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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 decommissi
by 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 agoThis 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 agoWho pays the electric bill? Sounds like it’s in the 50-100USD a month range for those two servers.
- shishcat 3y ago60€ 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 agoGood 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 agoAs a 15 years old, I desperately wanted to keep my old desktop running 24/7 to run my own website, learn PHP, linux and do some selfhosting. I wasn't able to run it more than 2 days in a row as my parents would always shut it down to save in power
- vultour 3y ago60EUR absolutely isn't a drop in the bucket for households in the EU, that can be a monthly bill for someone living in a smaller apartment.
- burnished 3y agoYeah, it is still a relatively small increase considering all your other bills, and rent, and food, and etc. what are you estimating the monthly budget to be for these small apartments? 60EUR a month is also pretty cheap for a hobby. If you can't count on your parents for even that level of support you might be better of getting emancipated.
- vultour 3y agoReally depends on the country and how small we’re talking, but I’d guess somewhere between 500-1000€. At 16 you’re getting quite old so you probably also want some kind of allowance, if this is on top of that then it can add up.
- bluescrn 3y agoBecause we've all felt the pain of power bills shooting up by 2-3x in a very short period of time, perhaps? The cost of running a PC 24/7 used to feel insignificant, but not so much any more. I've been running an old PC as a home server for years, but should probably find a more power-efficient NAS box to replace it with.
- burnished 3y agoStill feels weird to take that out on a random 16 year old.
- nunesvn 3y agoI'm father of a 10 years old kid. If he wants to run a server at 16, I will give him the electricity bills, a 20U rack, a cisco switch and a bunch of cables. Congratulations to the OP and their family.
- fruit2020 3y agoWhen I was a kid in the 90s my dad had raised money to buy a good car. When the time came, he bought a not so good car + a computer for me. I still remember installing windows 3.1 from 40 floppy disks
- knorker 3y agoMy memory says that win3.1 came on just 7 floppies. Did you install from 5.25 floppies?
- infogulch 3y agoMaybe 7 feels like 40 when you're 13.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago40 is for Win95. Around 20+ for Warp 4.
- lakkal 3y agoI installed ESIX (Everex's SysV Unix) off of 40-something 3.5" floppies in the mid 90s. Naturally there were a couple of bad disks and the installation sat partially done for a few days while I awaited replacements to arrive in the mail.
- fruit2020 3y agoGood one. I guess I had win 3.1 and upgraded to 95
- 3y ago
- rpigab 3y agoMine is in the 50-100EUR range per year, powered on all the time. Dell Poweredge T320 with Xeon-2428L and an SSD.
- lnxg33k1 3y agoHe’s a 16 years old doing a very productive activity, I’d expect the parents to happily pay for it, I’d argue that if someone’s son is interested in learn ing and the energy bill is obstacle to wait before to make kids, parents should feel an obligation to fuel their kids passions
- sodality2 3y agoAs a former 16-year old, very grateful for my parents for doing exactly this to support my passions :)
- jorvi 3y agoAt €60 a month, that is €720 a year. OP indicated elsewhere here that they’re trying to cover some of the costs with side projects, but €720 anually is a big bill to foot for less affluent parents.
- geysersam 3y agoMoney well invested considering the guy seems to know more than some IT professionals already.
- KMnO4 3y agoI don’t want to get into whether the ability to afford these things for your children makes you more/less of a good parent… But if you can afford it, you absolutely should support their passions. The only reason I’m a high salaried software engineer is because my parents generously bought me a computer, allowed me to attend classes (programming in BASIC), etc.
- burnished 3y agoEh, power bill is the best one for an increase to appear on, way more wiggle room before anything important is shut off. Plus if we're talking about being poor it has two important benefits 1) excellent hours occupied to dollar spent ratio 2) engrossing hobbies typically mean they aren't out there rattling around stirring up trouble (which can get expensive in a hurry)
- 3y ago
- rasse 3y agoIt's quite normal for parents to pay for their children's hobbies.
- forty 3y agoAt least for rich parents :)
- comprev 3y agoYour parents are probably footing a large electricity bill for this running hardware unless there is a revenue stream for your services? Either way, hats off to your folks for supporting your interest.
- shishcat 3y agoI know, my smart plug reports around 60€ a month of costs. Most of it comes from the massive amount of hard drives, I try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects. Anyway, I couldn't find rentable dedicated servers with this much storage for less than 50€ a month, the upfront costs of new, energy efficient and powerful hardware is too much, and I truly enjoy running these servers myself. About the noise, my room has a small mechanical room and that's where the servers are located, the noise can't be heard from the rest of the room.
- CTDOCodebases 3y agoIMHO it's a good way to get your parents to pay for your hosting costs without having to beg :) I was in a similar situation regarding storage. I ended up having to upgrade the drives for fewer bigger ones but there are other ways to reduce power consumption like putting your storage server on a timer and turning on WoL so that you can wake it up out of those hours if you need to. Obviously this is not possible if you are serving files to other users 24/7.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoYou could be right — but it's hard to resist the cheap hardware you can find on eBay. I see numerous Hyve Zeus 1U servers on eBay right now for a couple hundred bucks — just add an SSD.
- mikeruiz 3y agoYou’re not wrong, but as a parent I would be very pleased to pay that bill. Best bargain in education I could ask for.
- varun_ch 3y agoThat is so cool! I've also been thinking of adding an old graphics card somewhere to support some ML stuff too - I just have to figure out how :)
- marcocastignoli 3y agoGrande!
- martopix 3y agoI'm also an Italian who taught himself how to code at 16 (I'm now 34), although not even remotely at your level. Then I studied physics, did a PhD, a postdoc about neural networks, etc., but I felt that what mattered to me the most was to inspire young people like the one I was, and I decided to come back to Italy and become a high school teacher starting this year. I'm also organizing an extracurricular python course in my school. If you're not based far from Milan and are interested in talking to my students, we could consider that! Good luck with everything.
- arnavpraneet 3y ago>businesses decommissioning hardware been looking for this for years but never found them in my country (India). Been a 16 year old with a homelab once, now older but no business hardware yet