A homelabber/sysadmin midlife crisis

https://lemmy.world/post/22026965

A homelabber/sysadmin midlife crisis - Lemmy.World

Meanwhile…

looks at old Thinkpad and raspi

You can get old servers on eBay for surprisingly little money, like this PowerEdge T410 for $200. Add some drives, install TrueNAS SCALE and you’ve got a good home server platform.
Dell PowerEdge T410 Server Xeon [email protected] 64GB RAM, 2TB HDD + RAID | eBay

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eBay

I have a ThinkServer with a similar Xeon, running proxmox -> Debian, so I was looking like “huh, interesting” until I saw the internals.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck all that. Damn it Dell, quit your weird bullshit. It’s just a motherboard, cpu, cooler, and ram. Slap in intake and exhaust fans. Figure it the fuck out.

Hmm, I don’t have direct experience with ThinkServers, but what I see on eBay looks like standard ATX hardware… which is not really what you want in a server.

The Dell motherboard has dual CPU sockets and 8 RAM slots. The PSUs are not the common ATX desktop format because there are 2 of them and they are hot swappable. This is basically a rack server repacked into a desktop tower case, not an ATX desktop with a server CPU socket.