42

Curious what you've got installed on it. What do you use a lot but took awhile to find? What do you recommend?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Swintoodles@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I built a massive overkill NAS with the intention of turning it into a full blown home server. That fizzled out after a while (partially because the setup I went with didn't have GPU power options on the server PSUs, and fenangling an ATX PSU in there was too sketchy for me), so now it's a power hog that just holds files. I just turn it on to use the files, then flip it back off to save on its ridiculous idle power costs.

In hindsight I'd have gone with a lighter motherboard/CPU combo and kept the server grade stuff for a separate unit. The NAS doesn't need more than a beefy NIC and a SAS drive controller, and those are only x8 PCIE slots at most.

Also I use TrueNAS scale, more work to set up than UNRAID but the ZFS architecture seemed too good to ignore.

[-] Parsnip8904@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

A GPU isn't really necessary for home server unless you want to do lots of client side transcoding. I have a powerhungry server that runs a VM offering samba and nfs shares as well as a bunch of other vms, lxc containers and docker containers, with a full *arr stack, Plex, jellyfin, a jupyterlab instance, pihole and a bunch of other stuff.

[-] Swintoodles@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I was trying to do some fancy stuff like GPU passthrough to make the ultimate all in one unit that I could have 2 or 3 GPUS in and have several VMs running games independently, or at least the option to spin it up for a friend if they came over. I'm probably not quite sophisticated enough to pull that off anyways, and the use case was too uncommon to bother with after unga bungaing a power distribution board after a hard day of work.

[-] Parsnip8904@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Ah now I get it. You'll probably need an expensive PSU to make that work. I'm sure there would be some option though in the server segment for people building GPU clusters.

[-] Swintoodles@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I was trying to go all the way when I should have compartmentalized it a bit and just had two computers instead of one superbeast. The server PSUs aren't super expensive relatively speaking, 1U hotswap 1200W PSUs with 94% efficiency are like $100. Problem was that the power distribution board I had didn't have GPU power connectors, only CPU power connectors, and tired me wasn't going to accept no for an answer and thus let out the magic smoke in it. I got lucky and the distribution board seems to be the intended failure point in these things, so the expensive motherboard and components got by unscathed (I think, I never used the GPU, and it was just some cheap Ebay thing). Still a fairly costly mistake that I should have avoided, but I was tired that night and wanted something to just work out.

[-] Parsnip8904@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

That's quite interesting. I would have thought that they were more expensive than that. I've been there too. You're doing a bunch of stuff, tired and just want it to somehow work. What have you been doing with the build after that, if you don't mind me asking?

[-] Swintoodles@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Was going to make it a sort of central computer that could centralize all the computing for several members of the family. Was hoping to get a basic laptop that could hook into the unit and play games/program on a virtual machine with graphics far above what the laptop could have handled, plus the aforementioned spin up of more machines for friends. Craft Computing had a lot of fun computing setups I wanted to learn and emulate. I would have also had the standard suite of video services and general tomfoolery. Maybe dip into crypto mining with idle time later on. Lots of ideas that somewhat fizzled out.

[-] Parsnip8904@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

That sounds really interesting. I have some VMs set up in a similar way for family memeber though they're very low power. They're mostly used to ease the transition from windows to Linux. I hope you get to do it again sometime :)

this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
42 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37613 readers
188 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS