Good for you! I get a feeling that there are fewer and fewer individuals learning the basics (or sometimes not-so-basic) of hardware and operating systems. It is invaluable knowledge, even when working with PaaS. For instance, having experience with IIS since NT4 and Apache since the 1.x days is invaluable in diagnosing Azure Web Sites.
Most dont even have a PC that they assemble themselves. They have very little idea of the internals. Nor do they follow and read enough about hardware news and articles. These PC could be used as Server. While not professional rack based ones, but you will still need config them.
A lot of these basic understanding and fundamental learning experience is gone. We are not far from Front End developers that dont understanding anything about HTML and CSS but only React.
We hear this every day on this website and it's just not true. Making computers accessible to people makes it more likely that they'll get into hardware enthusiasm and assembling a desktop from parts.
Even people actively in the industry don’t know. About 10 years ago I was working in a datacenter and one of the severs needed some hardware replaced (new ram or something). The guy who ran the team that used the server (who sat maybe 50 yards from the server room for many years), asked if he could watch me do the replacement. He had never seen the inside of a server before and was curious what it was like. This blew my mind. I didn’t get how he could be so close to it for so long and never see it. He made it sound like he never even saw the inside of a home PC as well.
At the time it wasn’t like there was a lot of protocols in place. He could have walked up to one of a dozen people and asked for a tour on any given day and gotten it, no questions asked. Not to mention random servers sitting around the cube farm for whatever reason. He just never thought about it before that day.
I provision servers for a living and usually the only times they get physically touched are when we rack them and the 2nd and last time is when we unrack them. Occasionally, one will have a hardware replacement. But for the most part a server runs continuously for 3-5 years. Even a memory upgrade involves unbundling so much cable (power, network, storage, KVM) that it's easier to rack a new one with more memory.
I'm not surprised your team leader, if of a certain age, hasn't seen the inside of a modern server. We push our datacenters further and further out into the countryside. My annual trip to our DC was a 4 hour drive and even then it was just to do annual inventory.
In a modern datacenter I totally get it. I’ve visited one of our current data centers and had to get a lot of clearance, and go through several layers of security. I couldn’t even drive in the parking lot without my name being on the list and proof of my identity. Most people will never get that chance; I have a lot of co-workers who have asked and were all denied.
However, at the time, in that office/datacenter, the barrier to entry for him would have just been asking and 2 minutes of his time (or however long he wanted to look around). The computer rooms were on the way to the bathroom. That place was all pets, no cattle, so we were constantly doing whatever it took to keep the hardware running. There was no shortage of opportunities.
Very cool to see! I find it interesting that being young you didn't automatically gravitate towards Linux. It is IMHO much more interesting to use than windows, is free in a variety of ways, and gives you the power to customize as much as you desire. You did join the light side after all however so all's well that ends well :)
In my case was WindowMaker converting it into something totally alien to a NeXT; it was unique with
it's GTK themings, translucid RXVT's and yet running much faster and stable than Windows.
As for taking your servers with you. You don't have to! Use tailscale (or wireguard). Just downgrade your hardware a bit beforehand perhaps in order to decrease burden.
If you ask your university nicely they may provide rack space for you.
Universities love when students take initiative and build/maintain servers. My university had a student apprentice program where students provided technical expertise to departments as a work study program. And my colleague in the program had a deal with the CS department where they hosted his game server for him. Since he was learning valuable server administration skills and working with other students they approved it.
It’s an easier sell if you ask to put it in the DMZ and if there’s some benefit for other students.
Then it just shows they've got better planning timescales than most clients I deal with.. (so much last minute bullshit right now with Christmas next week...)
In years past if you knew someone it might have been easy to get a server plugged in and on the network with a public IP at a university. Maybe in an office or lab somewhere on campus. Nobody would likely know, or care to ask any questions.
Today, they are more and more locked down, everything is run by "enterprise" IT, you need to submit forms and get approvals for every new device with a public IP address, etc. Anything unknown that pops up on the network will be automatically blocked until they know what it is and who is responsible for it.
Nope, my son has them (5 in total) stashed under the stairs where they still manage to generate enough heat & noise to make me question the placement. Still, pretty chuffed that he's managed to do it all himself.
Please note that hosting a publicly accessible server in your room at home is specifically prohibited by some employers in heavily regulated industries, and if found, this may result in a large fine (enough to cover the company security re-audit cost) and termination. They even prohibit having a public IP on the router, having IPv6 support, having firmware other than the manufacturer-supplied one, and even having access to the router (i.e., it's the manufacturer and the ISP who should be responsible for security updates, for ensuring that there is absolutely no way for attackers to enter the home network by means of routing, and for the fact that you cannot screw that up).
Having a server for your own use from within the home network is fine.
Could you give a hint to the employer or the industries you talk about? Surely if an employer wants to very very securely lock down the workspace they would just tell employees to come to office and design that like a fortress, right? I mean I know companies that have metal condensed onto the windows to prohibit mobile reception, but why regulate your home like that?
