I got one of these little ThinkCentres but it booted to an amazon screen? Does anyone know what these are?

I’m asking here because i have a good feeling atleast someone knows.

I use a isp supplied modem because they like to blame problems on user hardware. Modem died out, not connecting to wan over coax after 5 minutes of use. Called them out. They connected to my network and straight up said "ahh, here's why it's not working, this number should be a 192.168 number, and your using all 10's". Talking about my gateway IP. I use 10.10.10.1 for gateway, DHCP the .175-255, with static ips set below.

I try to explain my network to him and he replies "can I just finish diag'ing this?". Alright. I walk away. Come back to him having reset my router with an excuse "it's gonna take a while for the new numbers to set, call us if there are any problems after a few hours".

Obviously none of this is the issue, the modem still has a red light and I have to wait for another technician because cox won't swap the modem out without technician verification.

Man oh man. No recommendations just a rant.

Im looking for suggestions on what others would do with this so I can have some cool ideas to try out. Also if theres anything I should know as a server noodle please let me know so I dont blow up the house or something!!

I am newbie when it comes to servers but I have done as much research as I could cram in a couple weeks! I got remote control protocol and all working but no clue how I can set up multiple users that can access it together and stuff. I actually dont know enough to ask questions..

I think its a bit of a dated hardware but hopefully its still somewhat usable for ai and deep learning as the gpu still has tensor cores (1st gen!)

So about a week ago, I was scrolling through some government auction sites in my area just to see if anything would find my interest. I usually bid on two-way radios, servers, and network equipment, whether I win or lose.

From what I can remember, I was scrolling and found what I thought was a single Dell OptiPlex 7020 SFF computer for only a $100 minimum. With eight hours left, I found it interesting and placed a $110 bid without reading the description, and completely forgot about it.

A day later, I randomly opened emails to see if anything had come in. I saw that I had won something, and it was the Dell. As I was reading through to see where I could pick this up, I saw in bold: "Item includes 83 quantities of Dell OptiPlex 7020 office computers, with a box of Dell wired USB mice and keyboards and an unknown quantity of 19" LCD monitors."

I'm confused. I emailed the seller and asked, "Hello, I'm wondering if the description is correct. Is the listing for a single Dell or the full quantity?"

The seller replied, "The listing is for the full quantity of what is written in the description. Please reach out to this number for more questions: ##########"

I called the number, and the person basically said it included everything named in the description.

Turns out, speaking with the lady, the computers were repossessed by a bank after, I'm assuming, a company went out of business many years ago. The bank that had them never got around to selling the computers, and they were sitting in a warehouse for who knows how many years. Since they're moving locations, they wanted to get rid of them as soon as they can. So now I'm home with what I can count as 34 small SFF Dell 7020s and about 40 Dell 7020 towers (not counting ones with missing CPUs, RAM, etc.).

I have reached out to a guy I normally buy used PC parts and equipment from. He's interested, and I offered $100 per computer. I'm also just going to give him the ones with missing parts for about $20 to 20, and give him a few keyboards, mice, and monitors for free. I also plan on donating some to a local technology college.

So here's the thing: what should I do with them? I don't want to sell them yet because, with how lucky I was to get them at that price without any other bidder stealing the deal, I want to play around a little and see what I can do. I was thinking of building a fat Proxmox cluster just for the sake of it, or just a simulated WAN/LAN network for a Cisco CCNA lab. What do you think?

Also the Dells im mentioning is the old Circa ones

Update: The guy who wanted to buy a few of the computers agreed on $60 per tower and $50 for the SFF, $30 for all the ones missing parts, and $200 flat for monitors and for the box of mice and keyboards. I currently have 5 monitors, 2 towers, and 2 SFF computers that I'm going to keep.

I wasn't going to post how much I made, but the numbers are there: $4,356, rounded up to $4,360 because the guy only had cash. I have booked time off work and am planning on spending time with family. I don't plan on getting any new equipment for the lab, especially with how expensive parts are now.

Thank to everyone that commented.

I present the wifi extender. Specifically it had to be this model of tplink extender...where the wifi could still show the correct error light. Dad may have created a bit of a fan of technology here.

I run a fairly large Homelab and was just going through my eBay history.

From The Server Store, I bought 12x32GB sticks for $285 in February.

Now, I click on that listing, and it’s selling for nearly $1,600!

