Reusing Old Hardware
honestrepair.net
honestrepair.net
What I'm saying is that the math isn't as straight forward as it might appear.
That said, it is now pretty straight forward to build a 'nano-datacenter' consisting of an enclosure, thermo-electric cooling, rack, switch, UPS, a server providing NAS storage and a couple or 6 servers providing compute. Plug its PDU into the socket where your dryer used to plug in out in the garage.
It all falls apart when you want to use the Web. A Thinkpad T23 with a Pentium3 CPU just cannot render Modern Websites at acceptable speeds.
Basically if it wasn't for heavy JavaScript websites, most people could still be using decade-old machines for their day jobs.
It's much cheaper using a couple $5 VPSes for services. The only hardware left at home that is on 24/7 is my NAS, which is because 20TB of storage costs too much in the cloud.
You'll need a domain name to associate (and handle email, etc), and while technically you need 5 users to have unlimited storage, at the moment it doesn't seem to be enforced and a single user does have it.
Currently I'm storing ~50TB for $10/month. At this price and having 100Mbps Internet connection, I only turn on the NAS for local backups.
If you can configure your laptop to only charge the battery to ~80% or so, you'll extend the battery life significantly. The optimal range for long-term storage is ~40-60% charge.
Which incorporates a number of different adblocking lists.
I used the progress in CPUs in a different way: bought one of the fanless ITX sized computers and attached reasonably sized WD passport to it which is spun down most of the time (things are mostly served from an internal SSD)
Realistically all of this could be built into a single hybrid of disk shelf and blade server box. That is something I've contemplated as the 'next generation' of the technology.
And that leaves you with how to dump the heat out of the water, and that is most effectively done (in a small scale) with thermo-electric coolers. You can add scale cooling very effectively by turning on additional coolers. My design is pretty simple, the reservoir tank is on top of the rack and there is a heat exchanger on the bottom and one in "front" of the CPUs. As they draw air through the heat exchangers the water warms and rises to the top where the reservoir is, and the chilling water in the reservoir naturally sinks back down to the bottom where the first heat exchanger is.
You can think of it like a rack sized version of the liquid cooler you can put on an enthusiast PC these days. Its quiet, self contained, and quite efficient, while still being able to use forced air cooled server equipment. The goal being efficient cooling in a temperate climate (California Bay Area) that is quiet and can use surplus/old equipment that was originally slated for a data center without violating any of that equipment's assumptions about the environment it can count on.
What standard are you using for "efficient"? Thermo-electric coolers are neat, but the last thing they are whatsoever is efficient from a power-usage stand point.
If you're doing chilled water cooling, the only real option to consider is a mechanical heat pump (e.g. the ones in a refrigerator), but even that is silly. Hardware doesn't mind being somewhat warm, and using ambient air for cooling is far more efficient then either.
There's a reason thermoelectric refrigerators aren't really a thing. Peltiers are horrible. Mechanical heat pumps easily achieve twice the efficiency or more.
PUE
This is the part that sounds strange to me. Water cooling has its advantages, but the heat is almost always dumped from the water by pumping it through a radiator that has fans blowing air through it. What's the advantage of thermo-electric cooling here over the traditional method?
1) It is quiet
2) It is easily electronically controllable based on the heat load in the water.
The heat sinks on the thermo-electrics are convection cooled and you could blow air over them but as you increase the thermal gradient between the heat sink and the air around them you are able to dump more heat. The only parameter you can vary with the typical heat exchange is "blow more air" you can't change the working temperature of the exchanger.
That said, the way power plants cool their water is in big evaporative cooling towers, but since I don't need a humidifier for the lab I stick with just convection cooling :-)
But if you skip forward a few years, a 2012-2013 quad socket, eight core Xeon machine that was many thousands of dollars is still quite useful. If you want to lab your own xen or kvm hypervisor stuff on a machine with 32 cores and 256GB of RAM you can do it for under $1000, if you know where to look, and can tolerate a 500W load addition to your electrical bill.