I've never heard of this in financial services or network infrastructure. It doesn't even sound sensical; if your employer wants a secure LAN, they need to provide a device that treats your home network as a WAN (sort of like a travel router), and your work computer should be configured to only connect to that device. Otherwise you're probably on a network with e.g. TVs, which are definitely malicious.
I never said that this makes sense or that it was enforceable - yet this is what you get when your company is infected by checklist-based compliance people and if an important customer regularly sends these checklists as a condition of continuing the contract.
I am not permitted to name this former employer because this would allow hackers to create targeted phishing emails and social engineering attacks against other people working there.
Compliance with what? I've never heard of this as part of FedRAMP, PCI, SOC2, or FINRA requirements. Another user hasn't heard of it in an ITAR restricted context. I don't see how you could ever pass an audit if employees' personal devices are in-scope. You could never check all of the other boxes you need.
The router public IP requirement in particular is an impossible one. You don't control what address your ISP gives you. No checklist is going to have an item for some random unaffiliated third party. They might be stupid, but not that stupid.
I have never asked where these requirements come from. Possibly, they are just the whims of that customer. To me, they seem to be written as a windy way to require connecting through a mobile hotspot managed by the operator.
1) I somehow doubt this is true.
2) If it was, it would not be possible to enforce. People are adding and removing stuff on their home network all the time. What if your roommate's machine gets compromised?
3) Wouldn't it be simpler for them to send out a VPN appliance and treat the home network as untrusted?
Organizations should treat all physical networks, including the ones in their own offices, as untrusted. If they are trusting an internal network these days, they are doing something wrong.
Others already expressed surprise on what you wrote and none has confirmed...
But here is some fun fact: when I was working at poultry plant (well, chickens laid eggs) I had a clause within contract that I cannot have my own chickens... I guess because of increased risk to introduce diseases for the plant chickens?!
You do know a router requires a public IP to even work you cannot not have a public IP. Either the people who rite those rules have no idea about computers or you miss read something.
Key point from that link; IKEA's swapped the materials round to use a lot more of that honeycombed hollow stuff, which makes it less than ideal for drilling or holding heavy equipment.
This is annoyingly common in a lot of furniture, including desks. Anyone who's thinking of drilling their desk to put in a desk-clamp monitor mount: make sure the desk is solid, first!
It is cool but Ikea used to be cheap but now they have significantly lowered the product quality and also increased the prices on top of that, atleast in Australia.
It's always interesting seeing people like this online. I didn't start programming until I was 15, and didn't know how to deploy anything for real users until many years later. At 13, I don't think I knew how to do anything useful.
Something that miss is, unless you need tons of IO (in the form of SAS/SATA storage, or old generation PCIe cards), avoiding these huge, noisy and power hungry servers are a lot simpler than people may think. Mini/Micro form factor OEM PCs on the same price point generally come with much newer generation of hardware (instead of a 3rd gen i7, you might get a 8th gen i5) and overall performance is so much better. It’s also so much easier to host and maintain (just plug it near your ISP modem, and forget about it).
Had an Intel Motherboard + Atom CPU combo as a File Server once, but eventually had to upgrade it because Atom chips really suck. Eventually want to a Skylake Pentium, which performs much better.
This is exactly what I didn't want when I was 16. I did have a server too, but in the HP ML form factor (less noise than the pizza boxes). Also, ECC is kind of important, and a real HW raid is a nice learning expierience.
I've got an old Skylake HP elite SFF machine. Without modification it can hold two 3.5in drives and a single 2.5in drive. Also with great cooling design (cowling to direct heat from the cou straight out of the back) and an efficient PSU (80 plus platinum), it makes a great value always-on machine.
I was looking at running OpnSense for my router and almost used my old Skylake computer. Instead I bought a $100 fanless Intel N100 micro computer that sips 7w and has about the same performance. The electricity savings will pay for itself. And the i5-6600k wasn't even that power hungry.
You might be surprised about the old Skylake. If it's using a solid state drive and any unnecessary fans/peripherals are disabled, it's probably only going to use 10w or so at near idle (as a firewall would be with that chip.)
Even if it uses 17W on average, the 10W difference would be $14/year at $.16/kWh electricity. Unless your electricity is significantly more expensive, it probably will never pay for itself over its useful life.
But if you _do_ need a whole bunch of SATA disks, it's hard to beat a bunch of R720XDs.
I have a small fleet of them and they're actually not that noisy or power-hungry if you
1) disable cpus
2) undervolt remaining cpus
3) write your own fan controller off of raw ipmi byte sequences
By far one of the best cost/pb mass storage solutions. I have a bunch of NUCs and SBCs too, but they're definitely suited for different purposes.
One of these days I'll buy a surplus Isilon cluster or two and truly achieve bulk storage apotheosis. Cbf fighting Ceph in my spare time as well.
