What something that you are really good at? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Sometimes you just want to brag about something you excel at but never get the chance or you're just to modest. Now is your chance to tell a bunch of internet strangers about your amazing talent.

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[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I am really good at building computers. Like speccing out the parts, making sure they’re compatible, making sure they look good together, doing nice cable management, setting up the UEFI settings, etc. I spend a lot of time staying up to date on all the new hardware and checking prices.

Other than laptops, I’ve built every computer I’ve owned since I was about 14. It’s so fun that I’ll spec out PCs on Newegg with no intention of buying them, just for fun. My wife thinks I have too many computers, which I can’t really argue with, but I just know I’m one good sale away from building another.

It actually came in handy recently, when my sister wanted to buy her husband a gaming PC for Christmas. I gave her a bunch of spare parts I had, and we ordered the rest and built him a beautiful PC within her budget.

I built my company’s servers too, instead of paying the ungodly high prices for equivalent Dell or HP servers.

[-] rab@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

Enterprise servers are expensive because you have support. DIY servers are on you if something goes haywire

[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah, I understand the benefits of going with enterprise solutions, but for a very small company like mine, it makes a lot more sense for me to build them myself. I know how to do it, and I’m very comfortable digging into the hardware to fix any issues I might encounter. But yeah, for a company with a lot more resources, I totally understand going with a more expensive option that they know will work within whatever SLA they have.

[-] maccentric@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago

What’s your go-to for server builds these days?

[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The ones I just built are 64 core Threadrippers with Supermicro boards and 2U Supermicro chassis. I know they’re technically workstation processors, but if you’re only putting a single CPU in each server, they make really good server CPUs.

I built two of those to handle the workloads and have fault tolerance, then a third node that’s just a little mini PC running a Ryzen 5700G. That’s literally just there to fill out the Ceph cluster. He sits on a little rack mount shelf and does the work like a champ. His big brothers are very proud of him.

I’ve always been impressed with Supermicro’s quality. I considered a cheaper Asrock board, but Supermicro has never done me wrong.

Then for RAM, I stupidly went with Nemix this time. 22% failure rate on the sticks they sent me. And such a hassle dealing with their customer service, who sent me more bad sticks and told me they couldn’t find a problem with the sticks I sent back. Idk man, whichever system they were in wouldn’t boot. Put in known good RAM, and they would boot. Then the replacement sticks wouldn’t pass memtest. Whatever they’re doing to test their RAM is inadequate. Anyway, I returned that RAM and went with Micron, and now both systems are running great.

For the OS, I’m using Proxmox VE. I really like how easy it is to run high availability services with it.

$10k for the whole setup, but it sure beats paying $550 a month for cloud hosting on Digital Ocean.

this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024

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