fun times.
• raajg 3y ago
  Recently bought a Raspberry Pi 4, spun it up and installed various things on Ubuntu running from an SD Card. I now have a server running in my room again after probably a decade! I'm not 16. :p
• lannisterstark 3y ago
  They should. A Prodesk or RPi is cheap :)
• husamia 3y ago
  I wish we can scrap everything and start over We would make the internet a safer place to be We could let the energy flow easier And protocols are more secure
• kristopolous 3y ago
  I had an AMD K6 with about 128MB of ram when I was 16 - running FreeBSD 2.2 on I think a 10GB drive with a TGUI9680 AGP graphics card and a Hayes v.92 modem. Before that I had a PC AT with I think a 20MB drive and VGA graphics; it was a significant upgrade. Now you know about how old I am.
• huqedato 3y ago
  When 18-19 yrs old I used to have a rack in my room with 5 HP blades + 1 router + 1 switch. I had 4 startups. All failed...
• willsoon 3y ago
  I don't even lift. This 16 year old guy during the covid is going the same way as me, but I'm in my 50s. The story is my story is just like me that Im very happy with him and Im sending him the best of wishes and ---if you can read this --- Im proud of you. And I am jealous. Man, you are 16 and you must know that you are achieving so much, especially because you are free and brave. We need more people like you. Edit: Im not a dev oc. I am a lawyer.
• ugiox 3y ago
  Most senior software engineers don’t have servers in their rooms neither.
  • bluescrn 3y ago
    Of course not, they can afford to put them in a different room or a dedicated server closet, to keep the noise away from where they work/sleep...
• honkycat 3y ago
  This is cool, but honestly... Go learn how to paint or play an instrument. join a band and create art. You will have a ton of time to learn to code and build servers. I was one of these early bloomers for being a programmer, and you know where it got me? The same fucking place as all of the other people who started in their mid 20s. Its a waste of time. Well... I make hundreds of thousands of dollars and have a stable career and I mostly like my job... BUT! My point stands. There are absolutely diminishing returns for being a "good" programmer, and then it opens up to social stuff. Being able to impress someone with your paintings. Being able to both implement and design a page. Being able to jam with your co-workers after work every once in a while. If anything focus on school and drill math as hard as you can, it is a HUGE hill to climb later in life.
  • pgwhalen 3y ago
    Yikes, this is a pretty judgmental post. I spent my time as a kid joining bands and being in plays, but if someone loves building homelabs, what’s wrong with that? To your point about diminishing returns in technical skills vs social skills, as a senior engineer, I completely agree, but I have the opposite takeaway! I love to build at home and expand my knowledge of pure computing, because it’s a love of mine that I don’t actually get to do much of at work.
    • honkycat 3y ago
      Fair, edited to make it less judgemental. Honestly I don't care what people do with their time, anything is better than reality TV. I just deeply regret my mis-spent youth expecting a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow that was not there
  • stanmancan 3y ago
    What an absolutely horrible take. Here's a kid who's found something he's passionate about and loves what he's doing and all you can do is say "get a life". We rarely get to pick what we're passionate about. We go through life and, if we're lucky, we stumble upon something that piques our interest. We don't pick when that happens either. You could find your passion when you're 7 or when you're 70, or anywhere in between. It could be technology, cooking, baking, art, music, gardening, exercise, a sport, or any other thing on an endless list. People who are passionate about something, anything, are the most interesting people to talk to.
• holoduke 3y ago
  I see so many parents just making the consumer computers available to their kids. Ipads and phones. Because I am a computer nerd i have a few regular desktops at my home. My kids are allowed and stimulated to play with them. Of course games and youtube is what they like. But I see my son 5 years old already downloading mods for a specific game. He asks me to help him with installing him. He is now quite familiar with navigating through folders, coping etc. I cant blame the 'other' parents. They themselves are also just consumers. Whereas my sparetime is programming, hacking, 3d printing and more.
• MoSattler 3y ago
  Most 16-year-old don't have rich parents.
• citizenpaul 3y ago
  It's probably unpopular and a boo hiss reaction on HN but I don't encourage this even though I did the same thing as a teen. The electricity cost of this is almost certainly at best $20+ per month. While there is a cool factor here, that is the main benefit. If you can scrape together enough money for a server, you can get a cash card and sign up for several years of a $5mo VPS. The VPS will probably teach you a whole lot more real knowledge than a home server due to it tackling many of the real world problems that come up in tech.
  • averageRoyalty 3y ago
    > The VPS will probably teach you a whole lot more real knowledge than a home server due to it tackling many of the real world problems that come up in tech. I'm curious why you think this. Plenty of jobs are around that involve physical disks, RAID, SANs, etc. Plenty more require knowledge of on-site networks or hypervisors. There are many, many things you can't do on a VPS or similar.
    • citizenpaul 3y ago
      I think its not really an opinion that the hardware/server side of things is becoming commoditized. People in charge don't really care what the hardware is unless they need several data centers worth of servers. They would rather pay to just outsource that to AWS/GCP/Azure. Which means those jobs are going to be less numerous in the future and the pay will continue to drop as the job becomes mostly a paint by numbers type of thing. I could be wrong but I don't think there is a bright future in it. I would not recommend it to anyone except for a hobby. Like I said though sometimes the cool/wonder factor is the benefit to get a person interested in something though. It is easy to lock yourself out of a remote server, at least for junior people. When you have to think about those things you learn to plan and think things through before you act.
