this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
41 points (93.6% liked)

Selfhosted

44206 readers
886 users here now

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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. 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.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I got a stack of PCS that are very similar if not identical. Third gen i7, 8 gigs of ram, one terabyte hdd, all but one are the same HP model with the same motherboard, etc too. I upgraded the RAM in a few of them, and I have enough spare TB hard drives to put an extra in each. Two have Nvidia GeForce 210 gpus, and the unique one out of the bunch I'll probably throw in a spare RX 570 I have.

But, what to do with them? Easiest answer is probably sell them all for $75 each but that's not what we do here, right? Right now I'm assuming they all support w o l and I can easily set up ansible/awx for orchestration. I'm just looking for some fun experiments, projects, or actual uses for this Tower of PC towers

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 6 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

I would look into setting up a proxmox cluster ~~with high availability~~ on them and from there you can look into fun projects that you can run as proxmox vms or lxcs.
https://www.xda-developers.com/proxmox-cluster-guide/
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/High_Availability

edit: HA seems to require a shared disk, such as a SAN or NAS.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 6 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

You should be able to do HA with ceph, I think. You can do almost-HA with zfs mirrors, where instead of instant failover you only lose data up to the last mirror sync (a few minutes max).

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 3 points 17 hours ago

Ah right, that rings a bell. Proxmox and Ceph sounds like a perfect experiment for OPs hardware. :)
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pveceph.html

[–] fikniefnadjofullinn@feddit.is 2 points 11 hours ago

Ceph is great, we run critical infra at work on proxmox with ceph. Very reliable in my experience. It was definitely helpful for me to have ceph experience from my home cluster when starting there.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Eh... Maybe for learning.

Although they technically support vt-d, performance on 13-year-old machines will be pretty abysmal by today's standards.

[–] 486@lemmy.world 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

They are not too terrible really. 3rd gen i7 is the Ivy Bridge generation, so 22 nm. For many homelab server tasks the CPUs would be just fine. Power efficiency is of course worse than modern CPUs, but way better than the previous 32 nm Sandybridge generation. I had such a system with integrated graphics and one SSD and that drew 15 W at idle at the wall.

[–] earphone843@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 hours ago

My first gen i7 would still be going strong if the mobo hadn't started dying. Especially running Linux.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, I focused on the I’m just looking for some fun experiments, projects part.
I wouldn't use the machines for anything other than experimenting for fun, they're power hungry too if counting per performance.

[–] 486@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The at load efficency isn't always the most important metric, depending on what you are using the machines for. If they are mostly idle, efficiency isn't too bad. Many server tasks don't load the CPU to the fullest anyway.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

That's true, if there's no load then the difference isn't much money.
I'm running a NAS, some game servers, a forgejo instance and a jellyfin server and more on my machine so it's never truly idle and I forgot to think about that metric.

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Slap a few zigbee smart plugs into your setup, cluster them in Home Assistant, and measure the total power draw. That's what I do. It's eye-opening... I learned that my 5800X3D/7900XTX gaming PC is capable of pulling exponentially more power than my entire server cluster. I shut that thing off when I'm not using it now haha.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

My server has a gaming vm with gpu passthrough (6650 XT). With my vm powered on and idle the whole server draws about 60w-65w. Monitor not included.

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Damn, that's impressive. My rig idles at ~110W, but I've heard that the 5800X3D just....does that. Especially so with the fact that it has AMD's beefiest GPU.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago

I went for a tiny Ryzen 7600 (no X), so it comes at the cost of a worse cpu and worse gpu. :)

[–] lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Even first gen i-series Intel CPUs support VT-d. I had an i7-870 that ran my entire setup under Proxmox for several years, until early 2023.

What you really need is RAM. In my case, ~32GB per node in a three-machine cluster is not quite enough, but a 4c/8t CPU is more than plenty.