Senior year of Highschool, I put Unreal Tournament on the school server. If it were me, I'd recreate that experience, including our teacher looking around the class. That was almost 20 years ago, I hope everyone is doing alright.
Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
I have a box with 10 old laptops that I keep around, just for that. Unreal tournament 2004, Insane, Brood Wars and all the Id classics. I don't get to set it up a lot, but when I do it's always a hit.
Shitty k8s cluster/space heater?
Hmm, get 25 monitors and friends and play one of those starship bridge simulators like https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/
I volunteered as tribute to be one of these 'Friends'
You made me remember PULSAR - Lost Colony which is a decent iteration of co-op space bridge sim!
According to Bush Jr. And Cheney you are now capable of building a super computer dangerous enough to warrant a 20+ year invasion
Depending on the actual condition of all those computers and your own skill in building I'd say you could rig a pretty decent home server rack out of all of those for really most purposes you could imagine, including as a personal VPN, personal RDP to conduct work on, personal test server for experimental code and/or testing potentially unsafe downloads/links for viruses
Shit you could probably build your own OS that optimizes for all that computing power just for the funzies, or even use it to make money by contributing its computing power to a crowd sourced computing project where you dedicate memory bandwidth to the project for some grad student or research institute to do all their crazy math with. Easiest way to rack up academic citations if you ever want to be a researcher!
What are you referencing in regard to the super computer investigation? Internet search failed me
https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/12/20/iraq-scores-hordes-of-ps2s-at-us-gamers-expense
I'm pretty sure this is it.
Weird. Thanks for finding it!
I think the only answer is “Doom”
But can they run Crysis?
We're you thinking like Doom Lan party, or some weird supercluster with the pure focus of running Doom?
25 machines at say 100W each is about 2.5KW. Can you even power them all at the same time at home without tripping circuit breakers? At your mentioned .12/KWH that is about 30 cents an hour, or over $200 to run them for a month, so that adds up too.
i5-4560S is 4597 passmark which isn't that great. 25 of them is 115k at best, so about like a big Ryzen server that you can rent for the same $200 or so. I can think of various computation projects that could use that, but I don't think I'd bother with a room full of crufty old PC's if I was pursuing something like that.
I won't be leaving all of them on for long at all. I've got a few basically unused 15A electrical circuits in the unfinished basement (can see the wires and visually trace the entire runs) I'll probably only run all 25 long enough to run a linpack benchmark and maybe run some kind of AI model on the distributed compute then start getting rid of at least half of them
This is only about 21 amps. Most outlets in a home are 15amps but 20amps isn’t unheard of. From one outlet doubtful but yes one house would provide that much power easily if you split them up to three or 4 rooms on different breakers.
Now it would be fun to watch his electric meter spin like a saw blade … (yes I’m old .. I remember meters that had spinning discs)
I have a couple of these (only the G2 and G3 SFF) and they consume between 6-10w when not under load, and they max out at 35w (or 65w depending on CPU). I run proxmox with 64gb ram and they are surprisingly efficient.
Jack into the local coffee shop
Put a different operating system on each one, and make each a gateway to access the next. See who can make it through.
HungerGamesOS. I love this idea!!!!
I certainly wouldn't want pay the power bill from leaving a bunch of these running 24/7, but would work fine if you wanted to learn cluster computing.
You could always load them up with a bunch of classic games and get all your friends over for a LAN party.
Run 70b llama3 on one and have a 100% local, gpt4 level home assistant . Hook it up with coqui.Ai xttsv2 for mind baffling natural language speech (100% local too ) that can imitate anyone's voice. Now, you got yourself Jarvis from Ironman.
Edit : thought they were some kind of beast machines with 192gb ram and stuff. They're just regular middle-low tier pcs.
I tried doing that on my home server, but running it on the CPU is super slow, and the model won't fit on the GPU. Not sure what I'm doing wrong
BOINC! Do some science. :)
If I had 25 surprise desktops I imagine I'd discover a long dormant need for a Beowulf cluster.
The thought did cross my mind to run Linpack and see where I fall on the Top500 (or the Top500 of 2000 for example for a more fair comparison haha)
Distcc, maybe gluster. Run a docker swarm setup on pve or something.
