Whack. I just set up a Forgejo too.

Eh, fair enough. I can kind of respect the dedication even if I dont agree with the politics.

Hell, I bet they have stats on exactly how many Linux users they have just based on how many people use proton.

If there's anything I've learned from my fiance, it's that there's both nothing wrong with a piece of media being for younger audiences and theres nothing wrong with consuming stuff meant for younger audiences.

Shit, Prodigy is endlessly shilled by folks on Mastodon with 18+ only in their banners.

I wouldn't hate that. I've been meaning to try some AI extension to add to my VSCodium install to talk to my self hosted AI instance.

It would be fun to compare it to a de-microsoted extension

Didn't work.

Gonna go to bed and kinda just hope this starts working and then try again after work when reality sets in.

How much did you eventually spend for everything combined?

Hard question to answer because it's the server of Theseus at this point. My first NaS/Homelab was probably about $300 in cheap parts. It had 3 TB of SSD storage in a 6 bay 2.5 in SSD caddy that fit in a 5.25 bay of a Optiplex. It booted from a single NVMe drive and had 2x 4tb spinning disk drives.

My current server is a little over $1500 I think. It has 2 gpus (5060ti 16GB and 3060 12 GB for AI and hashcat stuff), 8x 4tbHDDs, 8x 500gb SSDs, an EPYC 7302p CPU, all noctua fans (3 case 2 CPU).

What are the running costs?

Electricity is cheap in Kentucky. I think this might cost $10-$20/month to run. Jellyfin is my most used service so I moved it and the production nas that fuels it onto a much more power efficient setup (Optiplex 3000 with a single 12tb HDD) and that probably costs a couple bucks at most a month. I have all the data backups on my big server so if the second hand HDD dies I can just point there server at my big server while I reload a new 12tb HDD.

How much space does it gobble up?

Not much more than a normal gaming PC. It fits in a Gamemax Titan or any other E-ATX case really.

How loud is it?

Not very. The stock fans of the Gamemax were fine but the Noctua flex is always funny. I keep my server right next to my gaming PC which is right next to where I game (duh) and work from home. It's only noticeable when one of the HDDs is dying and trying its best. This is why I went with consumer components in a consumer case as opposed to a rack mount solution. I worked in a data center and so I have some rack mount servers but they're loud as shit.

Backup/redundancy plan?

I pay for 500gb of Proton drive. All my important documents are backed up there. Most of my TBs of data are movies and shows. It would suck to lose the collection but it's not worth setting up an off site backup for terabytes of meaningless things like that. Honestly, I only really need sub 100 GB of cloud storage for photos and tax documents. It was just a good deal to get the 500 from Proton.

Internet connection good enough (upload speed)?

My internet connection is dog shit. That's why I started my NaS. I got sick of the show I was streaming being interrupted by Spectrum shitting the bed again. Websites I run are hosted on GitHub or a VPS until I can get something less bad.

How many hours did it take you to set everything up?

Well, I'm very cheap. I mean VERY cheap. My HDDs in my big server were pulled from some NetApp appliance that used a weird blocking format for HDD data which don't feel bad if you didn't know that cause I didn't either. Took a few days to figure that out and then a few weeks to run a auto reformat on Truenas to put them in the right blocking format for anything other than a NetApp appliance to use.

And that kinda stuff is what you deal with when you want a beefy server but you don't want to buy new. If I had bought this server new in 2018/17 when most of the parts were new, this would probably be a $10k-$15k server.

Can I recommend doing this? Only if you want to learn. I've dealt with so much weird shit. I have a memory leak that eats up 70% of my usable ram. I can't get the 5060 to run properly and the AI I have running on the 3060 is too stupid to help. Everything is virtualized which was a weird call, I virtualized Truenas and passed through a SAS controller to use my NetApp drives. Why? I got convinced by a Homelab YouTuber and it seemed fun.

But that's what what I wanted. Weird and jank to play with. I've probably put in a couple hundred hours of work into it. I put 5-6 more just today trying to learn Cloudflared tunnels to open my Jellyfin server to the web. But I might try my AI server next.

I never feel like I appreciate these enough. This is the work of someone who thought this scene and others like it were so beautiful he had to hone his skill as an artist to painstakingly recreate this view to share with others. Something that we do as an after thought with our phones now.

Thank for sharing this with us, Thomas. I think it's beautiful too.

Do they even make disks with enough space for a modern game? Secondly, would a spinning disk be fast enough for it?

I feel like the only way for truly physical media in the AAA space to be a thing again is if people are willing to pay an extra $60+ for an external SSD that holds the game.

But what where you doing and which instance?

Sick! I've added both to my list.

I'm almost done with "Tracers in the Dark"

$1000-$1100 is still a lot to ask of me specifically, but that is closer to market IMHO