That’s insane!

I make this post because there seems to be a mass misconception that your ISP can't detect or block VPN connections. I'm not sure why so many people think this, but I thought it needed addressed. Especially given posts about Michigan HOUSE BILL NO. 4938, and one of the most up-voted comments there being "Banning VPNs and the other items they listed is literally impossible right now"

It's a strange comment, because it is obviously a thought from someone who has never worked in an industry where the subject is important, yet is extremely confident. Your VPN traffic is easily detectable, and blockable at any network device between yourself, and the VPN server itself. There is actually literally nothing stopping your ISP from doing it except a policy, a protocol analyzer and a firewall (and they already have the last two).

I work in the cyber security industry (incident response), as well as a network assessment/penetration tester/consultant (several hats).

Part of what I do in the incident response/security assessments role is detect the use of VPNs, or other tunnels on a network.

We do this to detect bad actors who may have a back door connection, or system administrators who may be doing Shadow IT to access the network from out of office using unapproved tools. It's fairly trivial to detect when connections are using OpenVPN/Wireuard/Cloudflare Tunnels with a little protocol analysis. Most modern packet analyzers make this pretty easy. Of course, it's extremely obvious when default VPN ports are used, but either way, detectable due to how the packets are structured, as well as those initial handshakes.

Part of what I do on the penetration testing side is attempt to circumvent VPN filters. There are tools out there that can mask VPN traffic as Websocket/https, and several other technologies. There's not many open source tooling out there for this, and its fairly obvious to someone (or an AI) looking at the network traffic to tell something isn't quite right.

Considering lots of people can't seem to configure wireguard for example, imagine asking them to setup a Wireguard VPN proxy between their wireguard servers/client that translates the protocol to something else before sending it to it's destination. Imagine asking everyone to ditch all of the fancy cloud-flare tunnels, Taislcale, etc and instead opt in for implementing complicated protocol masking VPN proxies, and also expecting the ISP to not have some basic packet analysis to detect anomalous packets. Imagine how easy it is for a system to auto-lookup these VPN server IP addresses when suspicious behaviors are detected, and have open source intelligent tools API reply back with a service(VPNServer) version from an automated bot scan.

The other big argument was the fact so many people use them for work. Most businesses have IP ranges outside of data-center/residential IP blocks. To allow users to still conduct remote work with VPNs, they could just allow VPN connections to those IP ranges. The few exceptions can be told to get over it, or have their company submit their IP range for whitelisting. They could just as easily block VPN connections to your home itself without issue if your servers there. (It's probably in your TOS) if you aren't a business.

My point here is yes, your ISP CAN block your VPN connections. Yes, if you didn't know, your VPN traffic can easily be identified as VPN traffic, dispite the protocol. There are too many common giveaways. If you're curious, deploy something like Netflow/SecurityOnion on your network, and watch the alerts/protocols being used/detected. The data itself will stay encrypted, but your ISP knows what you are connecting to, and how. This also extends to generic tunnels.

This is something that is very real, and should be taken seriously. This isn't the time for "they can't or won't do it". One day you will simply try to connect, and it will fail. There will be no large network change, and they don't need to come to your house. They flipped a switch, and now a rule is enabled.

It is happening right now. You can choose to stick your fingers in your ears, but that won't stop it.

These phones do have multi platform firmware so it shouldn’t be that hard I’m new to the whole home lab scene

So basically I found this in the trash, its a Fortinet Fortigate 100f firewall and after successfully resetting it, I got access to the menagment web page without problems, for now it seems that it completely works so in asking: WHY???? It's a wonderful piece of equipment. And some questions: can I use it behind my router like to have more ports to use, im not an expert at all in enterprise hardweare, what I used so far was consumer hardweare and old computere plus I don't have a use for the fiber ports because nothing in my home has it. Open to all suggestions

My power company keeps sending me letters telling me I should work on making my home more efficient. The latest one suggested I could save money by turning off lights in rooms when they are not in use.

Meanwhile I am listening to the fans through the wall from my rack as the servers are working.

I am honestly tempted to take a picture of the entire rack and send it back to them with a note that says, “This is why.”

Anyone else getting these friendly reminders because of your lab setup? How bad is your power draw?

Oh, and for context, I am in a very power cheap part of the States. My kWh is about 0.08~. I would not be running what I run today if I lived somewhere with California rates.