If you don't want a super noisy server in your room you can rent one from Hetzner for cheap. (Cheapest one currently at 34 euro a month https://www.hetzner.com/sb)
> In May 2022, I finalized the crazy decision to get a real rack-mounted server - I got a great deal on used drives (3x3TB), RAM (128GB of DDR3), and relatively powerful (read: power-hungry) CPUs (2xE5-2690) in a Dell PowerEdge R720XD, which I paid for with some bug bounty money I saved up.
Plus electricity/internet costs, replacing broken drives, etc etc. You can get a lot of rental time out of that.
Assuming it really was drawing 120W, that's about 1000kWh for the year, so €300 at this year's unusually high prices, €150 in a more typical year, and probably half of that will be offset by reduced heating costs.
I used to have all of my services on cloud but since I got a 1G/1G home network and I found businesses decommissioning hardware and deals on local charity shops which source hardware from the landfill and give profits to charity missions, I decided to give it a go and try administering my own phisical servers. Currently running proxmox on 2 machines with one NAS and 14 spinning disks, with some Minecraft servers, personal programming projects, vulnerability scanners, telegram bots, VPSes for friends, android and MacOS building VMs, storage, some ML school projects with the recently added 1050ti, and hosting the infrastructure for my school CTF competition.
Good on you and all but I wanted to note that its weird how persistently people are focusing on the powerbill. It is a drop in the bucket for many households monthly bills and very cheap as hobbies go. I think my mother would have killed for that deal.
As a 15 years old, I desperately wanted to keep my old desktop running 24/7 to run my own website, learn PHP, linux and do some selfhosting. I wasn't able to run it more than 2 days in a row as my parents would always shut it down to save in power
Yeah, it is still a relatively small increase considering all your other bills, and rent, and food, and etc. what are you estimating the monthly budget to be for these small apartments?
60EUR a month is also pretty cheap for a hobby. If you can't count on your parents for even that level of support you might be better of getting emancipated.
Really depends on the country and how small we’re talking, but I’d guess somewhere between 500-1000€. At 16 you’re getting quite old so you probably also want some kind of allowance, if this is on top of that then it can add up.
Because we've all felt the pain of power bills shooting up by 2-3x in a very short period of time, perhaps?
The cost of running a PC 24/7 used to feel insignificant, but not so much any more. I've been running an old PC as a home server for years, but should probably find a more power-efficient NAS box to replace it with.
He’s a 16 years old doing a very productive activity, I’d expect the parents to happily pay for it, I’d argue that if someone’s son is interested in learn ing and the energy bill is obstacle to wait before to make kids, parents should feel an obligation to fuel their kids passions
OP indicated elsewhere here that they’re trying to cover some of the costs with side projects, but €720 anually is a big bill to foot for less affluent parents.
Eh, power bill is the best one for an increase to appear on, way more wiggle room before anything important is shut off.
Plus if we're talking about being poor it has two important benefits 1) excellent hours occupied to dollar spent ratio 2) engrossing hobbies typically mean they aren't out there rattling around stirring up trouble (which can get expensive in a hurry)
I don’t want to get into whether the ability to afford these things for your children makes you more/less of a good parent…
But if you can afford it, you absolutely should support their passions. The only reason I’m a high salaried software engineer is because my parents generously bought me a computer, allowed me to attend classes (programming in BASIC), etc.
As a former 16 year old, I distinctively remember having to negotiate to be allowed to run a computer 24/7 as a server. Part of my argument was calculating the cost to run the server ($10 / month for a 100 watt server at 0.10 / kwh running 24/7, a rough figure I use when referencing electricity costs to this day).
I had to submit an essay to my father, at 16, about why I should be allowed to use a computer more than an hour per day.
The essay won, but my father began talking about me while I was at the computer, saying I was a zombie who wasn't part of the family anymore.
I was learning to code. I built a bunch of websites, and some projects and schemes that earned me fairly serious money in high school. I learned VB6, html, a little perl, and php, on my own, with no mentor, and an active booing.
I'm not sure my dad has ever seen or visited a website I've built (dozens, maybe over 100). I even have bespoke code deployed right now, serving him, that he does not know exists.
I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all the time. I often think about where I'd be if I had an active supporter, like many kids have.
I can't speak for your father of course, but I do think he likely had a valid concern that he may not have effectively communicated that all of this time with the computer was directly at the expense of time spent with the family. He may have felt hurt that you seemed to prefer the company of a machine to his and the rest of your family. He and you may also have very different conceptions of what a successful/happy life might look like. I'm not saying he's right, but from the outside I can imagine why he might not have felt supportive and also why you might feel resentful for the lack of support.
Have you directly asked him why he wasn't supportive? Have you been open to his perspective or just assume that you're right and he's wrong? It's easy for us programmer types to try and simulate the mind states of others to avoid difficult conversations (speaking for myself of course).
Yup I see my son enjoying time on the tablet and teaching himself scratch which is great... But it clearly has an effect on his emotional state and overall quality of life if he spends too much time on it. We try and keep things balanced - he has plenty of time to do more programming in his life!