      • averageRoyalty 3y ago
        I think what you're saying 1) was very true 5 years ago and 2) is likely accurate to your part of the world. The story of the mid sized SV company moving back to hardware is becoming more and more common. Outside of that US tech bubble, millions of companies still use data centres regularly. Now if you're providing advice to someone in the US tech industry around the SV area (West I think?) maybe that's valid, but thee are many countries and millions of companies where those skills are useful. The OP is in Sweden, where that may or may not reflect your experience.
• tonfreed 3y ago
  16 year old me would be super jealous. Awesome work, and I hope you keep flying high
• noir_lord 3y ago
  Good on ya man. I started at 7, started selling code at 16 and now I'm Head of Software Engineering - we are in one of the last professional fields where merit can make up for not having a degree - would have liked to get one but it was never on the cards for me at the time (though get the degree if you can :) - it helps).
• rldjbpin 3y ago
  you'd be surprised to hear how many in this thread fall in that category. at the risk of sounding "back in my day"-ish, my first desktop as a kid was a refurbished server. i never used like its original intent, other than running xampp stack during occasional web dev. the "server" in question was actually an OG raspberry pi, which is still in service till date. that is all i could afford with space and money, and running it completely headless from day 1 had been a rollercoaster ride. aside: it has ironically become much harder to get hold of the latest pi despite a decade of developments.
• quailfarmer 3y ago
  I was just thinking back to my childhood homelab days. We would go to the regional recycling center and back our car up to the E-Waste trailer. One of us would pretend to move empty cases from the car to the dumpster, while another would crawl around and pull out treasures. I could field-strip a Dell Optiplex in 15 seconds, and pocket the RAM and CPU. I'm not sure we ever really made much profit, but we had fun doing it. I wonder if the waste contractor ever wondered where the high-value items were going?
• tombert 3y ago
  I wasn't 16 when I discovered used rack mounted servers, but I was pretty young (21 I think?). I had a miserable job paying near-subsistance wages in 2012 (about $30,000/year, no health insurance, Dallas TX). I needed something a bit more powerful than my laptop to do some experiments with video encoding, but I couldn't afford a "fast" computer at the time, at least not fast enough to do what I wanted. It didn't help that I was particularly bad at saving money until I was about 25. On a whim, I went on Craigslist and just looked up different ways of phrasing "fast cheap computer", and eventually stumbled upon "server". Upon doing so, I found that you could buy dated, but still useful rack mounted servers for basically nothing; in my case a seller was selling two rack mounted Dell servers, 16 cores each, 32GB of RAM, for about $250. I was just barely able to swing that, so I drove over, picked it up, and more or less defined the direction of my career for the next twelve years.
  • justinclift 3y ago
    Around the turn of the century I used to specialise in Solaris contracting, so my homelab back then was mostly old Sun Enterprise gear from Ebay. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise#Entry-level_servers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise#Entry-level_ser... Used to have an E450 (like the one here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_Ultra_Enterprise_450.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_Ultra_Enterprise_450....), and a bunch of other, smaller stuff (workstations). Also an E220R at some point from rough memory. No idea what happened to all that old stuff. Anyway, it was extremely useful for interview prep (aka brush up on specific skills) prior to meeting potential new clients, and also for doing general dev / packaging stuff on.
  • bluedino 3y ago
    Was there any reason you didn't use two 8-core desktops, for example?
    • dannyw 3y ago
      1. Good luck buying 8-core desktops for $125 ea. 2. It's not easy to parallelise video rendering (not just encoding) across two machines.
• alberth 3y ago
  Raspberry Pi I'm surprised no one has mentioned Raspberry Pi. You get a decently powerful compute node, no noise, tiny footprint, for ~$100. https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/
  • glimshe 3y ago
    Beelinks on Amazon have better cost-benefit unless you use the RPis without accessories.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• Yusefmosiah 3y ago
  Great work! What’s your social media platform? Curious about your tech stack — and what content/interest/community you’re serving.
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Thank you! The social media platform is a Twitter-like website for my friends (roughly 3000 of them registered, but smaller set of daily active users) that I started building in 2020. I made it to learn new technologies, so I've rewritten parts of it from scratch a few times. It's got a a SvelteKit/NuxtJS 2 frontend (in the middle of a long rewrite) with a seperate ExpressJS API (which others have used to make their own clients, like an Android app!) that's spun off of an older iteration of the site where the frontend was coupled as templated HTML. I used MongoDB from the start, but I'm beginning to regret that - It's getting hard to maintain relational consistency and ensure all the data going in the DB matches the same shape as the site scales. Maybe it's time to migrate to Postgres. I mix up a few things from the rest of the world for my site - comments are nested like Reddit/HN, and posts/comments are rich text limited HTML like a blog. There's a really minimal algorithm that's relatively hard to mess with: chronological feed from people you follow, and a seperate Explore page with top users and trending posts (based on the recent likes) Profiles have seperate 'walls' from posts so they basically have little comment sections for people to use. The new site also has profile customization so people can change the accent colour that their posts and profiles appear as in other people's feeds, and there's little widgets to customize profile 'Sidebars'. It's nice to have a little quiet place seperate from the rest of the world, with its own ecosystem of clients, tools, bots, etc. (actually this year somebody made a Spotify Wrapped style recap website using the API!).
