kensand
@kensand@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Has anyone bought from Save My Server before? 3 days ago:
Well then very little of what I said actually applies!
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn’t ideal for data durability. If you’re ok with all that, then go for it. I generally don’t buy used drives because I don’t want to take the additional risk.
I’d be surprised if you can’t find a better deal on used spinning rust though… the shipping alone is probably half the value on a good chunk of sales from SmS.
- Comment on Has anyone bought from Save My Server before? 4 days ago:
I get that, that was also something I used to like about old servers, but let me float a few of the things that I’ve come to realize through my home-lab career to you:
- Raid is perfectly feasible in consumer hardware. If your motherboard doesn’t have enough SATA ports, you can always get an HBA or a JBOD to support for more disks. There’s really no good reason (that I have heard of) for hardware raid today. Just remember raid is not a backup :)
- There are consumer ATX PSUs with redundancy. However, the only reason for PSU redundancy is when you cannot tolerate downtime due to a PSU or UPS failure, and that redundancy might save you a few hours of uptime over 10+ years in comparison to a non-redundant consumer PSU that you can go out and buy if it fails. When was the last time you had a (reputable) PSU fail on you? What kind of uptime are you targeting? If you don’t have an answer for that, 99% is very easy to reach even on consumer gear, and is a strong indicator that you don’t need enterprise levels of redundancy. 99% is literally 3 days of downtime per year. Also keep in mind that redundant PSUs are just going to gobble more power and increase operating costs.
- KVM features - this was the big one for me. I wanted to be able to perform out-of-band remote maintenance on my servers. Then I took a leap and got a Sipeed NanoKVM, and I haven’t looked back. there are plenty of them out there - PiKVM is another reputable one. When buying old enterprise servers, you often have to pay for the remote management license, and that is just another added cost. Not to mention that they lose support pretty quickly, and you end up running out of date software on one of your most critical interfaces to the machine. A NanoKVM, PiKVM, and others aren’t built into the machine, so they continue to be supported for much longer.
One other thing that I’ll mention and you probably already know - enterprise servers are LOUD - even just a single one can literally sound like a jet engine. That’s not a hyperbolae. If this is your first one, don’t underestimate it. I had my servers in the basement with decent insulation, I used IPMI to throttle the fans back to 10%, and I could still hear the whine on my first floor when everything is quiet. If you end up having to turn down the fans due to noise, you’re going to start having heat issues, and then you’re losing out on performance and shortening component lifespan. Noise-proofing a server is non-trivial - you have to allow air flow still, and where there’s air flow, there’s a path for noise too. My current setups all have 120mm and 140mm fans, and I can barely hear them when I’m working right next to them. My 3D printers are the loud ones in the basement now!
- Comment on Has anyone bought from Save My Server before? 4 days ago:
Yeah, they’re legit. Bought a few servers from them over the years. No major issues, packing was good, reasonable ship time.
Had one case where they sent a different NIC than what was listed. They just shipped me the correct one and told me not to bother sending the old one back.
Stopped buying from them though because I prefer off-the-shelf modern consumer hardware nowadays. The real cost is always power consumption, and I prefer to shell out more money up front in exchange for huge savings on power usage down the line. I can always run over to microcenter and replace a part same-day as opposed to ordering it online and hoping it comes soon.
If you’re a home-labber, I’d strongly suggest doing the same. Some of those old enterprise servers just gobble power for not that much compute relative to current day consumer machines.
If I was still buying older servers though, I’d probably be looking at their prices.
What are you considering buying?
- Comment on FYI (opinion.) don't buy an MMU 4 weeks ago:
They have their place. If you only do multicolor prints rarely, but change materials between prints a lot, that’s where they excel.
I have both an MMU (Prusa MK3S + MMU 2) and a toolchanger (very custom Voron 2.4 with Tapchanger), and the MMU gets used plenty to swap filament between prints. I look at my toolchanger as being for color prints, and I usually keep 6 colors of PETG on it. My MMU gets used more as the functional printer with all the engineering filaments on it like TPU, PC, ABS, PA. I rarely have to change filament rolls with this setup.
