Over the past few years ive gotten desktops from various smaller thrift stores but not i feel like i have too many and im not sure what to so with them? Do i save them and turn them into a bugger project? Do i make a nas out of one of them? Im stumped theres so many things to do with a pc that i dont know where to start, or if this is even the right place to post in?
I pretty much saved theses from e-waste and scalpers but most of the machines are devices nobody wants or has a issue.
I have some hardware from like 2008 running my entire home’s infrastructure. Jellyfin, Kavita, home automation, etc.
Solar panels and cryptocurency mining
Explain the former
I think they mean use solar to keep the price of the electricity consumption down. It is probably a joke since old gear is going to drink a lot of juice cryptomining.
Go to a local solar shop and give them money.
Cheap Linux desktops for a charity?
First of all: get rid of the broken ones. You’re not doing anything with the running systems, so there’s no need to hang on to the ones that don’t run.
Next, make a list of the things you want to do and start doing them.
If you’re worried about power consumption, don’t be. If you’re still worried about power consumption, get an inline watt meter (a kill-a-watt), take some measurements, do the math and feel at ease. If you don’t feel at ease, look up wake on lan. You can have powered down computers turn back on when they get a packet so you don’t need to worry about power consumption.
When you feel like you’ve done enough stuff, get rid of the computers you’re not using.
Repair what’s broken, slap Linux on them and donate to charities.
Yeep there are quite a few of these that get them into the hands of disadvanteged people or underfunded schools and such.
This.
If you’re anywhere near PDX,
theres so many things to do with a pc that i dont know where to start
Pick the first project that you think of and chase it down. If it sucks, then reformat the drive and do something else. Video game systems and file servers are great. So is installing a different OS on each, just to experience the differences side by side.
Do NOT continue “analysis paralysis”.
For any machines that are too inefficient to be worth continuing to compute with, you could at least save the power supplies for electronics projects. I’ve got some 12V addressable RGB Christmas lights being powered by an old ATX power supply, for example.
I power my 3d printer with a dodgy atx psu but it is like 700 watts xD a little overkill.
Explore weird OSs! I got an old Celeron D workstation just for playing around with weird old operating systems.
Its got a 32 bit bios but 64 bit celeron, so the grub stuff has been fund 😅
Some ideas:
- webserver (e.g. for a little personal website, maybe even host some fediverse things)
- irc
- weather monitor
- distro tester
- local LLM ~(they’re getting more and more efficient)~
If you’ve several of similar performance, you could:
- host lan parties, for classic games. Maybe some Quake, OpenTTD, Luanti
I recently turned every old junker and some nicer ones into a Harvester cluster. The really old ones I use as cold storage devices that I actually shut off when I don’t need them.
Dooe
Pretty sure there should be some nonprofit that will gladly get and assemble them so i.e. children on remote places can have a computer.
How do i find a charity/place who will take them?
Turn them into a Kebernetes or a Proxmox cluster.
And use CEPH as your filesystem.
A lot, depending on your interests and the hardware itself. I’m running a NAS (TrueNAS) on an old machine that also runs a bittorrent client and immich as TrueNAS “apps.” I’m running an *arr stack and jellyfin on another old machine. I’ve got another old machine running an i2p router, hyphanet node, and a few other services. In the past, I’ve used old machines as routers (pfsense), openhab/home assistant machines, game servers, ZoneMinder server, etc.
I’m in a similar boat. I use old computers for spare parts and hobby projects (e.g. I did Linux From Scratch on an old second-hand Thinkpad I picked up on a whim). I think cheap second hand computers are great for tinkerers e.g. you can flash custom firmware without worrying about bricking the mobo.
You could also use them as servers if you have any services you want to host.
Also if you truly have no use for them, fix them up, install something like Linux Mint on them, and give them away.
How old are we talking?
- Anything before core iX series is not recommended to be used as a server (missing instruction sets, low efficiency etc.).It could still be used for fun projects like installing gentoo or old redhat with plasma 2.
- If you have Core iX cpu (preferably 3rd gen or newer) you xan host some services, but look into c/selfhosted if you’re interested in that.
- You could also experiment with Kubernetes and combine lots of bad PCs into one less bad PC.
In the end PCs are useful only if you can run useful sodtware on them, but besides nostalgia there ain’t much use I see in them.
You can eke a lot of use out of an old computer as long as it’s not a public server. I ran my sister’s old Celeron laptop as a Debian server for doing local sftp file transfers at my parents’ house when visiting there for holidays, which it was perfectly useful for until like 2018, when it finally fully died. In the end it ran as a server more years than it was useful as a windows workstation.
I have a mix of eras of computer ranging from ddr to ddr3. most of what i have is from the windows 7 era, my “collection” mostly contains dell OptiPlex’s or whatever looks neat.
Ive heard you can do alot with a dell OptiPlex but i want to make a nas but im unsure how well it would be to store personal files with?
Since there are a lot of OptiPlexses with different specs I will give you a general advice for making home servers.
Use newest desktop you have and/or the one that took the least beating since you will need all the perfotmance and uptime you can get.
If you opt for used storage (like some hard drives you have), make them into RAID with redundancy (at lrast one possible drive failiure, preferably two if you can).
Also look for power efficiency, so if you have a laptop (and can add at least 2 drives in it for RAID) or a recent i3 or i5 dekstop (or even i7 if undervolted) that would be your best bet.
Also look for decent network interface card. Try to avoid 10/100mbit and look for 1gbit, though I doubt that old PCs can even push 1gbit. Also make sure that the LAN plays nice with linux.
For the OS, use something stable like debian, or if you want to thinker Alpine is fun and also really stable. Also Ubuntu Server is a solid choice.
When deploying services like a file server if you just want something that works (or at least should be easier than other options) YunoHost or CasaOS are your friends, but you can learn docker (or run without encapsulation) and nginx (or other reverse proxy I don’t care).
For a file server everyone has their preference, but I use SeaFile since it is crossflatform and simple with good integration.
As I said, for any questions about selfhosting just hit c/selfhosted and ask away.
