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Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

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Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#231

Post by amluto »

kube-system wrote: post #224
amluto wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most (all?) decent datacenters also have generators on site, and the intent is that the UPS will never run out of charge. So the fully-discharged case is an error and it might be intentional to require intervention to recover.

Yeah, some people treat UPSes as "backup power" but that's not really what they're intended for. Their intended purpose is to bridge the gap during interruptions... either to an alternative power source, or to a powered-off state.

Sure, but when you stick a UPS in the closet to power your network or security cameras or whatever for a little while if there is a power interruption, you expect:

a) If the power is out too long for your UPS (or you have solar and batteries and they discharge overnight or whatever) that the system will turn back on when the power recovers, and

b) You will not have extra bonus outages just because the UPS is in a bad mood.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#233

Post by kube-system »

amluto wrote: post #231
kube-system wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, some people treat UPSes as "backup power" but that's not really what they're intended for. Their intended purpose is to bridge the gap during interruptions... either to an alternative power source, or to a powered-off state.

Sure, but when you stick a UPS in the closet to power your network or security cameras or whatever for a little while if there is a power interruption, you expect: a) If the power is out too long for your UPS (or you have solar and batteries and they discharge overnight or whatever) that the system will turn back on when the power recovers, and b) You will not have extra bonus outages just because the UPS is in a bad…

I completely agree with B. But alas, people love buying shitty cheap UPSes.

But A is along the lines of the misconception that I'm referring to... There should be no such thing as "the power being out too long for your UPS". A UPS isn't there to give you a little while to ignore the problem, it's there to give you time to address it. Either by switching to another source of power, or to power off the equipment.

Now, the reason that every UPS that supports auto-restart has it as a configurable option, is because you often don't want to do this for many reasons, e.g.:

* a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage

* a catastrophic failure (because the battery shouldn't be dead) could be an indication of other issues that need to be addressed before power on

* powering on the equipment may require staggering to prevent inrush current overload

The whole use case of "I'm using the UPS to run my equipment during an outage" is kind of an abuse of their purpose. It's commonly done, and I've done it myself. But it's not what they're for.

But also, if you want a UPS that auto-restarts -- they exist -- but you get what you pay for.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#234

Post by foxyv »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #201
torginus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we literally did this in one of my previous places. We took all the old laptops that were to be junked by IT, and used them as a selenium test farm. We saved like $100k per month on the AWS bill at the cost of basically electricity. If all the machines were running Windows, the difference would've been even more drastic. What I dont get is that we have these autoscaling technologies that allow software to be f…

Enterprise hardware has companies that your company can call to get support when things go sideways, if they're using a rack full of 5 year old Thinkpads then they're on their own if something breaks

I believe they are referring to the dumpster support model. The hardware is so cheap that, if it fails, you toss it in a dumpster and buy more by the gross. Using Kubernetes to spread loads across your less reliable nodes ensures high availability. Sometimes this can be even more reliable because you are regularly testing your recovery and backup features and your hardware is more varied.

The downside is that if some piece of firmware or hardware has a vulnerability you have a larger attack surface.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#236

Post by itintheory »

qazxcvbnmlp wrote: post #219
torginus wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funniest thing about huge enterprises is that they often have processes so convoluted and restrictive for everything, that getting stuff done by the book is basically impossible, so people get creative with the limitations and we often end up with the sketchiest solutions in existence. I hope the words 'web server hosted in Excel VBA' illustrate the magnitude of horrors that can emerge in these situations.

Raspberry pi on a network controlled power supply to rebroadcast udp broadcast traffic across subnets

I saw an entire physical switch configured for bridging VLANs. It was even labeled as such. 802.1q is hard and confusing if you don't know what you're doing.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#237

Post by gopher_space »

torginus wrote: post #212
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise hardware has companies that your company can call to get support when things go sideways, if they're using a rack full of 5 year old Thinkpads then they're on their own if something breaks

We didn't have support, and we didn't need it, as the hardware was essentially EOL, probably would've been sold for like 20% of new price. We just chucked Selenium grid on them, locked them in the storage room, and if they died, they died (they didn't die a lot tho, which is surprising, as we had quite a few cheap sketchy in there as well)

I can deconstruct my workflow to the point where the benefits of plugging outdated hardware into the project are calculable. Info, transformation, etc I don't need in near real time feels like it's trending towards the price of electricity.

