[ale] Anyone out there?

[Solomon Peachy]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 10:01:49AM -0400, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
> Since my daily driver became twin super computers I can't even look at the
> off-lease/warranty gear from eBay any more without wasting too much time
> figuring out what else it would need to be a baby testing environment for
> work stuff.  "So 3-5 of those, more ram for each, a triplet of 2U drive
> boxes for lustre and new switch...." And suddenly that $250 used server
> morphs into a $15k 10 node cluster with a $400/month power bill to do....
> nothing.

Hah, that's what I think when I see the various "home lab porn" photos 
on the /r/homelab subreddit -- it seems most of the folks there have an 
equipment/complexity fetish, and only try to come up with uses for all 
that gear well after they see their first power bill.  (/r/selfhosted 
falls under this same complexity acquisition syndrome too, and I say 
that as someone who's been selfhosting for.. geez, 25 years now..)

Not that I'm entirely immune from that problem -- But now that all of my 
equipment is back under one roof/site with <2Mbps Up DSL, a lot of the 
stuff I had running is now pointless/impractical, and there's no point in 
continuing to pay the power bill to keep it all online.

So I'm going to consolidate, but I genuinely need the raw compute a 
beefy box (ie >=16c/32t) or four brings and I can't justify the expense 
of a more modern/efficient system in the same general performance class.
> I'm beginning to think that HPC may be an addiction best treated with
> low-tech hobbies like gardening and metalsmith work. Just need to build out
> that CNC plasma cutter with a small cluster for a blender render farm to
> drive it....

I now live in the middle of 30 densely-wooded acres. There's no shortage 
of meatspace activities... and I've found I much prefer those to staring 
into screens.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
                                      @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL                      speachy (libra.chat)
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