Selfhosted

37814 readers

492 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

187

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

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] someguy3 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

God damn. What are the specs on those? I gotta check out some government auctions.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

4th gen intel i5s, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs, so not terrible for a basic Windows desktop even today (except of course for the fact that no supported Windows desktop operating system will officially support these system come Q4 2025)

But don't get your hopes up, when I've bid on auctions like this before the lots have gone for closer to $80 per computer, so I was genuinely surprised I could win with such a low bid. Also every state has entirely different auction setups. When I've looked into it in the past, some just dump everything to a third party auction, some only do an in-person auction annually at a central auction house, and some have a snazzy dedicated auction site. Oh and because its the US, states do it differently from the federal government. So it might take some research and digging around to find the most convenient option for wherever you are (which could just be making a friend in an IT department somewhere that will let you dumpster dive)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

They're actually decent. Congratulations!