this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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I rescued an office spec HP desktop from a trash heap and upgraded it with second hand components from https://computerstoreberlin.de/?lang=eng. Its running Ubuntu server and I use it as a wordpress dev server and also my yt-dlp machine which dumps the files into a samba share. I'm very proud of it
yeah, you can get quite damn far with something like that. best other advice I can give you is to make sure your provisioning and backups are solid (because something will break sometime), and to keep an eye on power draw
not everything needs to be 902834098234 cores and distributed systems shit
the backups is good advice. I need to put in a second drive and work out how to make it keep a backup. I'm learning all that as I go.
As for power draw, I only turn it on when I need it and it's not connected to a display - just ssh-ing into it, so hopefully not wasting too much juice.
older-era computers aren't all great on power. the different between something like a c2d and i3 was immense. it's still absolutely fucking mental how little power the apple arm shit draws (for what it does). something like a kill-a-watt or so would be the easiest to do some measurement
I'll hit you up elsewhere a bit later and share some ideas for backup :)
It had an i3 which I bumped up to an i5-750 (it only cost 4 euros) but it's socket 1156 era, so probably still rather inefficient compared to recent gens, right?
thanks! that would be great. I already have a NAS with redundancy for my important stuff, but I'm starting to build a large archive of downloaded youtube videos for research projects and I would hate to lose them.
for backups have a look at kopia. not only for the functionality, but for the fact that this whole thing is a static-linked single go binary. drop it where you need it, and you're done.
I'm using two 16TB HDDs in a Raid 1 configuration (one mirrors the other) on my Linux Mint daily driver. I just set it up with mdadm. There are obviously much more complicated ways, but this was simple and convenient for my needs right now.