I am also looking at building one of these Swapper3Ds, which should prevent all the waste from printing multiple colors with the MMU.
- Comment on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation 2 months ago:
I have self-hosted both, although admittedly Gitlab was quite a few years ago. Forgejo is faster and lighter, GitLab is slow and huge. Unless you know you need a very specific GitLab feature, I’d go Forgejo all day.
- Comment on Splitting comic books into panel 4 months ago:
Just following your above link, you could pre-convert your comics using this: framagit.org/nicooo/kumiko
- Comment on Is there a way to avoid those holes? 5 months ago:
To me it looks like tuning your pressure advance might help.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
I have an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra. I hate that it’s proprietary, but in the resin printing world the only non-proprietary option is Prusa, and it was just too small and expensive to justify. My Elegoo doesnt get network connectivity (so no risk of unapproved updates), and I use prusa slicer to slice and then uvtools to convert to the “encrypted” chitubox format. Since the printer isn’t allowed to update, I’m not worried about ever being forced into using chitubox.
I don’t really care about network connectivity for it; the built in camera is useless for me. I just have a rpi zero with a webcam on it for monitoring, and I also have an IOT switch controlled by that pi via a lan-only http server with a toggle button to control its power. If I see a print is failing via the webcam, I just cut power to the whole printer to stop it remotely. This works even outside my LAN via VPN.
I do still have to start prints the old fashioned way using a usb stick. This doesn’t bug me much, since I have to go check on resin levels, make sure there’s no crap in the tank, etc before starting a print anyways. I have a short usb extender cable to avoid wearing out the usb port on the printer itself as well. I have mucked about with using the rpi as a dummy usb drive where I can just upload files to the rpi and then the printer reads off of it via the usb port, but I couldn’t get it working :/
I’m happy enough with the printer itself - it’s fast, reliable (so far) and produces some high quality prints. The price was very reasonable at the time (iirc $450 for the printer, $250 for wash and cure station), all things considered. If someone ever produced a mainboard that supported an open-source firmware for it, I would buy and install it in a heartbeat.
- Comment on Found money. What do? 6 months ago:
I’m assuming there was no ID or contact info with it, since you probably wouldn’t be asking if there was.
Hypothetically, if you were to give it to the police, how would the police know that who the rightful owner is? If I walk into a police station right now and say I lost $200, do you think they would hand over $200 to me? No, I have no way of proving thats my money, and they wouldn’t believe me for a second.
Keep it. Lord knows everyone could probably use an extra few hundred bucks these days…
- Comment on OctoApp, but not from the Play Store? 8 months ago:
It doesnt look too hard to build from source if you want to go that route… You could just make a debug apk and install it with ADB.
- Comment on Self-hosting a Lemmy nodd 11 months ago:
Regardless of whether you are using a block or an allow list, you have to maintain the list…
I’m not sure what your point is; if you want to devote your time, effort, and potential liabilities to it, that’s up to you. I just figured I would share a perspective on why I didn’t want to do that.
I appreciate all the hard work done by instance hosts; using individual Lemmy instances are a privelege, not a right. I would fully understand and not be upset if my home instance were to shut down at a moments notice.
- Comment on Self-hosting a Lemmy nodd 11 months ago:
Sure, but then you’re left with text only and are relying on your blocklist for URLs, which is just going to be a game of whack-a-mole. I personally didn’t want to have to worry about that in my free time, but I’m sure other folks feel differently.
- Comment on Self-hosting a Lemmy nodd 11 months ago:
I self hosted a Lemmy instance for a little while, but I stopped over concerns of malicious actors posting CSAM which would then get federated over to my server. I don’t have the appetite to deal with that, and I’m glad I shut it down because just a few weeks later there was a big instance of it happening all over Lemmy, and I’m sure I would have had to deal with cleaning it up on my server too. Just something to keep in mind.
Otherwise though, the setup process isn’t too complex.
- Comment on There is only 1 choice 11 months ago:
And that choice is Robin Williams. The man was a gem 🥲