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I just won an auction for 25 computers. What should I setup on them? (reddthat.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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I placed a low bid on an auction for 25 Elitedesk 800 G1s on a government auction and unexpectedly won (ultimately paying less than $20 per computer)

In the long run I plan on selling 15 or so of them to friends and family for cheap, and I'll probably have 4 with Proxmox, 3 for a lab cluster and 1 for the always-on home server and keep a few for spares and random desktops around the house where I could use one.

But while I have all 25 of them what crazy clustering software/configurations should I run? Any fun benchmarks I should know about that I could run for the lolz?

Edit to add:

Specs based on the auction listing and looking computer models:

4th gen i5s (probably i5-4560s or similar)
8GB of DDR3 RAM
256GB SSDs
Windows 10 Pro (no mention of licenses, so that remains to be seen)
Looks like 3 PCIe Slots (2 1x and 2 16x physically, presumably half-height)

Possible projects I plan on doing:

Proxmox cluster
Baremetal Kubernetes cluster
Harvester HCI cluster (which has the benefit of also being a Rancher cluster)
Automated Windows Image creation, deployment and testing
Pentesting lab
Multi-site enterprise network setup and maintenance
Linpack benchmark then compare to previous TOP500 lists

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[–] seaQueue 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Distcc, maybe gluster. Run a docker swarm setup on pve or something.

Models like those are a little hard to exploit well because of limited network bandwidth between them. Other mini PC models that have a pcie slot are fun because you can jam high speed networking into them along with NVMe then do rapid fail over between machines with very little impact when one goes offline.

If you do want to bump your bandwidth per machine you might be able to repurpose the wlan m2 slot for a 2.5gbe port, but you'll likely have to hang the module out the back through a serial port or something. Aquantia USB modules work well too, those can provide 5gbe fairly stably.

Edit: Oh, you're talking about the larger desktop elitedesk g1, not the USFF tiny machines. Yeah, you can jam whatever hh cards into these you want - go wild.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

From the listing photos these actually have half-height expansion slots! So GPU options are practically nonexistant, but networking and storage is blown wide open for options compared to the miniPCs that are more prevalent now.

[–] seaQueue 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah, you'll be fairly limited as far as GPU solutions go. I have a handful of hh AMD cards kicking around that were originally shipped in t740s and similar but they're really only good for hardware transcoding or hanging extra monitors off the machine - it's difficult to find a hh board with a useful amount of vram for ml/ai tasks.