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

  • GetAwayWithThis@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    9·
    3 hours ago

    Since they are old, i would imagine the power efficiency isn’t the best on them for a 24/7 HA cluster at home. Unless you have an abundance of solar power or something. So I would use them as a test branch for whatever I want to do for self-hosting and learning

    I would use them as learning platform for myself. Play with Active Directory DCs, replicataion, failover, recovery, networking etc. Just because more practice in that is what would be needed for advancement at work.

    Others mentioned Kubernetes and Proxmox clustering. I could also use some sacrificial storage and compute to play around with those technologies so I could improve my self-hosted services.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      3 hours ago

      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).

    • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      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.worldEnglish
        4·
        3 hours ago

        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.

      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        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.worldEnglish
          4·
          3 hours ago

          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.xyzEnglish
            2·
            3 hours ago

            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.

  • MXX53@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    3 hours ago

    I would want to do a cluster. Just to learn how that works. But just thinking of the electricity cost, I would personally donate them.

    • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn’t even have to have HDs for every system.

      These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    Refurb all, sell all but three, set up a cluster. Then when you’re satisfied, sell those three and use all the money to buy one or two systems with modern hardware.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    I’m not sure about anything useful. Best thing would probably be to install Linux and donate them to people in need. For experimentation, sure, set up a Beowulf Cluster, learn FreeBSD, Orchestration, Kubernetes, Ansible… Use them to test your microservice architecture software projects, software-defined networking…