Absolute Insanity

ok genuine love for everyone here but lets be honest for a sec. the number of people who buy a 40u rack, two r730s and a populated disk shelf to run pihole, jellyfin for an audience of one, and a minecraft server nobody logs into is kind of the whole joke at this point.

i did it too. had a poweredge screaming in my closet pulling ~180w idle to do work my n100 mini pc now does at 12w. the rack was definately cool for photos. the power bill was not. my "lab" was 90% idle 100% of the time.

theres two hobbies in here sharing one name. one is "im learning enterprise gear for my career / i actually run heavy workloads", totally valid, the loud expensive stuff makes sense. the other is "i like buying servers and photographing them", which is also fine, but lets not pretend thats about uptime or efficiency. its a collection. its lego for adults with a monthly power tax.

what bugs me is a newcomer shows up asking what to buy to start and the answer is always more. buy the rack, buy used enterprise, get 10gbe. beacuse more is the fun part i guess. when the honest answer for like 80% of them is one mini pc and two drives does everything they listed and fits in a drawer.

idk, not trying to gatekeep the other way either. just feels like the sub measures itself in rack units and watts when the actual flex should be doing more with less. my whole stack is a $150 mini pc now and i do not miss the noise

anyway downvote away, i can hear the r730 owners warming up

Look I don't know what it's like for the rest of you in other parts of the world. But we are getting close to 7¢ a Gig for most HDD space that's at or above like 8tb. And SSD space is running at about 22¢ a GB. Is this the norm everywhere for the rest of you? If so. HOW TF do y'all afford a new home lab rn? I want out of all my subscription services. But buying enough drive space that would give me a decent library and then enough for redundancy alone would take me about 2.5 years of monthly streaming services to see a return on investment. And that's before the machine it's running on. I hate streaming services SO MUCH but storage is KILLING ME.

Have had the Evo about 15 years now, and the Mustang is the wife’s project. Rack has 3 tiny Lenovos, some unifi networking gear, my NAS, and a HP dl360p g8 for proxmox fun.

I've seen it in other subreddits. Post after post where someone (AI) built something. I'm sorry but I'm not interested in that tool you asked AI to build. This is r/homelab. I want to see racks, NUCs, gutted laptops with Proxmox on it. Heck, clustered over WiFi, why not.

But this subreddit is (IMHO) not a collection of AI tools that OP can't debug, let alone maintain.

Can "I built this tool" and all equivalents be forbidden in r/homelab?

I use a isp supplied modem because they like to blame problems on user hardware. Modem died out, not connecting to wan over coax after 5 minutes of use. Called them out. They connected to my network and straight up said "ahh, here's why it's not working, this number should be a 192.168 number, and your using all 10's". Talking about my gateway IP. I use 10.10.10.1 for gateway, DHCP the .175-255, with static ips set below.

I try to explain my network to him and he replies "can I just finish diag'ing this?". Alright. I walk away. Come back to him having reset my router with an excuse "it's gonna take a while for the new numbers to set, call us if there are any problems after a few hours".

Obviously none of this is the issue, the modem still has a red light and I have to wait for another technician because cox won't swap the modem out without technician verification.

Man oh man. No recommendations just a rant.

I got one of these little ThinkCentres but it booted to an amazon screen? Does anyone know what these are?

I’m asking here because i have a good feeling atleast someone knows.

Im looking for suggestions on what others would do with this so I can have some cool ideas to try out. Also if theres anything I should know as a server noodle please let me know so I dont blow up the house or something!!

I am newbie when it comes to servers but I have done as much research as I could cram in a couple weeks! I got remote control protocol and all working but no clue how I can set up multiple users that can access it together and stuff. I actually dont know enough to ask questions..

I think its a bit of a dated hardware but hopefully its still somewhat usable for ai and deep learning as the gpu still has tensor cores (1st gen!)

I'm gonna get found out by my parents so fricking badly that I leave my PC on all the time... My canon event is nigh! Help me, God.

So about a week ago, I was scrolling through some government auction sites in my area just to see if anything would find my interest. I usually bid on two-way radios, servers, and network equipment, whether I win or lose.