> I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all the time. I often think about where I'd be if I had an active supporter, like many kids have.
He was probably concerned about your familiar relationships. All relationships have an element of reciprocity. Plus he probably just missed you.
In your situation it sounds like he could have benefited by being a bit more curious and accepting.
IMHO as a parent rejecting the authencity of a child cancels out all the loving things you do because then you are not loving the child. You are loving an imaginary version of the child that only exists in your own head.
> IMHO as a parent rejecting the authencity of a child cancels out all the loving things you do because then you are not loving the child. You are loving an imaginary version of the child that only exists in your own head.
sooo many parents are guilty of this. Living through your child is unhealthy
Some people (even to this day) just equate computer usage with goofing off. :(
Doesn't matter if you're a highly paid IT professional, if they see you using a computer they assume you're being slack and have suggestions (repeatedly) on better uses for your time.
I'm father of a 10 years old kid. If he wants to run a server at 16, I will give him the electricity bills, a 20U rack, a cisco switch and a bunch of cables. Congratulations to the OP and their family.
When I was a kid in the 90s my dad had raised money to buy a good car. When the time came, he bought a not so good car + a computer for me. I still remember installing windows 3.1 from 40 floppy disks
I installed ESIX (Everex's SysV Unix) off of 40-something 3.5" floppies in the mid 90s. Naturally there were a couple of bad disks and the installation sat partially done for a few days while I awaited replacements to arrive in the mail.
IFMMSMV CD distr of '95 was around 48Mb, '98 (SE2 ?) around 100-110. With a bit of knowledge you could shrink the installed one to 35 and and 52 respectively.
Your parents are probably footing a large electricity bill for this running hardware unless there is a revenue stream for your services? Either way, hats off to your folks for supporting your interest.
I know, my smart plug reports around 60€ a month of costs. Most of it comes from the massive amount of hard drives, I try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects. Anyway, I couldn't find rentable dedicated servers with this much storage for less than 50€ a month, the upfront costs of new, energy efficient and powerful hardware is too much, and I truly enjoy running these servers myself.
About the noise, my room has a small mechanical room and that's where the servers are located, the noise can't be heard from the rest of the room.
IMHO it's a good way to get your parents to pay for your hosting costs without having to beg :)
I was in a similar situation regarding storage. I ended up having to upgrade the drives for fewer bigger ones but there are other ways to reduce power consumption like putting your storage server on a timer and turning on WoL so that you can wake it up out of those hours if you need to. Obviously this is not possible if you are serving files to other users 24/7.
You could be right — but it's hard to resist the cheap hardware you can find on eBay. I see numerous Hyve Zeus 1U servers on eBay right now for a couple hundred bucks — just add an SSD.
>businesses decommissioning hardware
been looking for this for years but never found them in my country (India). Been a 16 year old with a homelab once, now older but no business hardware yet
I'm also an Italian who taught himself how to code at 16 (I'm now 34), although not even remotely at your level. Then I studied physics, did a PhD, a postdoc about neural networks, etc., but I felt that what mattered to me the most was to inspire young people like the one I was, and I decided to come back to Italy and become a high school teacher starting this year. I'm also organizing an extracurricular python course in my school. If you're not based far from Milan and are interested in talking to my students, we could consider that! Good luck with everything.
When I was 16 I started an ISP in my bedroom. I had an 8 port octo serial cable into a computer for people to dial into, and an ISDN line going out. It's how I learned linux. Setup SMTP mailservers etc.
That's a pretty dope setup. I was running a web hosting company at that age (and likely near the same time period? late 1990s into the early 2000s). Couldn't have done the ISP thing because not even ISDN was available in my area.
I wasn't 16 when I discovered used rack mounted servers, but I was pretty young (21 I think?).
I had a miserable job paying near-subsistance wages in 2012 (about $30,000/year, no health insurance, Dallas TX). I needed something a bit more powerful than my laptop to do some experiments with video encoding, but I couldn't afford a "fast" computer at the time, at least not fast enough to do what I wanted. It didn't help that I was particularly bad at saving money until I was about 25.
On a whim, I went on Craigslist and just looked up different ways of phrasing "fast cheap computer", and eventually stumbled upon "server". Upon doing so, I found that you could buy dated, but still useful rack mounted servers for basically nothing; in my case a seller was selling two rack mounted Dell servers, 16 cores each, 32GB of RAM, for about $250. I was just barely able to swing that, so I drove over, picked it up, and more or less defined the direction of my career for the next twelve years.
In that particular time, I couldn't find any kind of computers for cheap that had those parameters. Servers were cheap and easy as long as I wore headphones and was vigilant about turning them off when I wasn't using them.
Rack mount servers have hidden costs. Sitting next to what sounds like a swarm of drones for one. Enterprise pricing for replacement parts is the other.
(Dells have worked out for me ok, but not without having to replace backplanes and other parts immediately.)
All my recent additions to my homelab have been Dell Poweredge SFP systems. Businesses use them for a few years and then upgrading, so they're always available. I do make sure to get ones that have a PCIe slot so I can add a 10gbps card.
