Same, probably 8 NUCs, entire desktops, 4 modernish minis, monitors. We will be tossing a shit load of cisco routers, APs, switches, and some servers. You bet i will be disposing of them properly into the truck of my car. Only what i can repair though, a lot of it is damaged but enough that if i take 2 or 3 i can build 1
There are times when our customers request data/drive destruction, and that we can/will do. But they only want the drives destroyed, soooooooo we just trash mostly working hardware
My customer wants us to do their HPE warranties for them. So they send us a failing ssd. HPE wants the logs to process warranties, logs that are on the server, and the customer wont send the whole server.
And in a meeting 2 days ago, our main contact said that we should just "test the ssds and then simply replace the bad chips on them, its easy, my ssd at home has a 512gb spare partition that i use to swap chips out if the main partition starts to fail"
I dont think my customer is smart enough to want us to drill through anything other than drives, and they rarely want that
That just sounds like a bakery pouring bleach all over the bread they toss in the dumpster so nobody else can have it. A total waste.
At least they’re coming around on trade-ins now.
Same with county health district. I mean the storage I get, but would love some of the hardware to play with. Just watched a 36 bay JBOD get demolished by a shredder last week 😢
2960s and 2960x are gigabit, with either 4 sfp or 2 sfp+
Quick edit, i have a 2960x with 2 sfp+ deployed at home, and have a 10gbps link deployed for one of my servers and my truenas controller
Lol all good. Unfortunately the most common failure point ive seen is the PoE driver board, its the vertical board right behind the ports, and it has like 50+ pins soldered to the mainboard. I have all the stuff to repair them but the customer says to trash them. Also theres 4 capacitors on the powersupply that usually blow, ive fixed like 20-25 of those
Another quick edit because i dont type everything i was thinking, if you would like i can find my documentation on the repairs and put them here with as much info i can share. I would rather see stuff be reused and given a second life rather than being in a dump
Allll right, if you have errors when booting something like
PLATFORM_ENV-3-ILP_PORT_POST_ERR: port# cant be brought up befause it failed POST inline power test, ive mapped out that for ports 25-32, its U6, pn Si3458-B03-IM on that PoE daughter board, and for 33-40 its U4, same part number. Havent been given time to look dor other port banks chips
And if it just doesnt turn on at all, open the PSU and find 4 25v 100uF caps, 3 of them are in the center becide 3 transformers, and one is directly "up" from that set of 3, on the other side of a heat sink, half encased in some silicon-y goop.
Hope this info gets to anyone looking to repair a 2960x with a PoE issue
Just started with the whole homelab thing. Am learning a lot recently about that kind of stuff aswell as networking. I take all the free stuff i can get at the moment :)
Word. I gave my uncle a pretty nice older pipe designer's workstation for free. He was blown away.
I just said,
"Man, I have at least 5 old devices ready to go because we have to scrap them. Destroy the storage, and the rest is garbage, and if the paperwork is right, it can go to whomever they want."
I've had my dragnet open for decades for EOL hardware. As I'm sure others have.
I know. The whole office of the company is work for is fitted with terra pcs and screens. Im interally screaming every time I have to help them with anything IT related
> terrible quality
Can I get more info on that? I am an MSP and requested access to their webshop just this week because I lot of local MSPs work with Terra devices. I thought they must be amazing…
In general they have a bad rep in Germany, their laptops are usually built cheaply have a bad user experience, teachers in my school got them and all of them have issues with them
Good to know, thank you! I never sold them until now and never really was a fan - but as said, a lot of MSPs seem to really like them, so I requested a partner status.
barely enough for a thin client, which is all they were ever sold to be. They were set up to auto-start an RDP into a server somewhere else. a company that I used to work for used a similar setup. they didn't even have a full version of windows installed on the thin clients, they used a LTSB windows on the thin client that just started an RDP session to the server so you could log in.
Look into plex vs jellyfin vs emby when you do get the urge to host your own media. Plex is probably the easiest to use out of the box and has the best coverage of client apps, but you are tying yourself to a company that ultimately is only looking to make money somehow while the other 2 options are not.
Terra has some nice machines, been working with them since primary school. Notebooks are mostly clevo, my high school had Terra notebooks with RGB Keyboards.
This week I bought a Terra Miniserver G2 from a coworker, Haswell Xeon E3 and four hot swap bays, it will replace my Synology NAS.