Since I've been looking at this situation from a resource point of view for a bit I see obvious savings in slowing down certain accepted processes. For example, an entity that continuously updates needs to be continuously scraped while an entity that publishes once a day needs to be hit once a day.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#238

Post by amluto »

kube-system wrote: post #233
amluto wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but when you stick a UPS in the closet to power your network or security cameras or whatever for a little while if there is a power interruption, you expect: a) If the power is out too long for your UPS (or you have solar and batteries and they discharge overnight or whatever) that the system will turn back on when the power recovers, and b) You will not have extra bonus outages just because the UPS is in a bad…

I completely agree with B. But alas, people love buying shitty cheap UPSes. But A is along the lines of the misconception that I'm referring to... There should be no such thing as "the power being out too long for your UPS". A UPS isn't there to give you a little while to ignore the problem, it's there to give you time to address it. Either by switching to another source of power, or to power off the equipment. Now,…

Some of these is IMO a bit silly:

> a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage

A lot of devices are unconditionally safe to shut down. Think network equipment, signs, exit lights, and well designed computers.

> a catastrophic failure (because the battery shouldn't be dead) could be an indication of other issues that need to be addressed before power on

This is such a weird presumption. Power outages happen. Long power outages happen. Fancy management software that triggers a controlled shutdown when the SOC is low might still leave nonzero remaining load. In fact, if you have a load that uses a UPS to trigger a controlled shutdown, it’s almost definitional that a controlled shutdown is not a catastrophe and that the system should turn back on eventually.

All of your points are valid for serious datacenter gear and even for large server closets, but for small systems I think they don’t apply to most users, and I’m talking about smaller UPSes.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#239

Post by kube-system »

amluto wrote: post #238
kube-system wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with B. But alas, people love buying shitty cheap UPSes. But A is along the lines of the misconception that I'm referring to... There should be no such thing as "the power being out too long for your UPS". A UPS isn't there to give you a little while to ignore the problem, it's there to give you time to address it. Either by switching to another source of power, or to power off the equipment. Now,…

Some of these is IMO a bit silly: > a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage A lot of devices are unconditionally safe to shut down. Think network equipment, signs, exit lights, and well designed computers. > a catastrophic failure (because the battery shouldn't be dead) could be an indication of other issues that need to be addressed before power on This is s…

> > a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage

> A lot of devices are unconditionally safe to shut down.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean you want to expose them to brownout conditions when your UPS is depleted. If the power is continuing to flip on and off, it's better to just leave it off if you don't have the battery to prevent even short interruptions. A good UPS can do this automatically for you. A cheap one will just stay off and let you respond to the outage.

> This is such a weird presumption.

It wasn't a presumption I was making for all users -- but an example of why some users might not want auto-restart as a feature. Of course, if you want auto-restart as a feature, you can buy a UPS that has it as a feature and turn it on.

> they don’t apply to most users, and I’m talking about smaller UPSes.

Yeah, I know the situation: Someone has a network closet on a budget with a UPS they've sized to get them a few minutes of runtime. They put a UPS on the BOM because it checks a box. So they buy a low-end UPS that either doesn't have the feature, or it doesn't work right.

The solution is just to buy the right UPS for the thing they were trying to do... and test it.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#240

Post by sixothree »

kingstnap wrote: post #81
sixothree wrote: post #5

Say what you want about an old laptop, they sure are a lot faster than a $150/mo azure VM. And to be clear, I mean a _LOT_ faster.

I looked it up for specifics. Right now the closest I can see is that $121/mo gets you 4 Xeon Platinum 8370C cores and 16GiB of RAM [0] (storage not included!). Somebody Geekbenched that config here [1] 1274 single core 4256 multi core. Thats kinda terrible ngl. A mini pc with last gen mobile parts like Ryzen 5 7640HS gets 2610 single and 10768 multi core [2]. [0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/vir…

I feel like Azure and AWS are both getting worse. I logged into a VM I haven't used in some time and was immediately shocked at just how slowly it rendered even the most basic UI elements.
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