> All my recent additions to my homelab have been Dell Poweredge SFP systems.
When I read that, I assumed Dell had a line of servers I did not know about. After a few days, I doubt that that is the case.
SFP means "Small Form-Factor Pluggable" in my world. It's a connector on a NIC or on a router that lets you pick the physical media you want and then install a SFP adapter.
What did you mean to say before spell-check garbled it? Or, am I mistaken?
Counting my blessings, but I never had to replace any parts on them. They used boring SATA drives, which I had a few spares of even at the time.
The bigger issues were the noise and the heat and power consumption. Not only did they take upwards of a kilowatt of power each, but being Texas I also had to take into the account the increased cost of air conditioning.
I was only bitten by that one month where my power bill was like $150 more than usual, and from that point on I was vigilant about turning the servers off between uses.
>Sitting next to what sounds like a swarm of drones for one.
When I was in high school I (for reasons I can't really remember) ended up being given a dual P3 rack server. I ran that as my primary machine for 2 years. We called it 'the Hurricane'.
Anyway, it was extremely useful for interview prep (aka brush up on specific skills) prior to meeting potential new clients, and also for doing general dev / packaging stuff on.
Thank you! The social media platform is a Twitter-like website for my friends (roughly 3000 of them registered, but smaller set of daily active users) that I started building in 2020. I made it to learn new technologies, so I've rewritten parts of it from scratch a few times. It's got a a SvelteKit/NuxtJS 2 frontend (in the middle of a long rewrite) with a seperate ExpressJS API (which others have used to make their own clients, like an Android app!) that's spun off of an older iteration of the site where the frontend was coupled as templated HTML.
I used MongoDB from the start, but I'm beginning to regret that - It's getting hard to maintain relational consistency and ensure all the data going in the DB matches the same shape as the site scales. Maybe it's time to migrate to Postgres.
I mix up a few things from the rest of the world for my site - comments are nested like Reddit/HN, and posts/comments are rich text limited HTML like a blog. There's a really minimal algorithm that's relatively hard to mess with: chronological feed from people you follow, and a seperate Explore page with top users and trending posts (based on the recent likes)
Profiles have seperate 'walls' from posts so they basically have little comment sections for people to use.
The new site also has profile customization so people can change the accent colour that their posts and profiles appear as in other people's feeds, and there's little widgets to customize profile 'Sidebars'.
It's nice to have a little quiet place seperate from the rest of the world, with its own ecosystem of clients, tools, bots, etc. (actually this year somebody made a Spotify Wrapped style recap website using the API!).
I have to say, this would be an impressive set of achievements for someone much older - great work and glad you're obviously having so much fun with it all!
It says (on his website) that he started coding at the age of 7, so I guess he's had at least 9 years of mixed IT experience.
But learning the basics of setting up a server isn't that hard. One of my first jobs involved a lot of similar work, and I had never touched a server in my life - purely a coder prior to that. Literally my first task was to go down to the server room, install a new server, and install Ubuntu server on it, and set up the server. Took me a week to get that done.
Static IPv4 is very important for getting into networking. Out of my friends, one had a free semi-static IPv4 (rotated once a year iirc), now he has the best paying job in devops. Another one had a cheap surcharge to get it, also turned into a job after few years. My other friend had (and still has) a cg-Nat, so never got into any deep IT stuff, other then PC building.
You are very knowledgeable (for your coding and bug bounties) and very lucky (for the static ip, as well as understanding parents lol)!
100%. When I was a similar age to OP and getting into web development it was the coolest thing in the world that I could map a port on my router and type in my public IP address at a friend's house and the website that I wrote would appear.
If I did the same thing now there's a good chance I'm behind CG-NAT and it won't work at all, and a 100% chance that my public IP won't be the same in 2 months.
We've really broken the internet. Between this and the average kid using a locked-down tablet the barrier to entry is higher than ever.
I dunno, I don't really feel like having to use a service like dyndns or one of the dozens of clones is that big of a hurdle, is it? I recall using one of these services when I was in college (off-campus apartment with cable internet) back in the early 2000s.
For CG-NAT you don't actually get any inbound ports, so dynamic DNS won't help you.
That being said, I know some ISPs over here that will block standard ports inbound beyond SMTP when you're not behind CG-NAT. I can imagine that leading to some who are just starting giving up when they've followed all the instructions to get HTTP on port 80 working and it still doesn't work without explanation.
Yep, it's not a problem if you know how it works and don't have CG-NAT.
My point is that newbies don't know, and whilst the IP rotation problem might force some of them to learn about DNS, it will also put a bunch of people off entirely.
Congrats! At 16, I only had a 486DX2-66 with a 28.8K modem and a UPS.
For other teenagers and teenagers-in-spirit to accomplish this feat:
- Search for used enterprise servers on eBay. HP, Lenovo, Dell, and Supermicro are the typical brands to choose from.