    • danparsonson 3y ago
      I have to say, this would be an impressive set of achievements for someone much older - great work and glad you're obviously having so much fun with it all!
      • varun_ch 3y ago
• SunghoYahng 3y ago
  How did you acquire so much knowledge in such a short time? Can you share your process with me?
  • danparsonson 3y ago
    Never underestimate the value of motivated experimentation. 1) Set a goal (e.g. host a Minecraft server for your friends) 2) Spend all your free time trying to achieve it 3) Go to 1)
  • TrackerFF 3y ago
    It says (on his website) that he started coding at the age of 7, so I guess he's had at least 9 years of mixed IT experience. But learning the basics of setting up a server isn't that hard. One of my first jobs involved a lot of similar work, and I had never touched a server in my life - purely a coder prior to that. Literally my first task was to go down to the server room, install a new server, and install Ubuntu server on it, and set up the server. Took me a week to get that done.
• 1116574 3y ago
  Static IPv4 is very important for getting into networking. Out of my friends, one had a free semi-static IPv4 (rotated once a year iirc), now he has the best paying job in devops. Another one had a cheap surcharge to get it, also turned into a job after few years. My other friend had (and still has) a cg-Nat, so never got into any deep IT stuff, other then PC building. You are very knowledgeable (for your coding and bug bounties) and very lucky (for the static ip, as well as understanding parents lol)!
  • TheFuzzball 3y ago
    100%. When I was a similar age to OP and getting into web development it was the coolest thing in the world that I could map a port on my router and type in my public IP address at a friend's house and the website that I wrote would appear. If I did the same thing now there's a good chance I'm behind CG-NAT and it won't work at all, and a 100% chance that my public IP won't be the same in 2 months. We've really broken the internet. Between this and the average kid using a locked-down tablet the barrier to entry is higher than ever.
    • jamespo 3y ago
      My ISP is supposed to be moving users whose contract rollover to CGNAT. This is why IPv6 needs to be available everywhere, including on mobile.
      • digitalsushi 3y ago
        My ISP, in New Hampshire, Fidium, does not list IPv6 anywhere on their website. I asked the tech installing it. He told me no one uses it. So, he cleared that up I guess.
    • sgerenser 3y ago
      I dunno, I don't really feel like having to use a service like dyndns or one of the dozens of clones is that big of a hurdle, is it? I recall using one of these services when I was in college (off-campus apartment with cable internet) back in the early 2000s.
• shooker435 3y ago
  Let me know if you’re ever interested in a paid internship, Varun! Very impressive work putting this all together.
• mynameisnoone 3y ago
  Congrats! At 16, I only had a 486DX2-66 with a 28.8K modem and a UPS. For other teenagers and teenagers-in-spirit to accomplish this feat: - Search for used enterprise servers on eBay. HP, Lenovo, Dell, and Supermicro are the typical brands to choose from. - Before purchase, find the specification docs, drivers, and firmware on the specific model to be sure it's something that's complete and usable, or can be completed for reasonable $$. - If you plan on running XenServer or VMware ESXi to then run multiple virtual machines on it, make sure the hardware is compatible by checking the OS hardware compatibility list (HCL) before buying it. - Avoid 1U servers because they're louder than 2U+ designs due to having to use shorter, smaller fans that spin very fast. - Make sure the CPU is at least as fast as a computer you own, or it might be a very expensive doorstop or an oversized "Raspberry PI": https://www.cpubenchmark.net https://www.cpubenchmark.net - There is a gotcha with Dell, Lenovo, and HP servers using AMD CPUs where they are vendor locked. The plus side is sometimes sellers offer locked CPUs cheap enough that it makes sense. - ECC RAM. Friends don't let friends drive non-ECC RAM. https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html - SSD. Because spinning rust is for storage, not the OS. https://web.archive.org/web/20110831080738/http://buyafuckingssd.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110831080738/http://buyafuckin... - Try to get something with lights-out remote management (iLO or iDRAC) if it's already licensed. - When received, it's probably going to be dirty and have some scratches. Open it up and clean it with compressed air outside. - Bonus points: Convince the parental unit(s) to put a 19" patch panel and half rack in the garage. :]
  • BeefWellington 3y ago
    All of this advice is merely nice-to-have. You can easily just use an old desktop or laptop to do the same. I've homelabbed for a long time and have rackmounted systems full of old desktop parts, rather than buying or seeking out used server hardware. It just isn't required. ECC RAM? Nah. It's useful if you can find it cheap and your CPU supports it but it's overstated as a problem IME. I do agree you should buy 2U or even 3/4U equipment, if only so you can mount much larger (and thus quieter) fans.
    • skydhash 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• cyberge99 3y ago
  I started this way too, but many decades before. I wonder if OP found the R720 idrac “hack” on my blog! Kudos fella, you’re just scratching the surface of the fun to be had. Bring a towel!