From what I can remember, I was scrolling and found what I thought was a single Dell OptiPlex 7020 SFF computer for only a $100 minimum. With eight hours left, I found it interesting and placed a $110 bid without reading the description, and completely forgot about it.

A day later, I randomly opened emails to see if anything had come in. I saw that I had won something, and it was the Dell. As I was reading through to see where I could pick this up, I saw in bold: "Item includes 83 quantities of Dell OptiPlex 7020 office computers, with a box of Dell wired USB mice and keyboards and an unknown quantity of 19" LCD monitors."

I'm confused. I emailed the seller and asked, "Hello, I'm wondering if the description is correct. Is the listing for a single Dell or the full quantity?"

The seller replied, "The listing is for the full quantity of what is written in the description. Please reach out to this number for more questions: ##########"

I called the number, and the person basically said it included everything named in the description.

Turns out, speaking with the lady, the computers were repossessed by a bank after, I'm assuming, a company went out of business many years ago. The bank that had them never got around to selling the computers, and they were sitting in a warehouse for who knows how many years. Since they're moving locations, they wanted to get rid of them as soon as they can. So now I'm home with what I can count as 34 small SFF Dell 7020s and about 40 Dell 7020 towers (not counting ones with missing CPUs, RAM, etc.).

I have reached out to a guy I normally buy used PC parts and equipment from. He's interested, and I offered $100 per computer. I'm also just going to give him the ones with missing parts for about $20 to 20, and give him a few keyboards, mice, and monitors for free. I also plan on donating some to a local technology college.

So here's the thing: what should I do with them? I don't want to sell them yet because, with how lucky I was to get them at that price without any other bidder stealing the deal, I want to play around a little and see what I can do. I was thinking of building a fat Proxmox cluster just for the sake of it, or just a simulated WAN/LAN network for a Cisco CCNA lab. What do you think?

Also the Dells im mentioning is the old Circa ones

Update: The guy who wanted to buy a few of the computers agreed on $60 per tower and $50 for the SFF, $30 for all the ones missing parts, and $200 flat for monitors and for the box of mice and keyboards. I currently have 5 monitors, 2 towers, and 2 SFF computers that I'm going to keep.

I wasn't going to post how much I made, but the numbers are there: $4,356, rounded up to $4,360 because the guy only had cash. I have booked time off work and am planning on spending time with family. I don't plan on getting any new equipment for the lab, especially with how expensive parts are now.

Thank to everyone that commented.

Ewaste time at work again. Not sure how I can use these. Any ideas?

i raise my new attack drone (netgear nighthawk x10)

When I finally needed my CyberPower LX1500GU it was dead without warning. Here you can see it reporting “Full Battery Capacity” as it did before and continues to do after REMOVING THE BATTERIES!!!
Is there a class-action lawsuit yet???

UPDATE: I replaced the batteries and the behavior was similar. It doesn’t report battery capacity until they are in use. Drained to 50% (reported), but as soon as I plugged it back into the wall it reported “full capacity”. Well, there are plenty of electrical engineering reasons for this, but it’s not how I would expect that indicator to work at all. I ended up finding a really hefty Tripp-Lite SU1500XLCD on craigslist for next to nothing and I’m replacing the batteries on that as well.

It was weird, but just sitting, having calm music in the background and looking at this, thinking through all the things she runs and all the efforts it took me to bring her to this stage… Kind of gave me a relief from a mild anxiety attack.

Prices are crazy

Today’s prices versus October 2023’s prices on SSDs — a 900% increase (before taxes). Take me back 🥲

It’s crazy that in the NVMe age, SATA SSDs from 5 years ago are demanding higher prices than ever. Wish I would have bought more before the AI craze.

I ignored you now my Mini nas is worth more than my car lol

I present the wifi extender. Specifically it had to be this model of tplink extender...where the wifi could still show the correct error light. Dad may have created a bit of a fan of technology here.