- Before purchase, find the specification docs, drivers, and firmware on the specific model to be sure it's something that's complete and usable, or can be completed for reasonable $$.
- If you plan on running XenServer or VMware ESXi to then run multiple virtual machines on it, make sure the hardware is compatible by checking the OS hardware compatibility list (HCL) before buying it.
- Avoid 1U servers because they're louder than 2U+ designs due to having to use shorter, smaller fans that spin very fast.
- Make sure the CPU is at least as fast as a computer you own, or it might be a very expensive doorstop or an oversized "Raspberry PI": https://www.cpubenchmark.net
- There is a gotcha with Dell, Lenovo, and HP servers using AMD CPUs where they are vendor locked. The plus side is sometimes sellers offer locked CPUs cheap enough that it makes sense.
All of this advice is merely nice-to-have. You can easily just use an old desktop or laptop to do the same.
I've homelabbed for a long time and have rackmounted systems full of old desktop parts, rather than buying or seeking out used server hardware. It just isn't required.
ECC RAM? Nah. It's useful if you can find it cheap and your CPU supports it but it's overstated as a problem IME.
I do agree you should buy 2U or even 3/4U equipment, if only so you can mount much larger (and thus quieter) fans.
603 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadA lot of these basic understanding and fundamental learning experience is gone. We are not far from Front End developers that dont understanding anything about HTML and CSS but only React.
At the time it wasn’t like there was a lot of protocols in place. He could have walked up to one of a dozen people and asked for a tour on any given day and gotten it, no questions asked. Not to mention random servers sitting around the cube farm for whatever reason. He just never thought about it before that day.
I'm not surprised your team leader, if of a certain age, hasn't seen the inside of a modern server. We push our datacenters further and further out into the countryside. My annual trip to our DC was a 4 hour drive and even then it was just to do annual inventory.
However, at the time, in that office/datacenter, the barrier to entry for him would have just been asking and 2 minutes of his time (or however long he wanted to look around). The computer rooms were on the way to the bathroom. That place was all pets, no cattle, so we were constantly doing whatever it took to keep the hardware running. There was no shortage of opportunities.
Universities love when students take initiative and build/maintain servers. My university had a student apprentice program where students provided technical expertise to departments as a work study program. And my colleague in the program had a deal with the CS department where they hosted his game server for him. Since he was learning valuable server administration skills and working with other students they approved it.
It’s an easier sell if you ask to put it in the DMZ and if there’s some benefit for other students.
[1]: https://www.meetup.com/nix-zurich/
[2]: https://zfoh.ch/zurihac2024/
Today, they are more and more locked down, everything is run by "enterprise" IT, you need to submit forms and get approvals for every new device with a public IP address, etc. Anything unknown that pops up on the network will be automatically blocked until they know what it is and who is responsible for it.
"Nope most 16yr olds do not in fact have servers in their room"
Or at least that's how I read it.
- Most 16 year olds don't have servers in their room
- No indeed, some have them in the cupboard under the stairs
Of course, some 16 year-olds, like Harry Potter, have their room in the cupboard under the stairs, so the logic doesn't follow implicitly.
Having a server for your own use from within the home network is fine.
See https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/ for details.
I am not permitted to name this former employer because this would allow hackers to create targeted phishing emails and social engineering attacks against other people working there.
The router public IP requirement in particular is an impossible one. You don't control what address your ISP gives you. No checklist is going to have an item for some random unaffiliated third party. They might be stupid, but not that stupid.
But here is some fun fact: when I was working at poultry plant (well, chickens laid eggs) I had a clause within contract that I cannot have my own chickens... I guess because of increased risk to introduce diseases for the plant chickens?!
https://ikeahackers.net
:)
This is exactly what I didn't want when I was 16. I did have a server too, but in the HP ML form factor (less noise than the pizza boxes). Also, ECC is kind of important, and a real HW raid is a nice learning expierience.
Stuff like this, though "near the uni" would make it easier to access if/when the hardware needs a bit of adjustment. :)
* https://www.hetzner.com/colocation
Note that co-location pricing can be all over the place (from low to incredibly high), so don't get discouraged too early.
This website might be useful too, as it seems to show data centers in various countries.
* https://www.datacentermap.com/switzerland/
Might be useful for putting together a list of places to investigate. :)
Even if it uses 17W on average, the 10W difference would be $14/year at $.16/kWh electricity. Unless your electricity is significantly more expensive, it probably will never pay for itself over its useful life.
I have a small fleet of them and they're actually not that noisy or power-hungry if you 1) disable cpus 2) undervolt remaining cpus 3) write your own fan controller off of raw ipmi byte sequences
By far one of the best cost/pb mass storage solutions. I have a bunch of NUCs and SBCs too, but they're definitely suited for different purposes.
One of these days I'll buy a surplus Isilon cluster or two and truly achieve bulk storage apotheosis. Cbf fighting Ceph in my spare time as well.