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Thanks! I found the command here: https://blog.filegarden.net/2020/10/06/reduce-the-fan-noise-of-the-dell-r720xd-plus-other-12th-gen-servers-with-ipmi/ https://blog.filegarden.net/2020/10/06/reduce-the-fan-noise-... Is that your blog?
• rasse 3y ago
  Fantastic! I actually used your Quickz in a medical conference a month ago. Thanks for building that!
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Thank you, that's really cool. I hope it worked well!
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  at university we had a dorm wide private file sharing network, it stretched across all the dorms and over to a sister school as well I visited the top file sharer and he had a rack in his dorm room too, looked just like that kind of funny for 18 year olds I think you will like university
• miki123211 3y ago
  Fun fact. When I was a 16-year-old, it would have been significantly easier for me to get a $200 home server than a $5 Digital Ocean VPS. The online shopping service over here (Allegro, basically Amazon and eBay all in one) is perfectly happy to do pay-on-delivery for a small fee. You probably need to be 18 to sign up, but no Polish person ever actually cared about such restrictions and there's no age check. On the other hand, cloud services require you to have a debit or credit card, which you can't get without an intervention from your parents if at all. You can say lots of bad things about Bitcoin and crypto in general, but the youth rights angle can't be overemphasized enough.
  • parineum 3y ago
    > You can say lots of bad things about Bitcoin and crypto in general, but the youth rights angle can't be overemphasized enough. You're not in favor of parents controlling what their kids own?
    • miki123211 3y ago
      I'm in favor of kids being able to do on the internet what they were already able to do in meatspace. In the 80's, a kid of basically any age could go to see or rent a movie, buy a book, make purchases at a store, play an arcade game with their friends or throw some cash into a payphone and call anybody they liked, all without their parent's knowledge or permission. There were very specific things that have been decided as "age inappropriate" by a democratic process of law (although one that didn't include the kids itself), and those very specific things (like alcohol consumption or X-rated movies) were forbidden, everything else was fair game. In the modern age, most of those things are done online, and most platforms require you to sign a contract to participate, which requires you to either be 13, 16 or 18, depending on platform and jurisdiction. Even if you get past that by lying about your age, you still need a payment method, which you can't easily get without explicit parental permission. There are exceptions, some platforms support gift cards that you can get over-the-counter, without any form of ID, but the point still stands.
  • peppermint_gum 3y ago
    > You probably need to be 18 to sign up, but no Polish person ever actually cared about such restrictions and there's no age check. You need to be 13. >On the other hand, cloud services require you to have a debit or credit card, which you can't get without an intervention from your parents if at all. With parental permission, a 13-year-old can open a free bank account with a debit card that works online. It's not a new thing, I had one 15 years ago.
• throwaway167 3y ago
  Everyone's doing when I was 16. When I was 16 I read magazines about computers I couldn't afford, read Pascal code from a book that I wrote out in hand with pencil as I only had 2 hours time with a classroom computer each week, and almost died when getting a graphing calculator that could be programmed.
  • suzzer99 3y ago
    I had a Commodore 64 and could dial long distance for free using hacked Sprint codes. For a brief moment in time, my BBS had the best collection of cracked C64 games in town. But then I slacked for a few months and the game passed me by.
  • spogbiper 3y ago
    God that takes me back. Spent many hours writing programs on some cheap Casio and then for Christmas one year (15 or 16 years old) I received an HP 48s and it was a whole new world. Good times.
  • Aromasin 3y ago
    When I was 16, I spent way too much time playing Leagues of Legends. My life would be so much easier now if I started practising what I do now that early!
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    Who's Pascal?
    • teddyh 3y ago
      <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pascal_(programming_language)&oldid=1190270744 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pascal_(programmi...>
  • geek_at 3y ago
    My dad worked for IBM in the software group but he was able to get decomissioned (usually broken) Thinkpads for me to tinker with. This is actually how I started my MSP company in the early 2000s. I was selling webspace hosted on Thinkpads with broken displays running Debian Woody (and Sarge) in a ventilated book shelf in my room. Good times
• mdip 3y ago
  I was this kid in my day. I had an extremely high-end PC that I built myself (to date myself, it cost well over $6,000[0] and was a home-built 486DX50 (right when they came out) maxed out motherboard RAM (that might have been 16MB but memory escapes me), a Turtle Beach Wave Table Synth sound card, a video card capable of powering a display at 1152x1024 on a 16" CRT display. I ran a multi-node BBS on two 9600, then 16.8K modems. Had it not been for the experience of "tinkering" with that PC and its predecessor (a ten year old 8088), I would likely have never become a software developer. I had the honor of building a gaming PC for a neighbor kid and watched over four years as he (unbeknownst to him) became a very competent geek. A few years of tweaking settings in games to eek out a higher frame-rate, fighting with firmware updates, video card drivers, software updates and every other bit of mayhem that the words "I want to game on my PC" evoke, and you pick up a wealth of knowledge "by accident". I hadn't talked to the kid in four years; met up with him, again, recently and I was blown away. First thing he does is pull a "Flipper Zero" out of his pocket and tells me about all of the crazy things he's done with it. He is as capable as any systems guy I've ever talked to. He has no clue that he has this skill, either. It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a decent gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the last year, the same thing has happened to him. This year, my daughter (she's two years younger) begged me to build her a desktop, so she's getting a really nice Christmas followed by a year of learning/frustration. :) Oh, and the fam got a Flipper Zero this year, too. Can't have the neighbor kid have all the fun. [0] I saved up the money to afford it by building computers for other people.
