
Reusing Old Hardware - zelon88
https://www.honestrepair.net/index.php/2018/10/24/reusing-old-hardware/
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ChuckMcM
The author is not wrong, there is a lot of old hardware out there that is
still more than serviceable for many things. But the loaded cost (power,
maintenance, space, etc) of running servers at "home" can be way more than the
$10 a month for a droplet on Digital Ocean.

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.

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daurnimator
Indeed! I used to run various services on my older generation hardware, but I
realised that I was spending more than $70 a month on electricity to do so!

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.

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Uberphallus
Have you considered Google Suite?
[https://gsuite.google.com/](https://gsuite.google.com/)

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.

~~~
tallanvor
That's great, but what happens when Google kills the offering or suspends your
account for violating their TOS?

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PeterStuer
Sadly many of these old beige boxes weren't very well designed for efficient
low power consumption. Always ask yourself whether a Raspberry Pi style
platform, or even a jail-broken old phone couldn't run that workload just as
well on a fraction of the old banger's power budget. Most often the answer is
yes.

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wiz21c
out of nowhere : is there any effort to build/tune linux kernel (or gnu/linux
os) so that it consumes the least energy possible. (besides powertop and
alike).

~~~
DerekRobot
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTw...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTweaks)

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walrus01
I really would not say that a 2007 Xeon is in any way comparable to something
newer. Something that old is just a waste of watt-hours.

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.

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LeonM
I've been planning to buy a used high-end Xeon server circa 2015, harvest the
CPU's and RAM, stick them on a workstation motherboard and add some silent
cooling solution. That way i'll have a 20+ core, 128+GB workstation for about
2k euro.

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...

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lunchables
Couldn't you build a low-end threadripper or really nice Zen system for less
with far more power?

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LeonM
Haven't done any research yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if a 2 year old
high-end Xeon outperforms a low-end threadripper on my typical workload.

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.

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foxhop
My take on this is a small SmartOS cluster running on 3 x Thinkpad T430s -
each with the DVD drive removed and two SSDs installed as a ZFS mirror.

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.

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lpmay
Nice.

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.

~~~
foxhop
It sort of just works. Get yourself a big USB thumb drive (I use 8 and 16G)
and boot off it. You'll answer a few questions to install.

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.

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dfox
The main issue with repurposing random x86 hardware is power. This means that
anything NetBurst based is just garbage, but on th other hand random Core2
based corporate SFF desktop (which you can get for less than 40EUR) is
perfectly serviceable as home internet gateway/whatever server. You want SFF
desktop because it is designed to be reliable, it is usually cheap and
relatively quiet.

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walrus01
Anecdotally I see companies throwing out dell and hp 4th gen core i5/i7 sff
desktops from 2012-2013, straight into electronics recycling, all the time
now. One of those with 8GB of ram makes a totally fine Linux workstation.

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throwaway1X2
The part comparing "Intel Xeon E3 1320 V6" [sic] with older "Intel Xeon E5620"
as having the same memory bandwidth, same TDP, more L3 cache, etc., so having
"the same performance characteristics" is just plain crazy.

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.

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orev
3) GHz cannot be used as a speed comparison outside of the same generation of
CPUs. A 10 year old 3.5GHz gets nowhere near the same compute power as a
modern day 2.4GHz.

~~~
benwills
For a lot of basic operations, this is often false.

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.

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archi42
That really depends on your load. I once feared a huge performance regression
when a test took 2 minutes instead of 40s. Turned out one instance ran on a
i7-6xxx machine, and the other on a i7-9x0. Normalizing for the different
clock, the newer CPU had a 20% better IPC.

Disclaimer: I don't recall exact numbers, but they should be somewhat close to
those given.

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dirktheman
Reusing old hardware is all fun and games, but please remember to make
regular, offsite (online!) backups of your important stuff. Hardware will fail
at some point, and I'm not even talking about the obvious risk of house
fires/flooding...

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ahje
This. Having old hardware running various services in the basement is handy,
saves money (unless they use a ton of electricity), but the second stuff
breaks down you will be screwed unless you have a backup somewhere.

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kozak
The site is "currently unavailable in your country", I can't even read the
article. Tell me about openness.

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Double_a_92
Have fun: [http://archive.is/v25ID](http://archive.is/v25ID)

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xupybd
I have an old IBM System x3550 M3 running in my attic.

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.

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accrual
I love old hardware. I have a Pentium II box I've been upgrading for fun. It
dual boots Win98 and OpenBSD from two CF cards, and can serve many
contemporary application stacks. It's enjoyable knowing these big old chips
can still turn out a lot of functionality even if it's just recreational.

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fuball63
What do you use windows 98 for? I always loved the os and have a box that runs
an nes emulator.

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accrual
Sorry for the late reply.

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!

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egorfine
This is what they give me instead of any page on their site:

"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.

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tushartyagi
My new HDD started having problems in just 1.5 years.I just salvaged an old
HDD from my dad's 9 year old laptop (Dell Vostro) and used it.

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.

[1]:
[https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2](https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2)

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mr_woozy
Anyone know what happened to Edna? Hasn't been updated in years unfortunately
& I'm wondering if it's still safe to run online.
[https://github.com/thedod/edna](https://github.com/thedod/edna)

It looks like AudioStreamer that OP listed but I prefer to play my music with
vlc (or whichever 3rd party player)

~~~
mr_woozy
oh so I found this, anyone tried it?

[https://github.com/thedjinn/nedna](https://github.com/thedjinn/nedna)

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IWeldMelons
I personaly use Chromebook C710 as my main computer. Works just fine with 6GiB
RAM and stock HDD. Never liked cutting edge hardware.