You will likely find very few non-16 year olds doing that either. Locally I mean. I’m sure that at least five in this site do :-)
Plus electricity/internet costs, replacing broken drives, etc etc. You can get a lot of rental time out of that.
I used to have all of my services on cloud but since I got a 1G/1G home network and I found businesses decommissioning hardware and deals on local charity shops which source hardware from the landfill and give profits to charity missions, I decided to give it a go and try administering my own phisical servers. Currently running proxmox on 2 machines with one NAS and 14 spinning disks, with some Minecraft servers, personal programming projects, vulnerability scanners, telegram bots, VPSes for friends, android and MacOS building VMs, storage, some ML school projects with the recently added 1050ti, and hosting the infrastructure for my school CTF competition.
(Italy btw)
They would otherwise have had to go to the same high school.
60EUR a month is also pretty cheap for a hobby. If you can't count on your parents for even that level of support you might be better of getting emancipated.
The cost of running a PC 24/7 used to feel insignificant, but not so much any more. I've been running an old PC as a home server for years, but should probably find a more power-efficient NAS box to replace it with.
OP indicated elsewhere here that they’re trying to cover some of the costs with side projects, but €720 anually is a big bill to foot for less affluent parents.
Plus if we're talking about being poor it has two important benefits 1) excellent hours occupied to dollar spent ratio 2) engrossing hobbies typically mean they aren't out there rattling around stirring up trouble (which can get expensive in a hurry)
But if you can afford it, you absolutely should support their passions. The only reason I’m a high salaried software engineer is because my parents generously bought me a computer, allowed me to attend classes (programming in BASIC), etc.
The essay won, but my father began talking about me while I was at the computer, saying I was a zombie who wasn't part of the family anymore.
I was learning to code. I built a bunch of websites, and some projects and schemes that earned me fairly serious money in high school. I learned VB6, html, a little perl, and php, on my own, with no mentor, and an active booing.
I'm not sure my dad has ever seen or visited a website I've built (dozens, maybe over 100). I even have bespoke code deployed right now, serving him, that he does not know exists.
I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all the time. I often think about where I'd be if I had an active supporter, like many kids have.
Have you directly asked him why he wasn't supportive? Have you been open to his perspective or just assume that you're right and he's wrong? It's easy for us programmer types to try and simulate the mind states of others to avoid difficult conversations (speaking for myself of course).
Maybe he did not try to stand in your way, but was simply worried:
"saying I was a zombie who wasn't part of the family anymore."
He was probably concerned about your familiar relationships. All relationships have an element of reciprocity. Plus he probably just missed you.
In your situation it sounds like he could have benefited by being a bit more curious and accepting.
IMHO as a parent rejecting the authencity of a child cancels out all the loving things you do because then you are not loving the child. You are loving an imaginary version of the child that only exists in your own head.
sooo many parents are guilty of this. Living through your child is unhealthy
I don't think most programmers had any, in the age of 'everyone can code' it might be different but back then, you just read a book
Doesn't matter if you're a highly paid IT professional, if they see you using a computer they assume you're being slack and have suggestions (repeatedly) on better uses for your time.
Yep, this can be very frustrating.
Source: had a 486 with 40+120Mb HDDs
(yes, these kids exist)
About the noise, my room has a small mechanical room and that's where the servers are located, the noise can't be heard from the rest of the room.
I was in a similar situation regarding storage. I ended up having to upgrade the drives for fewer bigger ones but there are other ways to reduce power consumption like putting your storage server on a timer and turning on WoL so that you can wake it up out of those hours if you need to. Obviously this is not possible if you are serving files to other users 24/7.
I had a miserable job paying near-subsistance wages in 2012 (about $30,000/year, no health insurance, Dallas TX). I needed something a bit more powerful than my laptop to do some experiments with video encoding, but I couldn't afford a "fast" computer at the time, at least not fast enough to do what I wanted. It didn't help that I was particularly bad at saving money until I was about 25.
On a whim, I went on Craigslist and just looked up different ways of phrasing "fast cheap computer", and eventually stumbled upon "server". Upon doing so, I found that you could buy dated, but still useful rack mounted servers for basically nothing; in my case a seller was selling two rack mounted Dell servers, 16 cores each, 32GB of RAM, for about $250. I was just barely able to swing that, so I drove over, picked it up, and more or less defined the direction of my career for the next twelve years.
2. It's not easy to parallelise video rendering (not just encoding) across two machines.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=z440+workstat... (sorry for the long URL, it was necessary)
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=z440+hp+workstation&s=price-asc-r...
I missed that.
(Dells have worked out for me ok, but not without having to replace backplanes and other parts immediately.)
Check out HP z440 and z840 systems on eBay (fleabay?) and Amazon.
When I read that, I assumed Dell had a line of servers I did not know about. After a few days, I doubt that that is the case.
SFP means "Small Form-Factor Pluggable" in my world. It's a connector on a NIC or on a router that lets you pick the physical media you want and then install a SFP adapter.
What did you mean to say before spell-check garbled it? Or, am I mistaken?