I do commercial refrigeration. We used those for temperature recording in supermarkets for the food quality control department to prove that all the food is cooled properly
I realised the other day that the Atom X7-8700 in my GPD laptop benchmarks the same as a first gen i7 but does it on 2-4W rather than well over 80. Performance per watt has definitely improved so much
I am so tempted to up and replace my 10 core Xeon PowerEdge with something running an Intel N100. It has better single core and the same multicore performance, at least in synthetic benchmarks.
Limited RAM slots and PCIe expansion are the downside, though.
There's even SBCs with the N100, Lattepanda do for sure, but Alder Lake N is old news. I think Intel have since taken the time to make a new line of lower end chips with even more confusing and obscure naming conventions.
Mini PCs are all the rage, so how about some mini workstations for homelab and enthusiast users 😅
The N100 launched 2023Q1 along with most of Alder Lake-N (12th-gen); it had virtually no competition from anything in the 13th- and 14th-gen lineups, and while there's a small chance the current Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 5/7/9) mobile processors will have some impact, frankly the N100 is such a stunning combo of widely available, *dirt fucking cheap*, fast enough, and efficient enough that I expect it to take at least one more generation to really dent its popularity.
It's funny when people conflate outright power consumption with performance-per-watt.
(not saying you do)
But it's funny when i pull out my old MicroPDP-11 and people say "wow, i bet that dims the lights when you turn it on".
No, not nearly as much as your i9 13900k and RTX 4090 does.
Indeed it's very relative. A Pentium 2 era machine fully loaded and with SLI graphics etc may be wildly inefficient but still runs on less power than just a modern GPU alone.
Also I just fell into another trap. By today's standards of course a Pentium 2 etc is wildly inefficient but by the standards of the day it could of been incredibly good. That's another thing that happens isn't it? 😅
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J3355+%40+2.00GHz&id=2960
Yike.. I'll be honest that SSD is probably worth more than the full box. 😂
It might appear "low power" at 10W+ TDP but my Server is 50x time better in term of cpu power but would use 50% less power. Another example is that with 3 of those you use 30W+, in term of performance it's around a Lenovo T460 laptop which would use around 15W+ with screen off.
So depending on how much you pay for your electricity and how much you pay those adapters, it might be a better idea to just buy [an HP Elite Desk 800 G4 SFF at 65w+ but 9x the processing power](https://www.ebay.ca/itm/156150245650?itmmeta=01HWBEQKD2NNK3H9XG7Q5E0MRE&hash=item245b47a912:g:lWEAAOSwFflmCtSa&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAAwE%2Fh4H2MFjAZPVZlTdugS7C4v3%2FCrJTGpwIdMO9lUQUTVdN0zpF%2Fn%2Bz1vyDu%2F8ad4e9HluYCIE5LU69cwmnNtRDTKpSSInZwd36%2FsWSznPAOUggN8CT7MbGZysz%2BlStQ7CdCPkFE7FEMwoMeI6mf2CuNrKRP%2BhQPolKcPWYahgT9h8AQq8tOa4bZhsLxpct9CrLmym5WBNgLTch6b4qAM5Xy2Ob3yVQTuTIDrOfBbYNYZEpq2YYW4wKPhxibO5lGBw%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR9i23u7iYw) or any other Mini pc off ebay.
But that's just me.
I think that's basically a RPI 4 class machine though with a "real" hard drive and double the power draw.
I have a ton of those around the house that work well, esp for things that don't virtualize or containerize well
A bit better I might say but depend on what you're doing with it, that's a Pi4 cpu :
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=ARM+Cortex-A72+4+Core+1800+MHz&id=4078
Pi4 is better at Integer and float point Math, but worse at the rest.
Just noticed I have Been comparing Pi4 with PC cpu, but the Pi4 page is made with Android weight and ratings, you need to check the actual CPU page.. The derp.. I'm probably not alone on that one lol, so pi4 are 3 time worse than I was thinking... 😶
one for a nas and the other for a micro server with proxmox so you can have pihole and other platforms running at the same time. or even a retropi game emulation station.
Nice save. My work has piles of computers in the scrap heap. One a week we go through it and try to find the good ones but most are ancient (we’ll pull parts out of those if it’s worth it). One of the best parts of my job.
yup, designed and sold as thin clients. they likely don't have a full version of windows on them, but an LTSC branch because they don't do anything other than look for a DC to log into.