  • fatnoah 3y ago
    > Had it not been for the experience of "tinkering" with that PC and its predecessor (a ten year old 8088), I would likely have never become a software developer. Now that I'm 25 years into my software career, one thing that absolutely blows me away is just how few software engineers in my teams actually own their own computers. It's less than 50% for my current team. Meanwhile, I'm the weirdo with several (gaming PC, gaming laptop PC, and general purpose MBP) in addition to my work laptop. > It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a decent gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the last year, the same thing has happened to him I went through that experience with my son as well. He's never shown great interest in being taught computer stuff, but did want to help with a PC build. Now, he's tech support for his friends.
• awill88 3y ago
  You’re a natural but don’t forget to slow down, get done with school, find meaning outside of tech, and then change the world. You’re already on your way.
• supermatt 3y ago
  How loud is it with the mod you made to the fan?
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Much quieter, but still loud enough that I was told to move it from the living room to an unused room :)
• diego_sandoval 3y ago
  NAT doesn't get the hate it deserves for stopping people from running their own servers. I remember being being 18, making my first websites using the LAMP stack and not understanding why my friends were unable to access them from their homes. I knew the basic workings of the IP protocol, but hadn't read about NAT, and the responses online talked about "public and private IP addresses", which made no sense to me -- "Aren't all IP addresses supposed to be public? Isn't that how the protocol works?" Even after learning about how NAT works, I had no way to work around it, as my ISP blocked the router's web interface and I was unable to do port forwarding. I would bet that there are at least dozens of millions of people that didn't pursue a career in IT because of NAT. We should ask ourselves if collectively allowing NAT to be what it is was a good decision in the first place.
  • spogbiper 3y ago
    Most ISPs I've encountered (various places in the USA) do allow port forwarding or even replacing the ISPs router with one of your own. I'm not sure NAT has been a massive obstacle for most people interested in networking. And without NAT, we would have had to use IPv6 or something even worse. That would probably have turned off a lot of aspiring network engineers too.
    • TheFreim 3y ago
      > Most ISPs I've encountered (various places in the USA) do allow port forwarding or even replacing the ISPs router with one of your own. In the United States my entire life I have always been able to port forward when necessary, though I've only been on two or maybe three providers. I also would help friends in middle and high school port forward so we could connect to their game servers. Many providers seem to try to make it as hard as possible, attempting to lock down the interface behind a web panel. This can typically be bypassed by finding the real panel address locally or by getting a new router that isn't locked down. Growing up it was extremely easy, my provider didn't try to make it difficult, but now there is often a barrier to entry for people who desire to casually tinker with their network setup, which is unfortunate.
    • retrac 3y ago
• pixelmonkey 3y ago
  I sometimes wonder what got me into servers as a kid. I guess part of it was that the internet and open source were new, and it seemed like to be a "seed" in the network, rather than a "leech," you needed a server. Plus I had already gotten into building PCs, which is to say, just assembling and disassembling cases, motherboards, and parts. So maybe for my teenage brain it seemed like having a server made you part of some secret internet club, and used a skill I already had. Around the year 1999, I was fortunate to literally have access to my Mom's basement with adequate power and a dedicated DSL modem with a static IP. Which was a total stroke of luck, that a small Seattle ISP called Speakeasy was willing to set that up, even though I was all the way in a suburb of New York. I guess I was part of their "nationwide expansion plan." I was 15. Once the house got this static IP and a fast enough uplink (I remember it being 1.5 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up -- that was enough!) ... I felt compelled to make good use of it. So I would cycle through old desktop PCs and use them as servers. In 2004, I was away at college but still had access to that wired basement. Using some money from summer jobs and odd jobs during the school year, I bought a 1U rackmount server off eBay to store there as a Linux server, and this let me set up a small array of hard drives in it. The static IP let me do remote development via SSH as if that basement were a colo. My biggest issue is that I had no monitoring for power and WAN uplink. I still have a record of the specs: Intel Entry Server Platform, P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB of RAM, two SATA hard disk slots, and built-in dual-NIC (one 100Mbps and one 1000Mbps), which I managed to get for around $600. I then managed to find two 250GB drives to put in there. I ended up using that server as my web development platform from 2004-2009. I also remember one summer where I did remote development over the LAN on that server, working from my desktop development machine (also Linux) via the 1000 Mbps local LAN port, which felt like living in the future. I was using sshfs and NFS and the like to test code directly on the web server and turn over web app releases to the client for review. This was 2005. After which I eventually found cheap colo and cloud options. Funny enough that static IP DSL line was in my Mom's house until she sold it in 2012. Thanks for all the fish, Speakeasy! p.s. there's this fascinating 2002 article still available describing Speakeasy and giving a little vignette of late 1990s Dotcom 1.0 history, where people who ran a popular internet cafe in Seattle could fancy themselves telecom executives! https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20020703&slug=speakeasy28 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20020703&slug...