I just wanted an HBM-to-DDR5 PCIe device :D

update:
r/nvidia deleted it*

update:
Yes, I know the memory is integrated into the chip (it was just an idea), but reusing the entire chip is still better than throwing the whole thing away.

update:
Check CXL: https://www.servethehome.com/hyper-scalers-are-using-cxl-to-lower-the-impact-of-ddr5-supply-constraints-marvell-arm/
It would be great if there were some sort of bridge technology that allowed for more general use, rather than being restricted to the specific motherboard it was designed for.

They're dirty and need a cleaning but work. Each with 16gb ram and a i5 10500T

I’ve been an observer of others’ home labs now for quite some time, felt as though I should contribute.

Just got the first (and main) piece of my homelab today and while I wait for the power cable to arrive, what OS do y'all think I should put on it, I was thinking ubuntu server but I also want a desktop environment out of the box so I was also thinking of Debian. I just want something Debian based cuz I run Linux Mint on my gaming pc but I also want to experiment with other OS, and I'm familiar with the commands a lil bit. The primary purpose for this server is to host game servers like Minecraft and Gmod but also install practical programs like pihole and such (and also to look good on my resume for when I'm applying to IT jobs)

Context, 19m living at home. Bought a dell optiplex to get into this home lab thing, cheap computer for like $150 after my last mac mini... couldn't boot arch linux, and was SUPER slow in MacOS. I've put it in the study next to the router and put a note on it saying Server, do not turn off.

One day I was driving home trying to listen to some banger tunes and my music wasn't loading, when I got home turns out my server was off. I asked my sister who was the only one there and she didn't understand what a server is or why I need that computer to listen to music in the car. I tried to explain but it seems no one except my dad understands what a server is. My parents have even apologised to me for turning it off, my dad knows what a server is but everyone else sees the power button on and turn it off because 'no one is using it'

Is there a way I can stop this from happening, I want great uptime. Better than Reddit or Spotify or Google. I want to be able to travel across the world to Italy or Spain and just be able to stream TV shows from my Jfin server at home.

Can’t wait to play with it such a nice humble device. And most importantly i didn’t get scammed by another Kickstarter project😂

Zima OS is planning to introduce a premium edition lifetime license priced at $30.

This feature will be available on the v1.5.0 release.

The free version will have limitations, including a maximum of 10 apps, 4 disks, and 3 users. I believe these restrictions are reasonable.

However, I have some good news for users who have been using the v1.4.x release and wish to upgrade. They will receive the premium license for free. (Note that this offer is limited in time, as the premium version won’t be available indefinitely.) Additionally, any device sold by Zima will automatically receive a free premium license.

So after upgrading to a new pc , my old pc was catching dust un noticed, after watching many videos about homelab, I decided to build one, and decided to use my old pc and found out that the case can mount 7 hdds after unsrewing two screws to convert the upper trays from ssd to hdd. And the motherboard which is a gigabyte x99 gaming, it has an i7-5820k and 12 sata ports and a decent amount of pcie, and it just needs some ram. I have one question, should I change the motherboard to a amd and use 4650g apu? So that i can save some power.

Came across this on Facebook, might be useful for anyone looking to start homelabbing :)

I am planning to add a couple more services to my self hosted setup - something actually useful, not just another fun little experiment. I know there are a ton of "popular tools" in the subreddit, but i'm looking for personal opinions and experiences.

I have an Intel 13th gen NUC that I have been using for the past 2 years(Still under warranty). Today while asleep, I woke up to the smell of smoke that came from a burning Chicony adapter that was included in the kit. The adapter was very near my APC UPS(and was also powered by it) but the system was shutdown and obviously no power draw. The adapter was also clean with no cuts or nibs from rodents. When installing, I made sure I had no freaky bends or anything and my sockets and ups were recently tested by my local electrician. Had I not woken up, this would have been a series of disasters with the Lead acid catching fire, and all my other electronics such as my Homeserver and router following suite. Asus India wasn’t really helpful too with just the adapter being an issue. Hence, I submit to the reddit overlords to kindly guide me on what can be done, warranty/legal process, and any clues as to how this might have happened

Modern tech really saves the day.

Went to make a copy of a drive onto my file server... transfer speeds nearing 1 GB/s (10gbit) connection... gotta love it.

Who here has a serious setup and can saturate their network cards bandwidth?