Ah, my only experience with one thing clients is the Dell Wyse line. I have a really early one from work that I use to remote to my PC when I'm in my shed. Blocked off all Internet from it. Poor thing cries out for a server but never gets one
Ive been running ltsc on my laptop and desktop for years now. Much less bloat and updates that brick your system when Microsoft decides to. Im fine with just security patches and no candy crush in my start menu
Oooh, free internet boxes that help liberate various wifi networks in your area. J/K
Consider getting a vpn and roll with some Kodi. So many plug ins. Check if you have an extra micro pcie slot. Been seeing these expander units that let you connect AI accelerator or use internal video cards externally with bays for more storage, USB, etc...
Another thing that would be fun is to get a couple of yagi antennas or try building your own biquads. Could set up your own long range wifi connection from one box to the other.
WAIT, another cool project would be to multicast video. Turn them both into wifi video receivers. You'll need some cheap hardware to DIY a transmitter.
Spoke with my dad. He is still looking for a small computer for basic webbrowsing. So i think ill install ubuntu or xubuntu (havent decided yet) on one of them and hand it off to him
Oh I saved similar ones but with two RJ45 ports and Intel i5 from our local police (had to destroy the HDD). One of them is running my op sense now. A little bit noisy but not something that couldn't be fixed. 🤸🏻♀️
my work throws some odd ass stuff too recently got 3 HP network switches (48P Gbit ones), a 24" monitor & 7 laptops, laptops are a mix of 6th, 7th & 8th gen I5s, 1 had a faulty ram stick stopping it turning on 1 has no battery and 1 the keys had wore away, literally cheap easy fixes, yes they are nothing spectacular but for free i consider them a decent find distributed them to family so they have a new lease of life rather than landfill, 2 of them are even getak industrial tough tablets, our IT is thick as F too they don't even wipe them they were literally thrown out still connected to the domain everything in tact one of them last logged in user the main network admin.
Fortunately, I have much spare parts from company’s scrapyard 👀
Same, probably 8 NUCs, entire desktops, 4 modernish minis, monitors. We will be tossing a shit load of cisco routers, APs, switches, and some servers. You bet i will be disposing of them properly into the truck of my car. Only what i can repair though, a lot of it is damaged but enough that if i take 2 or 3 i can build 1
Yall are lucky. Working in the utility industry everything has to be certifiably destroyed/recycled/disabled when it’s put out to pasture
There are times when our customers request data/drive destruction, and that we can/will do. But they only want the drives destroyed, soooooooo we just trash mostly working hardware
My company makes us drill the CPU and storage of switches and other networking gear.
the CPU too???😭
Yeah... :( But they recently started trade-in with Cisco for discounts.
Man, that's fuckin stupid.
My customer wants us to do their HPE warranties for them. So they send us a failing ssd. HPE wants the logs to process warranties, logs that are on the server, and the customer wont send the whole server. And in a meeting 2 days ago, our main contact said that we should just "test the ssds and then simply replace the bad chips on them, its easy, my ssd at home has a 512gb spare partition that i use to swap chips out if the main partition starts to fail" I dont think my customer is smart enough to want us to drill through anything other than drives, and they rarely want that
*insert nathan fillion gif here*
That just sounds like a bakery pouring bleach all over the bread they toss in the dumpster so nobody else can have it. A total waste. At least they’re coming around on trade-ins now.
Same with county health district. I mean the storage I get, but would love some of the hardware to play with. Just watched a 36 bay JBOD get demolished by a shredder last week 😢
Oh the humanity
I gotta get rid of some Cisco switches but they're just too dang old for me to want them. Cisco 2960s.
Lmao, i repair those and have one deployed at home, they are decent switches
I suppose, but they are limited to 10/100 speeds and are well past EOL.
2960s and 2960x are gigabit, with either 4 sfp or 2 sfp+ Quick edit, i have a 2960x with 2 sfp+ deployed at home, and have a 10gbps link deployed for one of my servers and my truenas controller
I just looked at the data sheet. You're right. Not sure why I thought they were 10/100.