Electricity and heat is no issue for me as electricity is included in the rent of my office, and we currently use electric heaters to keep the office warm...
Also: a 2 year old server can be bought for about 1k, you can't get the core count and amount of RAM new for that price.
My entire tech power load, which includes my APC UPS, ubiquiti router and access point, 8 port gigabit switch, MoCA bridge, the above mentioned Dell server, and a Mac mini for remote Mac development, consumes about 100w at a steady state as measured at the outlet with a kill-a-watt meter.
At my current utility rates that comes out to be about $8.62 a month - not free but certainly imo a good investment to have local VPN, data storage, ESX and KVM virtual machine hosting.
The whole cluster idles at 150 watts and each node is backed by it's own dedicated battery. Upstream I have about 4 hours on an APC unit which also protects the router and modem from outages.
My own little cloud for under $1,200.
Do you have any guides you wrote or used that you can recommend? I'm looking at getting SmartOS set up at home as well, but I know I've got a lot to learn.
I like the Thinkpads because they are so cheap ($200-300) gets you an i7 and 8-12GB RAM. The CPUs are compatible with SmartOS for KVM guests.
All that said, I really should write a definitive guide of how to operate SmartOS coming from the linux ecosystem.
1. Xeon E3 1320 never existed. Was it meant to be 1230?
2. Does DDR4-2400 really have "the same performance characteristics" as DDR3-800 (even after accounting for having 3 channels instead of 2)?
3. How can a 3.5 GHz processor be "the same performance characteristics" as 2.4 GHz one (1.5x more)? Add IPC on top of that.
I have an application I'm working on and tested it across three different generations of CPUS going ~10 years back.
The code was written in C and the fundamental steps were to: mmap() two arrays of structs from a sata 3 SSD, compare the two, and write the intersection to a block of memory. The data size of each array was multiple gigabytes and the operation took more than a full second.
The ~10 year old low powered Xeon L5640 beat the higher-speed ~5 year old Xeon E5-2667 v2, and was only slightly beaten by the 3 year old i7-4790k. In short, they all ran at roughly the same speed.
I would say that this is because of the limits of the SSDs, but then I tested by holding that data in memory rather than disk, then ran the intersection. Same result.
This is a very basic operation that tests the performance of the CPU and memory. And for operations like these (ie: not using SSE2, AVX, etc), the perceived performance difference to the vast majority of people for a secondary home machine may be negligible.
Disclaimer: I don't recall exact numbers, but they should be somewhat close to those given.
Wouldn't it then just be testing the limits of your memory?
It cost me $50 + a new ssd. It's been great fun to play with. 12Gig of ram and 16 threads so it can do more than enough for me. I found it a bit slow for game hosting but for the price I can't complain.
I also have a couple of cheap VPS, but having a server on the same network is much snappier and I can throw large files around with ease.
I adore Windows 98. I spent most of my time on 95 but 98, especially SE, really polished the experience on a then-modern OS.
I mostly use 98 for nostalgia sake, playing old games, testing old software, and observing how things used to be.
I find it fun to firewall it off and connect to the internet with IE and old Firefox versions - finding what works and what doesn't. It helps provide some perspective and entertainment. It's incredible how interoperable Win 98 can still be with your modern devices.
Eventually I'll upgrade the Pentium II to an AMD K6-2 and see how it goes!
"OOOPS… We’re sorry for the inconvenience,
It looks like HonestRepair accounts are currently unavailable in your country, but keep checking back!"
Way to go. Not in the countries we like? You can't even read our blog. Go away.
This old laptop is what I would go to whenever I was between laptops. It's a C2D, 4GB RAM. I installed debian with i3 and it was good enough for browsing internet, to do random coding stuff, reading PDFs, watching movies (although it would run hot). Also I played a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon[1] on it. Man, I love RCT!! I just might plug in an SSD in it during the next windfall.
It looks like AudioStreamer that OP listed but I prefer to play my music with vlc (or whichever 3rd party player)