• iceflinger 3y ago
  When I was 16 I was definitely hosting services for people on a monthly VPS, but it wasn't until a few years later when my cloud provider imploded with 2 hours notice while I was in class and I lost all my files that I started to self-host with my own hardware over a VPN.
• whalesalad 3y ago
  I remember going through the entire qmailrocks.org guide on a PIII with 128mb of RAM (Running Fedora 1 or 2) and then saying "ok, send me some emails!" and my buddy immediately crashed it within like 30 seconds. We were laughing so hard.
• buttocks 3y ago
  At 16, I had a 24 hour BBS running in my bedroom.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  When I was 16 it took me a while to realise a "server" is just a loud PC with a weird shape that isn't optimised for use in the home. PCs cases are easier to work in and can fit larger (quieter) fans. Rack mount is good for networking equipment once you get above an 8 port switch, though.
• rconti 3y ago
  This is awesome! It's like a retro version of my youth; as someone 25 years older, I realize that not nearly as many people are interested in homelab/self-hosting stuff now. And it's not retro for retro's sake; Varun is also working on the latest tech as well. (also, it took me too long to realize how close their name is to /var/run which made me smile when I thought of it)
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Thanks! Never noticed /var/run. Might be an interesting idea for a personal logo or something :)
• palemoonale 3y ago
  Of course not; most 16-year-olds are enjoying their teenage years instead. (as they should) And build social skills.
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Haha that's totally fair - but I'm definitely still enjoying my teenage years and building social skills. I work on my hobby stuff in the free time I have after enjoying my teenage years, hanging out with my friends (and studying for school) :) Thanks for the concern though.
    • palemoonale 3y ago
      Thanks for the reply. No concern though, i was just too nerdy myself w/ computers and missed out on important teenager / young adult stuff. This time never comes back! Most dorks here wouldn't understand though.
• jjice 3y ago
  This is great, good on this kid. Networking was a mystery to me until I was like 18 so I missed out on some good years of self hosting. If I could go back, I'd buy a book on basic networking at 14 with some birthday money. That would be huge. I just didn't even know what to search for at the time. With all the free time I had in high school, this would have been a ton of fun to play with.
• linsomniac 3y ago
  Those Dell R720s are a pretty sweet spot. This past summer I got a couple to replace some old dev/stg hardware and picked one up for my home lab: $305 landed with 256GB RAM and dual CPUs, 24 cores, and dual power supplies. It normally runs quietly, though can ramp up if under heavy use. I added 8 1TB SSDs, and another 8 2TB spinning 2.5" drives. I had to buy a new RAID controller because the stock one wouldn't boot with all the drives in it (they are unsupported drives), and a 10gig NIC. All in for around $450.
  • geek_at 3y ago
    how much Watt does it pull?
    • genewitch 3y ago
      I had an HP proliant with 4 xeons, 40 total cores (80t), 192GB of ram, and 8 spindles. The 4 (four) power supplies ran about 600W idle and the BTU graph went to 1500W equivalent. I ran it on 240VAC on 2 supplies and it was generally around 1kw/h for my usage. It was electrically equivalent to a bitcoin miner.
    • olavgg 3y ago
      A dual socket supermicro with haswell/broadwell with only one sata ssd idles around 80 waitt. Full load up to 500 watt.
    • linsomniac 3y ago
      One that we have in production over the last day has been averaging 197 watts over the last week. So that's probably the upper limit of what I'm going to see on mine for my home lab use. I'll have lower use, and I have 8 7.2K discs where that has 14 10K. I don't have my home machine DRAC set up right now.
• reactordev 3y ago
  >”One day, I’m going to graduate and move out for university” Seems to me like University would be wasted time. You’re well on your way. If you can configure reverse proxies on nginx, host node apps, route ssh, and keep uptime - there’s a job for you today… Do university on the side if you really want the paper but you already possess the skills to succeed. The insatiable desire to learn. Best of luck my friend.
  • laserbeam 3y ago
    > Do university on the side if you really want the paper. There are other good reasons for uni, like social and networking opportunities (doing a startup with like-minded students, maybe exploring the uni party life, learning how research is done...). None of the reasons are worth going into debt for though. You do indeed already have the skills needed to get a good job in the field. Uni is an option for you but definitely not a requirement. Feel free to go for a study field which is tangential to your interests (e.g. UX design, business...). Maybe you won't be doing any of that for a living but it's one of the best opportunities you get to learn how people you will end up working with talk and think. You can certainly learn the stuff you major in on your own.
    • reactordev 3y ago
      Going to Uni for networking and social reasons (as long as you aren’t going into debt) is a great reason to go. I was simply suggesting that one already has the skills to go work and make a pretty handsome salary doing what they are doing while learning what they want to learn. It’s a whole lot easier to fund a woodworking shop when you have money. It’s a whole lot easier to experiment with 3D printing when you have money. You see what I’m getting at. It’s not the ends, it’s the means.
  • gizmo 3y ago
    You can learn the easy stuff by tinkering. It's fun! Many people are smart enough to teach themselves anything. But actually sitting down and doing the work is the hard part. How many people are going to struggle through "Algorithms" by Cormen without the external pressure of coursework and exams? Almost nobody. And that's the problem. It's not that people can't learn by self-study, it's that nobody wants to. There is no alternative for learning to the structured environment provided by a good university.