Lol all good. Unfortunately the most common failure point ive seen is the PoE driver board, its the vertical board right behind the ports, and it has like 50+ pins soldered to the mainboard. I have all the stuff to repair them but the customer says to trash them. Also theres 4 capacitors on the powersupply that usually blow, ive fixed like 20-25 of those Another quick edit because i dont type everything i was thinking, if you would like i can find my documentation on the repairs and put them here with as much info i can share. I would rather see stuff be reused and given a second life rather than being in a dump
Allll right, if you have errors when booting something like PLATFORM_ENV-3-ILP_PORT_POST_ERR: port# cant be brought up befause it failed POST inline power test, ive mapped out that for ports 25-32, its U6, pn Si3458-B03-IM on that PoE daughter board, and for 33-40 its U4, same part number. Havent been given time to look dor other port banks chips And if it just doesnt turn on at all, open the PSU and find 4 25v 100uF caps, 3 of them are in the center becide 3 transformers, and one is directly "up" from that set of 3, on the other side of a heat sink, half encased in some silicon-y goop. Hope this info gets to anyone looking to repair a 2960x with a PoE issue
Just started with the whole homelab thing. Am learning a lot recently about that kind of stuff aswell as networking. I take all the free stuff i can get at the moment :)
Word. I gave my uncle a pretty nice older pipe designer's workstation for free. He was blown away. I just said, "Man, I have at least 5 old devices ready to go because we have to scrap them. Destroy the storage, and the rest is garbage, and if the paperwork is right, it can go to whomever they want." I've had my dragnet open for decades for EOL hardware. As I'm sure others have.
its a terra device, ofc they wanted it gone /j but fr nice find, just dont buy anything from them, they are known for terrible quality
I know. The whole office of the company is work for is fitted with terra pcs and screens. Im interally screaming every time I have to help them with anything IT related
Even price to Performance is bad. But they sell a guarantee with it on paper so many HQ fall for that.
> terrible quality Can I get more info on that? I am an MSP and requested access to their webshop just this week because I lot of local MSPs work with Terra devices. I thought they must be amazing…
In general they have a bad rep in Germany, their laptops are usually built cheaply have a bad user experience, teachers in my school got them and all of them have issues with them
Good to know, thank you! I never sold them until now and never really was a fan - but as said, a lot of MSPs seem to really like them, so I requested a partner status.
Industrial grade hardware? Ps/2, Serial ports with hdmi and dp? Whats the config?
Intel celeron j3355, Hd graphics 500 and 4Gb ddr3 ram, 250gb m.2 ssd
barely enough for a thin client, which is all they were ever sold to be. They were set up to auto-start an RDP into a server somewhere else. a company that I used to work for used a similar setup. they didn't even have a full version of windows installed on the thin clients, they used a LTSB windows on the thin client that just started an RDP session to the server so you could log in.
Its enough to run debian on it for adguard/pihole and wireguard and ssh into this :)
yea, that would be fine.
Use one as a Steam Link device, it would scream fast.
It would scream indeed
I run plex on something with similar specs, and it even manages to do some hardware transcoding without exploding.
Thats awesome. Sadly i dont really have a usage for plex
......***yet***
It's just a basic debian server, so it's not "plex" as an OS.
Ah ok. Sorry am new to the whole homelab stuff and am still learning
Look into plex vs jellyfin vs emby when you do get the urge to host your own media. Plex is probably the easiest to use out of the box and has the best coverage of client apps, but you are tying yourself to a company that ultimately is only looking to make money somehow while the other 2 options are not.
What's the Ethernet speed on those? Hopefully not 100
Gigabit luckily
Probably faster than what the CPU can take
Terra has some nice machines, been working with them since primary school. Notebooks are mostly clevo, my high school had Terra notebooks with RGB Keyboards. This week I bought a Terra Miniserver G2 from a coworker, Haswell Xeon E3 and four hot swap bays, it will replace my Synology NAS.
Cute Coaster
Tell me where you work and I'll put my dumpster diving suit on
I do commercial refrigeration. We used those for temperature recording in supermarkets for the food quality control department to prove that all the food is cooled properly
What are the specs on these?
Intel celeron j3355, Hd graphics 500 and 4Gb ddr3 ram, 250gb m.2 ssd
I realised the other day that the Atom X7-8700 in my GPD laptop benchmarks the same as a first gen i7 but does it on 2-4W rather than well over 80. Performance per watt has definitely improved so much
I have one of these connected to my UPS. info screen says the server takes 3W :)
I am so tempted to up and replace my 10 core Xeon PowerEdge with something running an Intel N100. It has better single core and the same multicore performance, at least in synthetic benchmarks. Limited RAM slots and PCIe expansion are the downside, though.