The bigger issues were the noise and the heat and power consumption. Not only did they take upwards of a kilowatt of power each, but being Texas I also had to take into the account the increased cost of air conditioning.
I was only bitten by that one month where my power bill was like $150 more than usual, and from that point on I was vigilant about turning the servers off between uses.
When I was in high school I (for reasons I can't really remember) ended up being given a dual P3 rack server. I ran that as my primary machine for 2 years. We called it 'the Hurricane'.
And since we were in the old dorms, nobody cared, even when one room was running A/C in the middle of (admittedly mild) winter ...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise#Entry-level_ser...
Used to have an E450 (like the one here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SUN_Ultra_Enterprise_450....), and a bunch of other, smaller stuff (workstations). Also an E220R at some point from rough memory. No idea what happened to all that old stuff.
Anyway, it was extremely useful for interview prep (aka brush up on specific skills) prior to meeting potential new clients, and also for doing general dev / packaging stuff on.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Raspberry Pi.
You get a decently powerful compute node, no noise, tiny footprint, for ~$100.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/
I used MongoDB from the start, but I'm beginning to regret that - It's getting hard to maintain relational consistency and ensure all the data going in the DB matches the same shape as the site scales. Maybe it's time to migrate to Postgres.
I mix up a few things from the rest of the world for my site - comments are nested like Reddit/HN, and posts/comments are rich text limited HTML like a blog. There's a really minimal algorithm that's relatively hard to mess with: chronological feed from people you follow, and a seperate Explore page with top users and trending posts (based on the recent likes)
Profiles have seperate 'walls' from posts so they basically have little comment sections for people to use.
The new site also has profile customization so people can change the accent colour that their posts and profiles appear as in other people's feeds, and there's little widgets to customize profile 'Sidebars'.
It's nice to have a little quiet place seperate from the rest of the world, with its own ecosystem of clients, tools, bots, etc. (actually this year somebody made a Spotify Wrapped style recap website using the API!).
1) Set a goal (e.g. host a Minecraft server for your friends)
2) Spend all your free time trying to achieve it
3) Go to 1)
But learning the basics of setting up a server isn't that hard. One of my first jobs involved a lot of similar work, and I had never touched a server in my life - purely a coder prior to that. Literally my first task was to go down to the server room, install a new server, and install Ubuntu server on it, and set up the server. Took me a week to get that done.
You are very knowledgeable (for your coding and bug bounties) and very lucky (for the static ip, as well as understanding parents lol)!
If I did the same thing now there's a good chance I'm behind CG-NAT and it won't work at all, and a 100% chance that my public IP won't be the same in 2 months.
We've really broken the internet. Between this and the average kid using a locked-down tablet the barrier to entry is higher than ever.
This is why IPv6 needs to be available everywhere, including on mobile.
So, he cleared that up I guess.
That being said, I know some ISPs over here that will block standard ports inbound beyond SMTP when you're not behind CG-NAT. I can imagine that leading to some who are just starting giving up when they've followed all the instructions to get HTTP on port 80 working and it still doesn't work without explanation.
My point is that newbies don't know, and whilst the IP rotation problem might force some of them to learn about DNS, it will also put a bunch of people off entirely.
For other teenagers and teenagers-in-spirit to accomplish this feat:
- Search for used enterprise servers on eBay. HP, Lenovo, Dell, and Supermicro are the typical brands to choose from.
- Before purchase, find the specification docs, drivers, and firmware on the specific model to be sure it's something that's complete and usable, or can be completed for reasonable $$.
- If you plan on running XenServer or VMware ESXi to then run multiple virtual machines on it, make sure the hardware is compatible by checking the OS hardware compatibility list (HCL) before buying it.
- Avoid 1U servers because they're louder than 2U+ designs due to having to use shorter, smaller fans that spin very fast.
- Make sure the CPU is at least as fast as a computer you own, or it might be a very expensive doorstop or an oversized "Raspberry PI": https://www.cpubenchmark.net
- There is a gotcha with Dell, Lenovo, and HP servers using AMD CPUs where they are vendor locked. The plus side is sometimes sellers offer locked CPUs cheap enough that it makes sense.
- ECC RAM. Friends don't let friends drive non-ECC RAM. https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
- SSD. Because spinning rust is for storage, not the OS. https://web.archive.org/web/20110831080738/http://buyafuckin...
- Try to get something with lights-out remote management (iLO or iDRAC) if it's already licensed.
- When received, it's probably going to be dirty and have some scratches. Open it up and clean it with compressed air outside.
- Bonus points: Convince the parental unit(s) to put a 19" patch panel and half rack in the garage. :]
I've homelabbed for a long time and have rackmounted systems full of old desktop parts, rather than buying or seeking out used server hardware. It just isn't required.
ECC RAM? Nah. It's useful if you can find it cheap and your CPU supports it but it's overstated as a problem IME.
I do agree you should buy 2U or even 3/4U equipment, if only so you can mount much larger (and thus quieter) fans.