Models like those are a little hard to exploit well because of limited network bandwidth between them. Other mini PC models that have a pcie slot are fun because you can jam high speed networking into them along with NVMe then do rapid fail over between machines with very little impact when one goes offline.
If you do want to bump your bandwidth per machine you might be able to repurpose the wlan m2 slot for a 2.5gbe port, but you'll likely have to hang the module out the back through a serial port or something. Aquantia USB modules work well too, those can provide 5gbe fairly stably.
Edit: Oh, you're talking about the larger desktop elitedesk g1, not the USFF tiny machines. Yeah, you can jam whatever hh cards into these you want - go wild.
Do you have particularly cheap or free electricity?
12 cents per kilowatt-hour. I certainly don't plan on leaving more than a couple on long term. I might get lucky with the weather and need the heating though :)
a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can't get rid of without literally giving them away. they're 'tolerable' for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the 'performance per watt' just isn't there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.
these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run 'ok enough' on 4th gen, just make sure they're booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they'll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can 'rufus' a win11 installer, but there's no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.
I think you're not giving 4th gen enough credit. My wife's soon-to-be-upgraded desktop is built on a 4th gen i5 platform, and it generally does the job to a decent level. I was rocking a 4790k and GTX970 until 2022, and my work computer in 2022 was on an even older i5-2500 (more held back by the spinning hard drive than anything. Obviously not a great job, but I found something much better in 2022) my last ewaste desktop-turned-server was powered by an i5-6500 (which is a few percentage points better performance than the 4th gen equivalent) and I have a laptop I use for web browsing and media consumption that's got a 6700HQ in it.
I've already got a few people tentatively interested, and I honestly accepted the possibility of having to pay to recycle them later on. Should be a fun series of projects to be had with this pallet of not-quite-ewaste
NOT any kind of crypto mining bullshit.
There's always a good reason not to put another crypto mining cluster into the world.
Do a giant Proxmox cluster. You are going to need one hell of a switch though
Setup a CS 1.6 LAN party arena.
No pen testing lab sounds fun. 8 PCs for a segmented network, a few red team PCs.
If you purchased them from the federal government they won’t have hard drives.
State government, and it says they come with SSDs. They came from a school so presumably they're from a lab or are upgraded staff PCs, both would be pretty low sensitivity. Maybe I'll learn the final test answers for Algebra 1 at worst!
Might be fun to do some forensic data recovery and see if anything was missed though
Ooh, or behind the scenes email drama from staff!
God damn. What are the specs on those? I gotta check out some government auctions.
4th gen intel i5s, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs, so not terrible for a basic Windows desktop even today (except of course for the fact that no supported Windows desktop operating system will officially support these system come Q4 2025)
But don't get your hopes up, when I've bid on auctions like this before the lots have gone for closer to $80 per computer, so I was genuinely surprised I could win with such a low bid. Also every state has entirely different auction setups. When I've looked into it in the past, some just dump everything to a third party auction, some only do an in-person auction annually at a central auction house, and some have a snazzy dedicated auction site. Oh and because its the US, states do it differently from the federal government. So it might take some research and digging around to find the most convenient option for wherever you are (which could just be making a friend in an IT department somewhere that will let you dumpster dive)
I would personally attempt the Kubernetes cluster if I had that many physical machines!
You could possibly run ai horde if they have enough ram or vram. You could run bare metal kubernetes or inside proxmox.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters | More Letters |
---|---|
ESXi | VMWare virtual machine hypervisor |
IP | Internet Protocol |
NAT | Network Address Translation |
NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
PSU | Power Supply Unit |
SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
VPN | Virtual Private Network |
k8s | Kubernetes container management package |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
[Thread #697 for this sub, first seen 21st Apr 2024, 15:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If I were you I might try deploying a mini enterprise network with permissions and things. It would be fun to do it with active directory to try to practice pentesting, or it would also be fun to do with linux to try to learn more about deploying linux in enterprise environments.
This is pretty high on the to-do list. I plan on virtualization a bunch of it, but it would be pretty easy to have one desktop hosting each subnet of client PCs and one hosting the datacenter subnet. Having several hosts to physically network means less time spent verifying the virtual networks work as intended.
Also playing with different deployment tools is a goal too. Having 2-3 nearly-identical systems should be really useful for creating unified Windows images for deployment testing
Xonotic!