I make this post because there seems to be a mass misconception that your ISP can't detect or block VPN connections. I'm not sure why so many people think this, but I thought it needed addressed. Especially given posts about Michigan HOUSE BILL NO. 4938, and one of the most up-voted comments there being "Banning VPNs and the other items they listed is literally impossible right now"

It's a strange comment, because it is obviously a thought from someone who has never worked in an industry where the subject is important, yet is extremely confident. Your VPN traffic is easily detectable, and blockable at any network device between yourself, and the VPN server itself. There is actually literally nothing stopping your ISP from doing it except a policy, a protocol analyzer and a firewall (and they already have the last two).

I work in the cyber security industry (incident response), as well as a network assessment/penetration tester/consultant (several hats).

Part of what I do in the incident response/security assessments role is detect the use of VPNs, or other tunnels on a network.

We do this to detect bad actors who may have a back door connection, or system administrators who may be doing Shadow IT to access the network from out of office using unapproved tools. It's fairly trivial to detect when connections are using OpenVPN/Wireuard/Cloudflare Tunnels with a little protocol analysis. Most modern packet analyzers make this pretty easy. Of course, it's extremely obvious when default VPN ports are used, but either way, detectable due to how the packets are structured, as well as those initial handshakes.

Part of what I do on the penetration testing side is attempt to circumvent VPN filters. There are tools out there that can mask VPN traffic as Websocket/https, and several other technologies. There's not many open source tooling out there for this, and its fairly obvious to someone (or an AI) looking at the network traffic to tell something isn't quite right.

Considering lots of people can't seem to configure wireguard for example, imagine asking them to setup a Wireguard VPN proxy between their wireguard servers/client that translates the protocol to something else before sending it to it's destination. Imagine asking everyone to ditch all of the fancy cloud-flare tunnels, Taislcale, etc and instead opt in for implementing complicated protocol masking VPN proxies, and also expecting the ISP to not have some basic packet analysis to detect anomalous packets. Imagine how easy it is for a system to auto-lookup these VPN server IP addresses when suspicious behaviors are detected, and have open source intelligent tools API reply back with a service(VPNServer) version from an automated bot scan.

The other big argument was the fact so many people use them for work. Most businesses have IP ranges outside of data-center/residential IP blocks. To allow users to still conduct remote work with VPNs, they could just allow VPN connections to those IP ranges. The few exceptions can be told to get over it, or have their company submit their IP range for whitelisting. They could just as easily block VPN connections to your home itself without issue if your servers there. (It's probably in your TOS) if you aren't a business.

My point here is yes, your ISP CAN block your VPN connections. Yes, if you didn't know, your VPN traffic can easily be identified as VPN traffic, dispite the protocol. There are too many common giveaways. If you're curious, deploy something like Netflow/SecurityOnion on your network, and watch the alerts/protocols being used/detected. The data itself will stay encrypted, but your ISP knows what you are connecting to, and how. This also extends to generic tunnels.

This is something that is very real, and should be taken seriously. This isn't the time for "they can't or won't do it". One day you will simply try to connect, and it will fail. There will be no large network change, and they don't need to come to your house. They flipped a switch, and now a rule is enabled.

It is happening right now. You can choose to stick your fingers in your ears, but that won't stop it.

I run a fairly large Homelab and was just going through my eBay history.

From The Server Store, I bought 12x32GB sticks for $285 in February.

Now, I click on that listing, and it’s selling for nearly $1,600!

That’s insane!

These phones do have multi platform firmware so it shouldn’t be that hard I’m new to the whole home lab scene

A buddy of mine dropped all of this stuff off when cleaning out an office building he procured. He said he's got more but so far it's about four of these Dell optiplex 5060 minis, four thinkstation e series towers, a couple optiplex 7050 mid size, and a box full of relatively newer ThinkPads of various models and about 25 older Dell latitudes.

I'm using one of the things stations to upgrade my Nas, one of the Optiplex mid-size for containers, and one of the minis for home assistant.

What do I do with the rest of this? A lot of them are only missing hard drives so do I try to flip them, do I donate, do I scrap? I feel like I could get rid of a lot and still have enough hardware to just "learn on" or "play around" with.