• twodave 3y ago
  When I was 16 (2001), I bought "Teach Yourself C" by Herbert Schildt, a video card and a Sony Trinitron with my summer job savings. I got to the end of chapter 5 where Herb starts talking crazy about multi-dimensional arrays, saw the next chapter was literal witchcraft and gibberish (pointers), got overwhelmed and decided I was on to plan B: become a rock star. Programming was just too hard. I used what I learned to program my TI-82 and cheat on math exams. Fast forward a couple years, and I'm in my first semester in college. I had some advisor (no recollection whatsoever who it was) recommend that I avoid declaring a major for a semester and just take a few courses in a variety of my interests. What a life saver. I bought my first Java book and started digging into it. It was a lot more approachable than the C book (sorry Herb!). I attended the first class and realized I'd already read past the end of what the class covered. That started a 15+ year journey (so far) on a path I thought I'd turned away from. I still play and enjoy the guitar. But I know I'll never be better as a musician than I am as a technologist.
  • gyomu 3y ago
    Pointers were a turning point in triggering my love of learning and improving myself. I remember learning C as a teenager, and all the resources warning me that once it got to pointers it’d get weird and hard. I was mystified at first, but it was winter break and I decided I’d stick to it until made sense. I don’t remember if it took a few hours or a few days or the whole week, but when it clicked I felt so satisfied, and like I could take on anything from there. It was a really transformative moment. I remember reading an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of the notoriously hard Dark Souls series, where he mentions having a similar experience with playing guitar and learning bar chords - and infusing that notion of satisfaction from overcoming big difficulty humps in his games. It’s a really powerful feeling.
    • lowbloodsugar 3y ago
      It's funny. I learned 32bit RISC assembly before I learned C, and so I thought C was terribly hard or maybe tediously hard. Actually more like tediously hard to generate anything but (to my assembler eyes) goddamned terrible output. Pointers, tho, pointers are just addresses in a register!
• Beijinger 3y ago
  Windows server. This guy is a pervert.
• markhahn 3y ago
  I'm sorry for his endangered hearing. Servers belong in the DC where their noise isn't such a problem...
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    The noise levels are bearable, the constant sound is comparable to the noise generated by other home appliances (although the original location was not ideal). We moved it to my an unused room so it's not audible anymore.
• p0w3n3d 3y ago
  How much do you pay for the energy, and how thick earpads do you have with these optiplexes in your room?
• captainkrtek 3y ago
  This is great. Back when I was a teenager I found some ancient servers on craigslist and picked them up, they ran in my bedroom closet and sounded like a jet engine. Think my parents were concerned
• Sparkyte 3y ago
  There are so many ways to overcome ISP limitations to drive your own server at home.
  • eathren 3y ago
    Sure, but ... he's 16.
    • Sparkyte 3y ago
      I'm hoping he figures it out, one of those eurika moments are absolutely a blast.
  • herohamp 3y ago
    This comment is nonsensical
• spacecadet 3y ago
  As others have said, I was this kid too. Go go go! Yay for homelabs.
• iamawacko 3y ago
  Really cool! As a 16 year old I also had servers in my room. I still have them. They're towers, but they have ECC RAM, Xeon processors, and lots of drives. Arch Linux is the base operating system, managed by Ansible. Everything is connected together with a mesh network. I have Nomad and Consul running on each server, and self-hosting has been great fun.
• arnaudsm 3y ago
  Now that the iPad kid generation is growing up, I fear most don't even know what a file system is. The post desktop world is real. Abstractions are comfortable, but they might reduce the number of techie teenagers like OP in the future, and that worries me a lot
  • aaron695 3y ago
    [dead]
  • HankB99 3y ago
    Tomorrow I'll strike a blow for this. I got my (12 year old) grandson a Pi 5 for Christmas. I plan to spend as much time as he'll allow on-boarding and hopefully he'll learn the fundamentals. At the very least he'll need to learn how to open a terminal and launch the Docker container that runs a Minecraft server. :) There are other things that are included with the full RpiOS install that he can explore as well, like Scratch, Mathematica and Wolfram. And a few games that I tried and are absolutely horrible. His father, my son, earns a pretty good living writing code (and now managing a group that does this) and should be highly motivated to assist with motivation.
    • gerdesj 3y ago
      Good man. I gave my granddaughter (strictly speaking, my wife's grand daughter, but she calls me granddad and always has. She also now has a sister) a laptop running Ubuntu at the start of the first covid lock down in the UK. She still uses it. Mostly to watch crap on Youtube, I gather, but who am I to judge? It is tethered to my home router via OpenVPN and I patch it from time to time. I have an ISO27000 registration to keep on top of 8) That laptop was a customer cast off, destined for the skip.
  • throwaway3090 3y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... “Take their phones away and get ‘em on Windows 98.” That seems unnecessarily cruel though.
