This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I’m not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
People used to make their own sites and dedicated forum boards where the norm. With the mess of old hardware floating about, the overall lowering of bandwidth costs, more options being made available and simpler to deploy, and storage in the TBs coming down on price the population is bound to make things personal again one way or another. Being just another profile on some big platform doesn’t have the ‘me’ mark to it that putting your own together does. Have fun with it, break things and make them better, always a new idea to be had.
Unfortunately no old cloud servers or switches on ebay. As such availability of used hardware is more limited in future.
you dont even need big old iron. I run all my containers etc on old business sff pcs and storage on synology. works great
I’m weird, so I have 10G/40G networking and half a rack that would burn 10 kW when all fired up. My major cost issue is power, which is currently 0.7 EUR/kWh though capped at 0.4 EUR/kWh for a while. I could use some more modern hardware but it’s no longer bountiful and cheap.
That is insanely expensive electricity
I agree. Which is why I only run a firewall on a thin client, a low-power 8-core Atom C2758 Proxmox with SSDs and an external HDD and a fanless switch, all for about 70 W total 24/7/365. Any other server is one of the 120 W, 300 W or 500 W kind. These do add up.
@eleitl that’s so expensive. Where do you live?
It’s Germany. Regular rates are some 0.3 EUR/kWh at the moment, I hope to be there by May next year. Meanwhile, I currently make some half of my net power with photovoltaics. It helps to keep the costs down.
Maybe solar can help offsets the power cost? With enough sun and big enough panels, even without batteries you might run your servers for free if your electric company gives you credit for unused solar power during the day.
I’m actually making about 6 kWh/day from photovoltaics since mid-April averaged, which is about half my last year’s total electric energy consumed. I might be able to boost that to 8 kWh/day later this year. This is all while running very little infrastructure, for cost reasons.
oldskool, for something like this you can throw an old nuc on the network
multiple cores is the norm even on budget hardware so a surprising amount of cheap hardware is quite capable.
highly recommend looking into 1L systems. I moved in this direction after realizing i was headed down the same path as you.
Actually, these are mostly dual-socket boxes with lots of cores, ECC RAM and lots of 3.5", 2.5" spindles and SSDs, plus private storage networks, and such.
Instead of a NUC I run a 1U Supermicro 8-core Atom C2758 with 16 GB RAM and SSDs which is quite durable but will die eventually. With more modern hardware I meant something like that, only with onboard 10G and/or 50G (SFP+/SFP28/SFP56) with more and better cores as well as onboard NVMe along with frontal SAS/SATA slots. And of course some larger SSDs to populate these.
Just need to find the right sites. A couple places I’ve gone that seem to pick up a bunch of corporate PLM gear and refurb it are here:
https://techmikeny.com/ https://www.servermonkey.com/
I know about Servermonkey, and the prices there aren’t nice at all. I’m rather sticking with old servers with roughly the same specs, but perhaps twice the wattage and noise, which only run occasionally. The 24/7 stuff is already on a low-power footprint, though I don’t have a successor for that little Supermicro when it bites the dust. I’d rather pay way less than 1 kEUR for it.
I more stay with the other one for purchases, but if nothing else I like SM for their filters/build pages. I used to specifically try and build small and low power, but eventually it became simpler and more efficient to put everything on a couple big boxes and share resources rather than having a bunch of low power dedicated boxes. Does tend to make the office warm though with nearly 1Kw running the stack.
1 kW would cost me some 17 EUR/day. Or over 6100 EUR per year.
There’s normally a lot of used servers on ebay, anything in particular you’re looking for?
I’ve had issues finding 10g switches on ebay, but I know I’ve seen some older enterprisey switches