How many PCs is too many? lol

[Trendkilla254]

... Old VooDoo 1/2/3 3DFX cards...

I threw one in the trash maybe 1 year ago or just under. They had some really nice graphics on the install cd insert. It also came with a music video for evanescence with 2 fairies singing the song. It was pretty epic back then. I think it was Bring me to Life. I'm not 100% sure though. I'm at work and behind a firewall, no youtubing for me.

 

[DashApple]

I have one laptop : P .


Would like to get a Atom Pico ITX just for the fun of it .

 

[ARG]

So... what do you guys use them for?

1. Caching - local caching of web pages I visit frequently to speed up access (i.e. downloads my YouTube subscription feed locally)
2. Torrenting - for open source software and large linux ISO's
3. Backup - about 12TB of raw storage. Backs up all my computers. Also facilitates offsite backup of important data
4. Automation

• Renews my bus pass at the end of the month
• Books conference rooms for me when they become available
• Turns my lights on in the morning

5. Fast network - Enterprise grade equipment rarely gives me as much trouble as my old consumer router
6. Firewall - I'm paranoid so I need a hardware firewall on top of OS level firewalls
7. Monitoring - gathers data and stores it in a database (i.e. stores latency and speed tests so I can complain to my ISP and the CRTC [Canadian FCC] with data to backup my claims)
8. Media streaming - I rip all my DVD's and Blu-Rays (legal in Canada) and stream them off the server.
9. Uptime - I use the internet for so much these days, it's a big annoyance when it goes down. Enterprise gear is amazingly reliable and I can "set it and forget it" with it.
10. Storage - I only use SSD's in my computers and I use the NAS for large file storage.
11. Programming - because programming on Windows is like herding cats.
12. Funsies - some people have pets, I have servers.

Edit; probably forgot some things as well. That's the gist of it though. The big picture is for it to be a seamless and transparent system that improves/automates tasks in my daily life.

 

[diachi]

On the reliability thing - enterprise gear is the way forward:

"core01.*****.ca uptime is 43 weeks, 1 day, 21 hours, 16 minutes"

I'm pretty much the same as ARG for my uses. It's good to have a test environment at home too, so that I can test things before I make them live at work .

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

12. Funsies - some people have pets, I have servers.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's this last one more than anything

12TB of storage... that's quite a lot. Though with 4k movies, that space will be eaten up.

Edit: While I rarely have to, I actually like to do a restart on my home and work PCs once a week.

 

[diachi]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's this last one more than anything

12TB of storage... that's quite a lot. Though with 4k movies, that space will be eaten up.

Edit: While I rarely have to, I actually like to do a restart on my home and work PCs once a week.

Yeah, for regular desktops you should be restarting them fairly often - even just so that updates can be applied. Same goes for smart phones, you'll notice they slow down after a while.

Think I have about the same amount of storage as ARG, although half of it is for backups.

 

[ARG]

On the reliability thing - enterprise gear is the way forward:
"core01.*****.ca uptime is 43 weeks, 1 day, 21 hours, 16 minutes"

I'm currently at 11 weeks. The power goes out here for extended periods of time, more than my tiny UPS can handle.

While I rarely have to, I actually like to do a restart on my home and work PCs once a week.

I restart my PC's after Windows pushes updates every Tuesday. Home computer should be shut down every once in a while IMHO, they're not made for up time

12TB of storage... that's quite a lot. Though with 4k movies, that space will be eaten up.

* Raw storage. Most of it is used for overhead in parity protected arrays. Only about 3TB is actually usable. One drive fails and the others keep going like nothing happened, I get an email from the server and buy a new drive.

 

[diachi]

I'm currently at 11 weeks. The power goes out here for extended periods of time, more than my tiny UPS can handle.



I restart my PC's after Windows pushes updates every Tuesday. Home computer should be shut down every once in a while IMHO, they're not made for up time



* Raw storage. Most of it is used for overhead in parity protected arrays. Only about 3TB is actually usable. One drive fails and the others keep going like nothing happened, I get an email from the server and buy a new drive.

Power is bad here too. One of the guys at the radio club decommissioned the UPS from one of the Nav Canada radio sites. I managed to score some of the MASSIVE SLAs from there. They're something like 80-90lbs each - I have four of them. I get 2 and a half hours run time at ~35% load on my APC 3000. Bunch of stuff currently turned off so I'm getting 7 and a half hours...


