What's with the overkill hardware setups?

Amon

Btw you can set it up to turn the screen off without sending it to sleep. I use a screen lock to do this, but other things probably work too

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Mine is my 6th gen i5 gaming PC stuffed into an early 00's tower server chassis. It's got an ebay IT mode HBA hooked up to a bunch of drives I pulled from an old Lefthand node we were recycling.

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That sounds like storage failure.

I actually ran into something similar with the RPI 2 weeks ago. It was running incredibly slow, certain file directories refused to load, DNS resolution was failing 1/3 of the time and was super slow when it did work...

Pretty sure the 6 year old sd card finally gave up.

Having a script automatically write a bootable backup of the SD card to an SSH server once a week makes that recovery super easy. Literally just write the last backup to the card, swap them out, and all's well again.

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To be completely fair, it's hard to overstate the durability of an old Thinkpad. They're so ubiquitous, Linux compatibility is almost guaranteed. Then, after the battery goes, attach it to a UPC and ride that setup for another decade at least.

Moineau

Is that the award winning IBM Thinkpad running Linux?!

Amon

It's an earlier Lenovo, sire.

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What's with it is probably "I'm doing this because I love hardware."

Amon

Angry Thönkpad whirring intensifies

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64GB total each across 4 sticks haha. Well, one only has 32 but details.

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They’re not even real servers actually, 2 of them are my old gaming PCs I built in 2012 and 2017 and I have many Dell Optiplexes and the like lying around I reuse for various things

I have upgraded some of the parts in them - including the RAM, because ballooning VMs are annoying - but it’s still true they’d be ewaste otherwise

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You’re not wrong. Currently running 4 “servers” (describes their role, they’re really just repurposed desktops) and averaging 350W. Oof. Time to try ARM soon I think.

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I had a spare gpu lying around so I didn’t need integrated graphics

Then next thing I knew I had 16tbs of data

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I went overkill because i had money, no hardware i could dedicate and wanted flexibility for my volatile interests.
So overkill (except storage until i upgrade) that i plan sharing it with my family (when i set it up properly)
I could have made a less overkill choice but that way i probably wont need to change my setup for some game

ddh

It was the same in my house, with a 19" rack and old workstations. I'm downsizing to a 10" rack and so far it's quieter and cheaper (in the long run!)

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Heavy-duty applications? Lots of devices in the home? Reliance on PoE? There are plenty of reasons to use big equipment, it's not just for show.

I couldn't run multiple game servers off of a laptop the way I do on my spare Ryzen 9 5900X. I also have it transcoding media and it has 30tb of storage, of which I'm currently using over 2/3s for media/steam cache.

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Please tell more about those watches

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My first services were running on an old laptop from 2006/2007 standing on an old leather chair in a corner of a room. The laptop was standing on four old and used skateboard wheels so there was some space between the laptop and the leather.

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Ahh man that's a pain, my old notebook has no sata and only 32gb of emmc (which I'm tempted to remove and add a larger chip), but it's only being used for my 3D printer so it's not really a pressing need yet.

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W&O X9 Call. It's a terrible watch, basically just a shitty android phone inside of a knockoff applewatch case. It runs Android 9 on 2" screen, 4GB RAM and 64GB of space (didn't even test that one tbh), battery life - nonexistent (less than a day). But I've been looking specifically for stuff like this and bought a load of them at wholesale for like $28.5 a piece... and the specs didn't even exactly match between all of them. Loaded them up with cheapest plans for IoT devices, installed termux, nodejs and moved some of my personal scripts over to them. One app/script per piece, no need for VM's or containers And they got their own links so firewall is also not necessary.

None of them have static IP's accessible from outside though, so for stuff I need public access to I jam that into the remaining RAM space on one of the few of my $1/mo lowendboxes that I'm using primarily as VPN servers. Got them all on tailscale, so I could theoretically use Funnel to route traffic from public internet to those watches (haven't tried yet). And still to figure out some way for them to failover onto each other for internet because the plans are extremely limited, will probably have to learn android app development for that when I get to it.

There is also HK Ultra 2 which I believe is essentially the same thing, and I saw a few other variants on the market without even a brand name, so the only way to find them would be to search for "sim card" or sorting smartwatches category by bad reviews first

Sticky Fedi

I just found what server #loops run on.