Well, it all started way back when, with a misunderstanding in my mind about what a homelab is. Back then, in my mind a server was this big, honkin’, brutal piece of equipment. Over the years I came to realize that all that rack stuff, while cheap upfront on the used market, was costing me some serious bucks in energy consumption + the added load on the AC, even when electricity in my locale is relatively cheap. Since I already was invested, I didn’t want to redo everything and start from scratch. Then the ‘mini-racks’ started to be a thing with Lenovo’s and such. I saw that others were doing what I wanted to do with much less. So, now days, it doesn’t take much of a computer to run docker containers, Proxmox, etc. Far more energy efficient, doesn’t generate so much heat load, and significantly more quiet.

In the near future, my goal is to miniaturize my lab, and then build me a $4k AI machine. Out of the frying pan into the fire yes, but I haven’t had new equipment in well over 15+ years. I’ve always had used or refurb’s. I think it’s about time to treat myself.

I used to have a DVD duplicator. Picked it up at an auction many, many years back then turned it for twice what I had in it. Something similar to this:

I still have some IOMEGA Zip drives. LOL Man, I remember when those seemed inexhaustible.

I thought the same thing, but whomever the chap was, was buying 15 TB+ drives and didn’t seem to have issue. I questioned him about exactly what you said, and again, they didn’t seem worried about putting over 15 TB of data long term, on a drive that had bad sectors. The reason it came up, was because I was scrolling through New Egg and came upon some relatively cheap drives, however the seller was upfront about there being at least 25 bad sectors. I asked ‘Who would buy such a thing?’ and that’s how the convo started. I’ll have to go back through my comments and see if I can find it.

Hey @Elena Brescacin@poliversity.it , did you ever decide on a back up solution?

There was someone here not too long ago who purchases HDD with bad sectors. I think the idea was to instruct Linux to not use the bad sectors. I am unclear about the mechanics of how it’s done, but the concept has been rolling around in my head ever since. The drives in question were purchased knowingly with bad sectors and came with a warranty.

That got a knowing nod and a chuckle out of me.

The thought just struck me that there may be who knows how many of these out in the wild. Little ‘touch stones’ that people use across a global internet.

I generally try to ride the DDR3 cap as far as equipment. IIRC Intel 8th gen Coffee Lake require DDR4. DDR3 is cheap. So there is a trade off yes, but you’re right, it would be more efficient. When I finally build me a new computer, I will go all the way to DDR5, or whatever is the latest and greatest at that time. The T320 is a great server, it just drinks some electricity. The money I save on electricity, I could pay for another 7020. LOL Thought about selling the T320 on ebay, but I doubt someone would want to pay what it would cost to ship a boat anchor. Maybe CraigsList, local pickup.

I think I found the source of the icanhazip.com block. From the Github Issues page:

2025-03-27 17:00:02] production.ERROR: Failed to fetch external IP address. [“cURL error 60: SSL: no alternative certificate subject name matches target hostname ‘icanhazip.com’ (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html) for https://icanhazip.com/”]

Thanks for being upfront about AI involvement. I’m not sure I need an AI powered expense splitting app however, I damn sure wished I had the skills to build one. LOL Thanks for sharing.

Now? I wonder what was the prohibitive cause before?

Homarr

ETA: If you want to go nuts with integrations, HomePage seems to be the rage.

I don’t think so. The Vercel link just redirects me to vendor HIPAA comparison stuff

That happened right after the OP posted that link. Worked for maybe a couple hours and then…poof

The easiest way for me to show you is just a screen shot of my dashboard:

I’ve added a couple since that screen grab.

Nice! Rock on with yo’ bad self.

some “IoT” devices also use it for some reason

I haven’t conducted a thorough investigation, but the last container I added was SpeedTest Tracker and I am assuming that it’s using icanhazip.com and ifconfig.co to determine the best test servers based on my locale. I chose my own servers when I set it up. For the time being, I have both blocked and nothing seems to complain. SpeedTest Tracker still crons ever hour with success.

Suricata picked it up on the LAN side. I haven’t done an in depth review, but I am suspecting that SpeedTest Tracker is using icanhazip.com and ifconfig.co to check my ip and find the most appropriate test server. It’s on the list tho. For now I have them blocked and nothing seems to complain about it. I chose my own servers.

I know this is probably “the usual” for everyone here, but I’m genuinely excited that I managed to get it all running smoothly.

Heh! Don’t let anyone dampen your enthusiasm. It feels great when I am toiling away at something and finally all the pieces click together. I might have to walk away a few times and put the project on hold, but I keep whacking away at it. When it does work, it’s always a childish joy that comes over me and always gets a fist-pump.

What equipment are you running that Windows Server on?

Wow! It certainly a small world after all.