Fiber, 8gbps through Quantum Fiber (part of the Lumen/Centurylink family). No throttling here…
My bottleneck is the vpn that I have to have between me and the world… unfortunately. I only trust specific private trackers to not use it. I actually setup 4 seed boxes (VMs) in my garage to push more data out.
Proxmox cluster… and big storage truenas node.
And a dirty amount of networking… big cables on the right is QSFP, 40gbps 2x in lagg per server.
These pictures were just after a transplant to a new server rack. So everything is off… but the blinkin’ lights are real.
Edit: Didn’t turn off anything before I ran these…
Jfc please make sure that’s hazard proof and don’t get raided. People like you legitimately make the world go round.
So about that… I actually got solar installed on my house and when the “electrician” (subbed out contractor with dubious credentials but was operating under a legit company) ran dedicated breakers for the servers… the junction box caught fire.
That was a fun 2am to wake up at.
But it’s pretty safe now. Have had several master electricians come in and evaluate it all at this point and all of them are happy with it now.
I’m gonna guess incremental increases over the years, and snapping up used enterprise stuff on fire sale. It’s actually pretty feasible to do if you know where to look for this stuff.
More or less exactly this. Most of my servers are company decommission (some companies have a strict upgrade cycle, and I even have like 3 more “spares” sitting around). I’ve found some government liquidation here and there as well which has been great for resale to recoup some of what I spend. I have something like 4TB of Ram sitting in a box somewhere that I should sell somewhere…
Some stuff was “decent” ebay buys. A few items I just had to pony up for. Battery backups was mostly paid at full msrp, but has been worth it. HDDs are mostly “refurb” and built up over time as well, which is why raidz2 and several spares in the zfs pool.
But yeah, about 10 years of building it up. I use it as my playground for professional development, and it’s helped prove a lot of what I say on my resume.
When you have a functional setup like this, and can show that to potential employer. It’s been the best sole investment I’ve ever made. It’s netted me more money in contracts by many many times what I put into it.
Edit: and saved me from countless “cloud” privacy violations, data breaches, etc…
Edit2: Recurring costs is basically energy. The rack itself uses about 90kWh a day (about $5/day for me), cooling and all. My solar install creates just about that much per day as well so that’s all offset (and if I ever move my equipment into a colo, my house will basically have no electric bill at all). Internet is $165 a month, which is fucking great IMO… VPN is paid every 3 years or whatever that cycle is on. If I was to just take the non-replaceable stuff (about 20tb worth of data at last check, and a bunch of lxc containers) and put that on a VPS somewhere I’d be paying at least 10x what I do now in someone else’s datacenter, forget that that’s a recurring monthly cost.
