Flaki @flaki@flaki.social

Fun #homelab detail:
The current config (a Ryzen 3400GE with 32GB RAM and two 4TB SSD-s) runs several services (including this Mastodon instance) in Proxmox, as containers.

For experimentation with Docker I spun up a VM with 2 cores and 4GB RAM, installed Debian on it from scratch and set up the dockerized test instance.

On the graph below you can tell that just this overhead of running an actual VM (vs the low overhead of containers) bumped the power usage, as measured at the wall, almost 25%, from around 17W to 22W!

This is basically the price you pay for "the CPU cannot spend as much time sleeping/in low-power-states because the overhead of the virtualization in the VM keeps nagging it".

#homelab update:
I'm moving to a new apartment over the weekend and going to have my home internet disconnected in the old apartment, so I hooked up my homeserver setup to an old 4G router that is going to keep, among other things, this site alive while I relocate the server to the new place.

#homelab update:
Enjoy this homelabomination from yesterday's tinkering: two passively cooled cases tethered by a PCIe-riser-umbilical-cord

Unfortunately the RAM on the (newly-procured) RTX A4000 runs *mighty hot*, even with the small copper heatsinks they overheat under load in no time, so I will have to find a way to give them a more massive heatsink or somehow attach them to The First's heatpipe (which cools the GA104 core wonderfully btw)

If those little copper heatsinks seem out of place, you are onto my shenanigans, I had to replace the built-in VRM heatsink of the X300 as it was obstructing the giant aluminum slab that is the Alpine passive cooled I had lying around, but since this build *sips* power (avg. <15W with the two SSDs), these small copper heat sinks do the job just as well.
#homelab

Fun(?) fact, the new home server will be completely rebuilt inside & outside, but it would be *less than ideal* to lose access to this very site or my various other files and services, so I transplanted the old Proxmox-based system into an ASRock DeskMini barebones case while I work out the new stuff. Wanna guess what happened? The fan! It was a noisy little bugger, haha, so yoinked the motherboard from the case and stuck a giant passive cooler on the CPU
#homelab

The trusty ole' #homelab came a long way hah! In pursuit of reducing the baseline power consumption and killing the noise-producing parts I swapped out the hard drives for a pair of Samsung QVO SSDs, got HDPLEX's fully passive 250W GaN PSU (pictured above), and got rid of the fans.

#homelab status:
Still experimenting with both a Streacom FC5 and the Monsterlabo First #PassiveCooling cases to inherit the kingdom and become the next, silent version of my combo home server+cloud gaming rig.

The First doesn't fit much 3.5" drive space so will be the primary host with SSD-only storage, while I plan to use the Streacom as a second build and drop it off at my brother's place to house off-site backup storage and serve as a living-room #HTPC.

Current Status
#homelab