[HN Gopher] My Homelab Build
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       My Homelab Build
        
       Author : throwaway894345
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2021-06-09 16:27 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (christine.website)
 (TXT) w3m dump (christine.website)
        
       | ramshanker wrote:
       | Buying integrated graphics CPU because discrete GPUs are
       | impossible to find. THIS. is my pain too right now. Can't wait
       | for the Crypto bubble to burst.
        
         | throwaway894345 wrote:
         | Why aren't the crypto folks buying up all of the integrated
         | graphics CPUs as well?
        
           | Macha wrote:
           | * Poor support for APIs used to perform compute on GPUs
           | 
           | * Poor area density. If you were to try mine with igpus, you
           | need one system per igpu, and even if you just stacked
           | motherboards and power supplies together in some sort of
           | custom case, you clearly get a lot more compute per area with
           | dgpus.
           | 
           | * Poor performance.
        
             | throwaway894345 wrote:
             | No doubt that they're poorer performance than discrete
             | GPUs, but given the scarcity and cost of the latter I would
             | think they would settle for integrated gpus rather than no
             | gpus at all?
        
               | Macha wrote:
               | Mining isn't free. You need to pay for space and power
               | (especially when we're talking about the large scale
               | miners capable of making an impact on the hardware
               | supply). With most bitcoin like coins, the hashrate of
               | the network has diminishing returns as the difficulty
               | increases and the amount of compute resources needed to
               | mine blocks at a decent rate increases. If your computing
               | capabilities are worse than your competitors, it's
               | unlikely you'll make a profit (which is part of why
               | bitcoin mining is the land of ASICs these days, gpu/cpu
               | mining of bitcoin doesn't happen, most gpu miners mine
               | ethereum or monero, then if they want bitcoin sell that
               | and buy bitcoin).
        
           | InvaderFizz wrote:
           | Cost/benefit. The iGPUs are low hash, you only get one per
           | complete system. With dGPUs, you can stack 3-4 into a single
           | system, and each one of those is orders of magnitude more
           | powerful than the iGPU.
        
         | pickle-wizard wrote:
         | When I upgraded my homelab last year, I got around this by
         | buying a motherboard with IPMI. It has a cheap little Aspeed
         | video card on board. I also get the advantage of a built in IP
         | KVM, remote power control, and a virtual CD-ROM. Basically all
         | the stuff you get in a Dell iDRAC or HP iLO, but in a micro-ATX
         | board.
        
           | mech422 wrote:
           | I gave up on IPMI/DRAC/ILO on my old server equipment - it
           | was the most fragile part of the machines.
           | 
           | I ended up just getting a used Raritan IP KVM off ebay, and
           | its worked perfectly.
        
         | exo762 wrote:
         | Ethereum is to transition to PoS late 2021 / early 2022.
         | https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/
         | 
         | Rest of GPU-mining is likely small enough so that we will see
         | lots of GPUs on second-hand market.
        
       | loganwedwards wrote:
       | Entertaining read. I enjoyed the dialogue-like banter. Nice write
       | up!
        
       | Macha wrote:
       | Old desktop hardware works pretty well as a server for
       | homelab/personal use. My server is mainly cast off parts from my
       | desktop, and initially it was using a 4670k + 16GB RAM. Running
       | vaultwarden (nee bitwarden_rs), jellyfin, gotify, graylog,
       | Foundry VTT, unbound, a local Arch package repo, calibre-web.
       | 
       | Performance was pretty fine, it turns out even services like
       | jellyfin and foundry don't have much in the way of idle usage and
       | a personal server doesn't have much in the way of multiple users.
       | It's since been upgraded to a 3900x, mostly to justify
       | 3900x->5900x upgrade in my gaming machine, but also because there
       | were two tasks it got cpu bound:
       | 
       | 1. Running multiple h265 hevc to h264 transcodes for jellyfin - I
       | don't have a GPU with supported video acceleration support, since
       | both the r9 290x and igpu on the i5 were too old for both h265
       | decoding or h264 encoding.
       | 
       | 2. Writing to my storage array was actually CPU limited (it's got
       | lvmraid raid 6 on LUKS devices, LUKS on LVM would likely have
       | worked better than LVM on LUKS here).
        
       | jvanderbot wrote:
       | Not to be picky but: "Then I tried pinging it from the same
       | machine, another machine in the same room, another server on the
       | same continent and then finally another server on the same
       | planet. "
       | 
       | Could just be 4 machines in the same room.
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-09 23:02 UTC)