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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • I get that, that was also something I used to like about old servers, but let me float a few of the things that I’ve come to realize through my home-lab career to you:

    • Raid is perfectly feasible in consumer hardware. If your motherboard doesn’t have enough SATA ports, you can always get an HBA or a JBOD to support for more disks. There’s really no good reason (that I have heard of) for hardware raid today. Just remember raid is not a backup :)
    • There are consumer ATX PSUs with redundancy. However, the only reason for PSU redundancy is when you cannot tolerate downtime due to a PSU or UPS failure, and that redundancy might save you a few hours of uptime over 10+ years in comparison to a non-redundant consumer PSU that you can go out and buy if it fails. When was the last time you had a (reputable) PSU fail on you? What kind of uptime are you targeting? If you don’t have an answer for that, 99% is very easy to reach even on consumer gear, and is a strong indicator that you don’t need enterprise levels of redundancy. 99% is literally 3 days of downtime per year. Also keep in mind that redundant PSUs are just going to gobble more power and increase operating costs.
    • KVM features - this was the big one for me. I wanted to be able to perform out-of-band remote maintenance on my servers. Then I took a leap and got a Sipeed NanoKVM, and I haven’t looked back. there are plenty of them out there - PiKVM is another reputable one. When buying old enterprise servers, you often have to pay for the remote management license, and that is just another added cost. Not to mention that they lose support pretty quickly, and you end up running out of date software on one of your most critical interfaces to the machine. A NanoKVM, PiKVM, and others aren’t built into the machine, so they continue to be supported for much longer.

    One other thing that I’ll mention and you probably already know - enterprise servers are LOUD - even just a single one can literally sound like a jet engine. That’s not a hyperbolae. If this is your first one, don’t underestimate it. I had my servers in the basement with decent insulation, I used IPMI to throttle the fans back to 10%, and I could still hear the whine on my first floor when everything is quiet. If you end up having to turn down the fans due to noise, you’re going to start having heat issues, and then you’re losing out on performance and shortening component lifespan. Noise-proofing a server is non-trivial - you have to allow air flow still, and where there’s air flow, there’s a path for noise too. My current setups all have 120mm and 140mm fans, and I can barely hear them when I’m working right next to them. My 3D printers are the loud ones in the basement now!


  • Yeah, they’re legit. Bought a few servers from them over the years. No major issues, packing was good, reasonable ship time.

    Had one case where they sent a different NIC than what was listed. They just shipped me the correct one and told me not to bother sending the old one back.

    Stopped buying from them though because I prefer off-the-shelf modern consumer hardware nowadays. The real cost is always power consumption, and I prefer to shell out more money up front in exchange for huge savings on power usage down the line. I can always run over to microcenter and replace a part same-day as opposed to ordering it online and hoping it comes soon.

    If you’re a home-labber, I’d strongly suggest doing the same. Some of those old enterprise servers just gobble power for not that much compute relative to current day consumer machines.

    If I was still buying older servers though, I’d probably be looking at their prices.

    What are you considering buying?


  • They have their place. If you only do multicolor prints rarely, but change materials between prints a lot, that’s where they excel.

    I have both an MMU (Prusa MK3S + MMU 2) and a toolchanger (very custom Voron 2.4 with Tapchanger), and the MMU gets used plenty to swap filament between prints. I look at my toolchanger as being for color prints, and I usually keep 6 colors of PETG on it. My MMU gets used more as the functional printer with all the engineering filaments on it like TPU, PC, ABS, PA. I rarely have to change filament rolls with this setup.

    I am also looking at building one of these Swapper3Ds, which should prevent all the waste from printing multiple colors with the MMU.








  • This process is called ‘bootstrapping’, and is actually quite common in software. For example, the C compiler is written in C. The first iteration of the C compiler was written by hand in assembly code with a very limitted feature set, and that compiler was then used to compile the next iteration, allowing the second version (I’m not sure it was actually the second version; there may have been a few iterations in assembly) to be written in C itself.

    For Forgejo, you dont actually need Forgejo to build Forgejo; just a computer with the Go compiler and any other dependencies. Then, once you have the first version, you can publish the code you have on Forgejo. Nothing too crazy there 🙂

    This also leads to ‘dogfooding’, which is a whole other term…


  • Since you’re a bit concerned about self hosting and collaboration, I would recommend Codeberg - they are a non-profit based in Germany with widespread support and, as far as I know, is the public Forgejo instance with the largest user base.

    If you want, you can also host your own Forgejo instance and mirror your Codeberg repos to it. That way you can have two copies of your data, just in case Codeberg ever goes offline.

    You could also potentially use Gitlab, but I would personally prefer something Forgejo based. Forgejo has been much more responsive/snappier in my opinion; Forgejo is primarily written in Go, while Gitlab is mostly Ruby.




  • IMO, the issue here is that Microsoft appears to have violated the MIT license requiring inclusion of the original author’s copyright notice. I think he has every right to be salty about that violation.

    In your analogy, the sign on the furniture says:

    Free, but if anyone asks, you got this furniture from <name here>.

    Microsoft took the furniture from the curb, but isn’t telling people whom they got it from.

    I agree in regards to your opinion that he shouldn’t be complaining about the fact that someone forked his project, that just the nature of the MIT license. However, I do think he is justified in being upset that the license was violated. Hopefully this gets remedied; it’s not hard nor expensive for Microsoft to add his name to the copyright notice in the license.


  • I have an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra. I hate that it’s proprietary, but in the resin printing world the only non-proprietary option is Prusa, and it was just too small and expensive to justify. My Elegoo doesnt get network connectivity (so no risk of unapproved updates), and I use prusa slicer to slice and then uvtools to convert to the “encrypted” chitubox format. Since the printer isn’t allowed to update, I’m not worried about ever being forced into using chitubox.

    I don’t really care about network connectivity for it; the built in camera is useless for me. I just have a rpi zero with a webcam on it for monitoring, and I also have an IOT switch controlled by that pi via a lan-only http server with a toggle button to control its power. If I see a print is failing via the webcam, I just cut power to the whole printer to stop it remotely. This works even outside my LAN via VPN.

    I do still have to start prints the old fashioned way using a usb stick. This doesn’t bug me much, since I have to go check on resin levels, make sure there’s no crap in the tank, etc before starting a print anyways. I have a short usb extender cable to avoid wearing out the usb port on the printer itself as well. I have mucked about with using the rpi as a dummy usb drive where I can just upload files to the rpi and then the printer reads off of it via the usb port, but I couldn’t get it working :/

    I’m happy enough with the printer itself - it’s fast, reliable (so far) and produces some high quality prints. The price was very reasonable at the time (iirc $450 for the printer, $250 for wash and cure station), all things considered. If someone ever produced a mainboard that supported an open-source firmware for it, I would buy and install it in a heartbeat.





  • Oh 3d printer resin is absolutely not UV resistant - resin printers use UV light to solidify the resin at each layer, and exposing a print to too much UV light after printing can cause UV burn, similar to a thermoplastic.

    Coating the print in a UV resist clear coat should prevent UV light from reaching the print itself, and preventing the burn; think of it as sunscreen for your print 😉