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Senior year of Highschool, I put Unreal Tournament on the school server. If it were me, I'd recreate that experience, including our teacher looking around the class. That was almost 20 years ago, I hope everyone is doing alright.

Shitty k8s cluster/space heater?

Hmm, get 25 monitors and friends and play one of those starship bridge simulators like https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/

According to Bush Jr. And Cheney you are now capable of building a super computer dangerous enough to warrant a 20+ year invasion

Depending on the actual condition of all those computers and your own skill in building I'd say you could rig a pretty decent home server rack out of all of those for really most purposes you could imagine, including as a personal VPN, personal RDP to conduct work on, personal test server for experimental code and/or testing potentially unsafe downloads/links for viruses

Shit you could probably build your own OS that optimizes for all that computing power just for the funzies, or even use it to make money by contributing its computing power to a crowd sourced computing project where you dedicate memory bandwidth to the project for some grad student or research institute to do all their crazy math with. Easiest way to rack up academic citations if you ever want to be a researcher!

I think the only answer is “Doom”

25 machines at say 100W each is about 2.5KW. Can you even power them all at the same time at home without tripping circuit breakers? At your mentioned .12/KWH that is about 30 cents an hour, or over $200 to run them for a month, so that adds up too.

i5-4560S is 4597 passmark which isn't that great. 25 of them is 115k at best, so about like a big Ryzen server that you can rent for the same $200 or so. I can think of various computation projects that could use that, but I don't think I'd bother with a room full of crufty old PC's if I was pursuing something like that.

Put a different operating system on each one, and make each a gateway to access the next. See who can make it through.

I certainly wouldn't want pay the power bill from leaving a bunch of these running 24/7, but would work fine if you wanted to learn cluster computing.

You could always load them up with a bunch of classic games and get all your friends over for a LAN party.

Run 70b llama3 on one and have a 100% local, gpt4 level home assistant . Hook it up with coqui.Ai xttsv2 for mind baffling natural language speech (100% local too ) that can imitate anyone's voice. Now, you got yourself Jarvis from Ironman.

Edit : thought they were some kind of beast machines with 192gb ram and stuff. They're just regular middle-low tier pcs.

BOINC! Do some science. :)

Do you have particularly cheap or free electricity?

If I had 25 surprise desktops I imagine I'd discover a long dormant need for a Beowulf cluster.

Distcc, maybe gluster. Run a docker swarm setup on pve or something.

Models like those are a little hard to exploit well because of limited network bandwidth between them. Other mini PC models that have a pcie slot are fun because you can jam high speed networking into them along with NVMe then do rapid fail over between machines with very little impact when one goes offline.

If you do want to bump your bandwidth per machine you might be able to repurpose the wlan m2 slot for a 2.5gbe port, but you'll likely have to hang the module out the back through a serial port or something. Aquantia USB modules work well too, those can provide 5gbe fairly stably.

Edit: Oh, you're talking about the larger desktop elitedesk g1, not the USFF tiny machines. Yeah, you can jam whatever hh cards into these you want - go wild.

a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can't get rid of without literally giving them away. they're 'tolerable' for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the 'performance per watt' just isn't there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.

these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run 'ok enough' on 4th gen, just make sure they're booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they'll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can 'rufus' a win11 installer, but there's no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.

NOT any kind of crypto mining bullshit.

Do a giant Proxmox cluster. You are going to need one hell of a switch though

Setup a CS 1.6 LAN party arena.

No pen testing lab sounds fun. 8 PCs for a segmented network, a few red team PCs.

You could possibly run ai horde if they have enough ram or vram. You could run bare metal kubernetes or inside proxmox.

I would personally attempt the Kubernetes cluster if I had that many physical machines!

God damn. What are the specs on those? I gotta check out some government auctions.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

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If I were you I might try deploying a mini enterprise network with permissions and things. It would be fun to do it with active directory to try to practice pentesting, or it would also be fun to do with linux to try to learn more about deploying linux in enterprise environments.