• mrmattyboy 3y ago
  I completely get this - got my first "server" at 11 and a ex-dc "real" server at 13 from ebay after I got my first job. Really glad people are still doing this! (I learned a lot from getting £5 PCs from the local dump, which now don't sell electronics and now "retro" PCs are becoming more and more expensive - I wasn't sure if this ability for kids to buy a cheap PC and tinker (which may or may not help lead to feeling comfortable moving on to running their own servers etc.)
  • twbarr 3y ago
    My first real "server hardware" was a Sparcstation 5 I bought under a bridge at the Dallas first Saturday swap meet. I was maybe... 15? Before that, it was Linux on whatever commodity PC my dad had passed down to me. Running Linux on that Microchannel-based PS/2 was a bitch and a half for a 5th grader. I had _absolutely_ no idea what I was doing, but I feel like my general comfort with diving into things where I still have no idea what I'm doing started then and there.
• LoganDark 3y ago
  I had a server in my room at 13 :) It's cause I wanted a Linux box to host Minecraft servers on, that didn't take up resources on my main computer. It ended up serving the purpose rather well.
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  Imagine the hearing damage having a server in your room would bring (speaking as someone who got tinitus from a defective Toshiba laptop harddrive)
• gentleman11 3y ago
  But they should. Imagine something like a Helm in every household
• timcobb 3y ago
  When I was a young teenager in the 90s, the thing that blew my mind when I got my first computer was that it turned out that _all computers were servers_. The computer didn't need to be in a rack form factor, or expensive, or any of that. It just needed Winsock, TCP/IP, and that was it! My computer was the same as any other computer on the Internet. So, while this post is cool, I wish there was less emphasis on the hardware, which is pretty irrelevant for running a Node-base app and serving it to the Internet. You also don't need a static IP—you just need to figure out dynamic DNS :).
  • giantrobot 3y ago
    When I was a teenager one of the coolest technology things I got was an old spare desktop. I installed FreeBSD at first and later Linux but it was amazing to have my own Unix machine at home. It was not powerful nor did it have tons of memory or storage. But it was mine to do with as I pleased. I ran IRC bots and a web server hosting shitty Perl scripts I wrote. It was also the router (via dial-up) for the house once I got a network card for it. I learned so much messing around on that machine. I credit my ability to exit vim to working on that machine.
    • grepfru_it 3y ago
      One of the defining moments of my life was installing FreeBSD and figuring out how to get X11 working. Everyday after school I would try something new and one day I finally got it working. Loading an X window with xterm was so amazing. I get the same kind of joy today when I build my own Linux distros. First boot always brings a smile to my face :)
      • giantrobot 3y ago
        Back in the day when a bad config might burn out your monitor. Fun times. But it was similar for me. XFree86 3.x was a dumpster fire with having to guess (of scan through dmsg logs) which of several individual servers was right for your card, since the system might recognize only the graphics chip but rarely the marketing name of the card you owned. If you were lucky you'd be able to escape a bad config. Messing with X11 is what taught me to use a serial console since I could connect from another machine (before I had a network) to kill the errant X server. I bought so many damn O'Reilly books trying to master my little home Unix machine. I learned so much and appreciate having that knowledge but I do not miss the process of learning it at all. No StackOverflow, just assholes on IRC dismissively saying "RTFM" despite the manual being terrible or non-existent. That was unless of course you were being berated for calling it X Windows because assholes have to asshole.
• kraftman 3y ago
  I really enjoyed reading this because it was so similar to how I got into the field. I felt myself reading about you running windows and going 'oh wait until you discover ubuntu, oh you did!', reading about all the services and going 'oh wait until you discover docker, oh you did!', 'nginx, oh i should tell him about openresty! wait hes using it!' Great job in getting so stuck in and teaching yourself so much, it took me until 26 to get to where you're at now!
  • varun_ch 3y ago
    Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it :)
• wintogreen74 3y ago
  I had rack mount equipment running in my house for a while; not sure how he sleeps with it in his bedroom. The best part of the "cloud" was getting all those boat anchors out of my life.
• a-dub 3y ago
  1200 baud modem on an atari st at age 6, building pcs by age 9, seller's permit to buy computer parts at cost at age 10, turbo/borland c at age 11 (also some vb and mark williams coherent, but we don't talk about that) slip and slackware at age 12, dug trench for phone line and full-time bbs up at age 13, first software job at 15.
• usernamed7 3y ago
  I didn't ever have servers in my room... i kept them in the basement! I had a PBX running asterisk for the house landline, a file server, a monitoring server, and a few sandbox boxes. All old PII/PIII machines. My PBX called me (on my cisco desk phone) every morning to wake me up, and made me answer some basic math questions or else it called back. I sometimes forget how much i was up to with technology and linux.
• alexpotato 3y ago
  I bought an old rackmount server from a colleague who had in turn bought a bunch in an auction. I lived in New York City at the time and had to physically carry the server for about 20 blocks home from the train station. The entire way home I though "Man, this thing is HEAVY" I then got home, plugged it in and realized it was LOUD. I though "I know, I'll disconnect all the fans". Turns out even with all of the fans disconnected it was still the loudest thing in the apartment. I ended up ditching that server and just buying a refurbished small form factor HP desktop machine. That worked great, was quiet and ran find until a Hurricane Sandy related power surge fried it.
• devilsAdv0cate 3y ago
  [dead]