I like to live dangerously... My data storage is all RAID0. VM Storage on the big VM box is RAID 5. I just make sure to have backups of everything.

 

[ARG]

Wow. That's an impressive UPS run time. Mine has enough time to wait for a minute for the power to come back on before it sends the shutdown command.

RAID0, you're a braver man than I I use RAID10 in one server with an extra drive on fail over assignment, and RAID1 for everything else.

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

3tb of usable storage is pretty normal. I have a 500gb SSD and two 1TB drives in the PC, followed by 4TB, and three 2TB external backups. Consider myself very lucky that I never had a drive just fail out of nowhere to date. Also have a couple of 1TB drives just lying around from my old gaming PC, that I took out before selling.

Surprised you guys have so many issues with power. Generally speaking over the course of the past 5 years, I had one prolonged power outage, that was due to a snow storm and lasted 5 days. Aside from that just brief outages, 3-5 I would estimate, 3 at night and very brief. Wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't for having to reset the microwave clock.

I'm getting 7 and a half hours...

That is extremely impressive. Thought about getting a UPS for a long while, but ultimately decided I don't need it that much. If I'm working on something important I'm already saving it remotely every 15 minutes or so, and a shut down due to power should not have any effect on any of my PCs.

 

[DashApple]

I never need much storage on my PC ,

I have a 240Gb SSD that's half full , 200GB HDD that's empty and a 30Gb mSATA that for backups

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

Almost all of my drives are full with movies and tv shows. In all honestly I could probably delete 80% since I have access to it anytime streaming through Amazon and Netflix.

 

[diachi]

Surprised you guys have so many issues with power. Generally speaking over the course of the past 5 years, I had one prolonged power outage, that was due to a snow storm and lasted 5 days. Aside from that just brief outages, 3-5 I would estimate, 3 at night and very brief. Wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't for having to reset the microwave clock.



That is extremely impressive. Thought about getting a UPS for a long while, but ultimately decided I don't need it that much. If I'm working on something important I'm already saving it remotely every 15 minutes or so, and a shut down due to power should not have any effect on any of my PCs.

Hasn't been so bad over the last year, but we've seen the power go out in the middle of December at -50C for ~3 hours. Used to be a power outage at least once a week or so. Usually a raven or squirrel decided it'd cross the phases and take out power for a bunch of people. Small town, most of our power currently comes from diesel generators - it's not surprising we have issues.

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

-50C? Brrr.... I don't think I ever experienced below -35, and have no desire to.

Power where am (Northern NJ) is not in any way local. I'm actually not sure where exactly it comes from, but expect it's somewhat distributed.

The longest power outage I had at home, by a very wide margin, was after a snow storm in 2011, right around halloween. Power was out for 5 or 6 days, and surprisingly frigid temperatures (for this area anyway). That was a more localized event, and it took down a lot of power lines. Surprisingly, and I think as a result of the repairs after, when Sandy hit in 2012, there were a few blips, but no actual loss of power for me at all, which was interesting because I was literally watching my friends disappear off of chat one by one.

 

[Dr_Evil]

I'll get pictures of my stuff this weekend if I have the time and remember. I finally have a gigabit switch on the way for my living room. The little 5 port 10/100 just wasn't cutting it. Especially if transferring large amounts of data to my laser show PC. 100 megabit is only 5x faster than my internet.

 

[Cyparagon]

So... what do you guys use them for?

I've got 4 laptops, and although their specs aren't too special, they all have a purpose. One as a torrent/seed box w/ external disks, one as a media center w/ external disks, one (older one with serial/GPIB/COM) to communicate with and remotely program some of my lab equipment, and one general purpose. Getting into servers would be fun, but I'm not sure I want that power bill.

Every few years, the wind chill gets down to -60C where I live. The coldest this year was about -30C/-40C wind chill, which is pretty typical for my area. "The air hurts my face. Why am I living where the air hurts my face?" :undecided:

I've found oodles and bunches of SLAs/lithium in the scrap bins. I've put so many in parallel that with my low power draw, I could run things several days without mains power I think.