alt Hacker NewsI've had "servers" or a "homelab" at home for de3cades. I stopped a while ago when I burned out. About 4 month ago, I bought a new motherboard and graphics card for my desktop and dropped the old ones into a $70 case I got from Best Buy and put Ubuntu on it. I think I spent 10x that on memory for my new desktop, but that's just a passing grumble. The new server now runs transcription and embeddings for me on the old GPU. That motherboard is still plenty fast, but pushing 8 years old now. That's the advantage of buying a nice board from the outset.
The rest of the lab is a few ephemeral instances on Google, with dual A100s that spin up when I need to train things.
I put Ubuntu on the old beast, and never touch it. If the power goes out, it automatically comes on and Docker launches all the services when it comes up.
About the only thing that needs watching is the tiny SDR radio plugged into it, which I use for pure random numbers and talking to it with a hand held radio from the other house. Sometimes I have to unplug it and then plug it back in to get it back into service. No amount of finagling seems to fix it from software.
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When I found Tesla P100s on ebay for $75 I thought I was getting a cheap server, but 1/3 of the total cost was RAM. Sorry, first time I've built a computer since the shortage.
I got sick of the work around it, so one weekend recently, while my partner was out of town, I used Claude to help re-architect my whole homelab to be effectively 100% IaC with OpenTofu and Salt. Went through the whole architecture, networking, etc. Now I would just need to pull down the repo to my Mac and can spin everything up via PXE to install Proxmox, Ubuntu, etc., and then I have a scheduled golden image build, this can spin up my network devices with a bunch of VLANs and east-west firewalls, Kea and Unbound, even more esoteric things like a VM that passes through a USB ADS-B receiver. It spins up Talos to drive a Kubernetes cluster and everything from there. The only thing it can't (or doesn't?) manage is my Synology servers.
> About the only thing that needs watching is the tiny SDR radio plugged into it, which I use for pure random numbers and talking to it with a hand held radio from the other house.
You are an interesting person! We would be friends IRL :-)
May I ask what you use the pure random numbers for? And what you use the radio link for?