Another Closet PC!

[Cramig88]

hello all my tech buddies!

 

now, forewarning, lol...  this is exactly what it sounds like - a pc dug out of the closet!  lets see what we cant... do with it!

old HP ProBook 4535s, seems to have a whopping 4gb installed and ~360gb HDD.  Were also paired with an AMD E2-3000M APU (look at that potential!), dual core and a whopping 1,800mhz!  hey, giving it credit, each cycle counts!
 

admittedly, this thing is a piece.  the monitor dont even work, i use an external.  whatever.  But, not all hope is lost.  I do have extra ram for this, apparently it supports 32g on 4 dimms maximum.  duh it will take an ssd, i can prob replace the CD drive with a SATA.  yada yada...
but why?  In reality it probably eats more power than its worth, right?

 

possibly, so thats where i am at a crossroads.  I do have a raspberry pi.  think its a 3?  i dono, its got 8gb of ram, i used to use it as a RetroPie box but now its in the closet.  Although the stupid mini-hdmi broke on it so yeah.  Its been so long since i set the thing up, but im pretty sure its set to boot off the SSD thats in there - 1tb.  I think repurposing the pi, might be more... cost effective.  question is how, i dont have a mini hdmi.  sure i could SSH but how the crap do i do that with retropie on there?

anywho ~

as of now i have a HP 8570w and 8670w.  Theyre both awesome, oness got 3 SSDs in it, the other 4.  yes, replaced the CD drive for sata on either.  32g ram on 4 dimms.  CPUs are ok for their age, intel somethings.  But the coolest thing?  the 8570w has a Quadro 2000M and the 8670w has a 5010m - between the two thats a good amount of GPU!

any ideas on how i should re-do my homelab?  i think the closet hp is trash, as mentioned - not even worth the voltage to power it on.  how can i share resources using VFIO (or otherwise) so if i needed to gpu encode i could use either the k2000m or the 5010m... or both?

 

hey, about time to fix my home lab proper.  any ideas?  At the moment I just use plex to stream media and it isnt doing very well.  Must have something to do with a windows update... yes, thats why im asking for help on OS deployment.
it should be mentioned im used to using windows datacenter\server to manage clusters and junk.  very unfamiliar with dockers\proxmox but i have zero problem learning

 

thanks!

[jaslion]

6 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

hey, about time to fix my home lab proper.

Get a simple decently powerfull desktop and call it done. All devicres here are like not what you wanna do this with. Also laptop fans on 24/7 = very quick fan death. 

 

A 8th gen i5 has more cpu power than the devices combined and the igpu is actually GOOD at transcoding as it has many more newer features like h265 encoding and such. You simply just need a singlr proper device and a i5 8th gen random.office desktop is like 100$ if even and the minimum starting point

 

9 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

se plex to stream

You dont have the neccesary cpu power to encode heavily if you turn off transcoding it will go better as long as your end devices are capable.

 

10 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

but why?  In reality it probably eats more power than its worth, right?

It is beyond use. 10$ microcomputers are faster than it.

 

 

[Cramig88]

Well I figured out the bottleneck and it wasn’t the “crappy” computer

in fact it supports h264/5 encoding natively, the cpu (both laptops)

 

yes I get your point, one pc blah blah. Yes, I have that. But I don’t exactly wanna keep a 2500w pc up all day. Yes, two psu’s, 1500platinum and a 1000w (Corsair/seasonic)

 

anyways!  Old pc’s or not they still have use. Especially since, currently, I have a jbod/raid/something virtual hard drive/s. It’s networked between a number of other computers. Nice cause it don’t matter what size each drive/partition is - it’ll just take it or a combination as one “drive”. Networked even. Pretty neat. Idk set it up back in college

 

idea is I wanna redo it so I can incorporate containers. I keep seeing junk how ppl search for a movie, use sonaar or something, remote qtor, and blam.

but… I got 1tb drives mapped all over the house  and a 14tb HHD (yikes!)

if anybody’s got ideas or a link to share, I’m all for it

 

 outside of that I’m gonna fix my U2 server and rebuild my domain. Tons more storage and reliability on that guy. Still, not sure how dockers work… more like virtual machines in the background?  Webhooks?

Why bother docker if I could, idk, do VMs

clueless on that. Suppose I’ll google around