My VMs are also by function.  Physical boxes that i actually use and not just testing or something ( other than the farm servers ) are things like Village ( ya, same as my now non existent bbs, comes from the 1960s TV show. one of my earliest memories... huge fan. ) wonderland, Moya..    all 'places' so its a 'theme'

At the office when i was still in charge of things, they were the serial numbers... Boring but useful.

Wed Jan 10 2024 20:00:28 EST from darknetuser

For home systems, I name them after the place they are located on, so I have machines called wardrobe, bedside... you get the idea.

For production I tend to call things by their function, so you get reverseproxy, mainmail, backupmail...

Depends on use case. If you are a hard core gamer, you want power. if you are an AI nut, you *need* it.. 

But if you just want to watch cat videos, read email and do a spreadsheet every so often.. ya it dont matter that much, once you reach a certain threshold. 

Same for your incoming network line.. ( bringing it back to the room topic :)  ) if all you want to do is stream a couple cat videos at the same time and read mail.. dont need much. But if you want to do hard core multi player games, you need bandwidth.  

Wed Jan 10 2024 19:56:10 EST from darknetuser

IMO for home systems it is more important to get hardware that has features than hardware that has raw horsepower.

I don't have a naming scheme, everything is named on the fly with whatever seems appropriate.

While im not fond of them as they are overpriced for what they are, there are are a few x86 ( both intel and amd ) SBCs out there. But dont expect them to be speed demons either.    And instead of getting cases, could build a small rack for them.

Thu Jan 11 2024 10:13:26 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

I really, really, really want to find hardware that can run on 12 volts.

Oh and didnt think of it before i posted, but Bmax has mall NUCs that run on 12v ( i went and checked )

Not high end stuff unless you pay what i feel is silly prices and better spent elsewhere, but they come with eMMC to boot and a M.2 slot so would be good for storage arrays at least.  I got one to upgrade my old print server since my printer is basically windows only without a lot of trouble..  its the only bit of windows i allow in the house other than my VM on my shops laptop.  I know i can get a new printer, but i print so rarely i cant justify it.

I think i paid 75 bucks for this one, its a celeron N100 or something. has 6gb ram. More than enough to print with, but not much else.

My laptop is solid state.  PCIe3 NVMe.  One time I took all 40GB of my IRIX files and put them into a tar file.  No compression, the operation was done in 20 seconds.  40GB read, 40GB written, 20 seconds.  Would have taken a lot longer with SATA SSD, and I hate to imagine how long it would have taken on spinning metal.  NVMe is the way to go.  It faster than a cat with the zoomies.

NVMe is obviously the fastest, but requires a machine with the M.2 slot.  Several of them, in fact, to do a reliable cluster.

As far as power, a little searching reveals that there is something called a "PicoPSU" that snaps right into an ATX motherboard.  It looks like this:

12 volts in, motherboard voltages out, plus power for a couple of SATA devices.  I'll bet I could snag a set of cheapo mini-ITX motherboards and use PicoPSU modules to run them off a single 12 volt power bus.

Next test will be to see how the various types of storage perform over a 1 Gbps network.  No point in doing clustered storage if the network becomes a bottleneck.

Agreed, if your machine supports it. 

Personally i have not tried any of those nvme to sata adapters. Might be faster than regular ssd, i donno if the bandwidth is there to see a difference.   But either way, ya, ssd is better than moving parts by a long shot..

Thu Jan 11 2024 12:01:06 EST from LadySerenaKitty

My laptop is solid state.  PCIe3 NVMe.  One time I took all 40GB of my IRIX files and put them into a tar file.  No compression, the operation was done in 20 seconds.  40GB read, 40GB written, 20 seconds.  Would have taken a lot longer with SATA SSD, and I hate to imagine how long it would have taken on spinning metal.  NVMe is the way to go.  It faster than a cat with the zoomies.

Mine does, but they charge you like 5 bucks a month extra.  I found out the hard way. Comcast didnt, and each IP was routable, tho it was DHCP so did change like once a year or so. I read the stuff on the fiber people, it was not mentioned.  Until it didnt work.. called up, "i cant, is it because" .. "oh, you have to order this extra feature..."  really? why didnt you tell this up front? Id still have switched but not been frustrated when things broke ... But its static at least. 

Ya a router that gets pissed off every so often, would suck. and suck bad.     Tried taking the case off and sticking a big ass fan on it?

Thu Jan 11 2024 12:17:57 EST from darknetuser

Dunno. An ISP that does give you a public routable IP and doesn't force a lame ONT+Router combo on you is better than a CGNated ISP subscription behind an ONT-Router combo that overheats and needs reboot every 12 hours, and can't be bypassed, even if the latter gives you x100 the bandwidth.

Supposedly I am the sort of nerd that would need a tough bandwidth subscription because everytime my backup scripts trigger a full level 0 dump, they upload 6 Tb to storage. And that is only the workstation. I'd love to be able to upload over the Internet but at things stand, I have to use local storage and then physically move the storage server fom a location to another, lol.


By the way, I think that, for games, latency is more important than bandwidth.

I tried that once, but didnt provide enough power for my board. Went with something a bit bigger. Sort of the size of 2 M.2 cards back to back in length, like a long thin strip. 

Thu Jan 11 2024 12:58:53 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

 

As far as power, a little searching reveals that there is something called a "PicoPSU" that snaps right into an ATX motherboard.  It looks like this:

 

adapters do exist. but like i was saying i dont know about bandwidth, if its worth the effort.  Been tempted to try one just to see, but i have a pile of SSD which do the job.. 

Thu Jan 11 2024 12:58:53 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

NVMe is obviously the fastest, but requires a machine with the M.2 slot.  Several of them, in fact, to do a reliable cluster.