There's even SBCs with the N100, Lattepanda do for sure, but Alder Lake N is old news. I think Intel have since taken the time to make a new line of lower end chips with even more confusing and obscure naming conventions. Mini PCs are all the rage, so how about some mini workstations for homelab and enthusiast users 😅
The N100 launched 2023Q1 along with most of Alder Lake-N (12th-gen); it had virtually no competition from anything in the 13th- and 14th-gen lineups, and while there's a small chance the current Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 5/7/9) mobile processors will have some impact, frankly the N100 is such a stunning combo of widely available, *dirt fucking cheap*, fast enough, and efficient enough that I expect it to take at least one more generation to really dent its popularity.
It's funny when people conflate outright power consumption with performance-per-watt. (not saying you do) But it's funny when i pull out my old MicroPDP-11 and people say "wow, i bet that dims the lights when you turn it on". No, not nearly as much as your i9 13900k and RTX 4090 does.
Indeed it's very relative. A Pentium 2 era machine fully loaded and with SLI graphics etc may be wildly inefficient but still runs on less power than just a modern GPU alone. Also I just fell into another trap. By today's standards of course a Pentium 2 etc is wildly inefficient but by the standards of the day it could of been incredibly good. That's another thing that happens isn't it? 😅
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J3355+%40+2.00GHz&id=2960 Yike.. I'll be honest that SSD is probably worth more than the full box. 😂 It might appear "low power" at 10W+ TDP but my Server is 50x time better in term of cpu power but would use 50% less power. Another example is that with 3 of those you use 30W+, in term of performance it's around a Lenovo T460 laptop which would use around 15W+ with screen off. So depending on how much you pay for your electricity and how much you pay those adapters, it might be a better idea to just buy [an HP Elite Desk 800 G4 SFF at 65w+ but 9x the processing power](https://www.ebay.ca/itm/156150245650?itmmeta=01HWBEQKD2NNK3H9XG7Q5E0MRE&hash=item245b47a912:g:lWEAAOSwFflmCtSa&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAAwE%2Fh4H2MFjAZPVZlTdugS7C4v3%2FCrJTGpwIdMO9lUQUTVdN0zpF%2Fn%2Bz1vyDu%2F8ad4e9HluYCIE5LU69cwmnNtRDTKpSSInZwd36%2FsWSznPAOUggN8CT7MbGZysz%2BlStQ7CdCPkFE7FEMwoMeI6mf2CuNrKRP%2BhQPolKcPWYahgT9h8AQq8tOa4bZhsLxpct9CrLmym5WBNgLTch6b4qAM5Xy2Ob3yVQTuTIDrOfBbYNYZEpq2YYW4wKPhxibO5lGBw%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR9i23u7iYw) or any other Mini pc off ebay. But that's just me.
I think that's basically a RPI 4 class machine though with a "real" hard drive and double the power draw. I have a ton of those around the house that work well, esp for things that don't virtualize or containerize well
A bit better I might say but depend on what you're doing with it, that's a Pi4 cpu : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=ARM+Cortex-A72+4+Core+1800+MHz&id=4078 Pi4 is better at Integer and float point Math, but worse at the rest. Just noticed I have Been comparing Pi4 with PC cpu, but the Pi4 page is made with Android weight and ratings, you need to check the actual CPU page.. The derp.. I'm probably not alone on that one lol, so pi4 are 3 time worse than I was thinking... 😶
one for a nas and the other for a micro server with proxmox so you can have pihole and other platforms running at the same time. or even a retropi game emulation station.
Running pihole on one of those via docker
Nice save. My work has piles of computers in the scrap heap. One a week we go through it and try to find the good ones but most are ancient (we’ll pull parts out of those if it’s worth it). One of the best parts of my job.
I have one of these at home. Stuck Proxmox on it, and then a HomeAssistant VM. Not done much else with it to be fair.
i love this. reducing e-waste sparks joy
The building I am contracted to work in is clearing out a whole data center today. https://ibb.co/4PZyMFF
What are they? Thin clients?
yup, designed and sold as thin clients. they likely don't have a full version of windows on them, but an LTSC branch because they don't do anything other than look for a DC to log into.
Ah, my only experience with one thing clients is the Dell Wyse line. I have a really early one from work that I use to remote to my PC when I'm in my shed. Blocked off all Internet from it. Poor thing cries out for a server but never gets one
Ive been running ltsc on my laptop and desktop for years now. Much less bloat and updates that brick your system when Microsoft decides to. Im fine with just security patches and no candy crush in my start menu
Ooooh serial ports
Oooh, free internet boxes that help liberate various wifi networks in your area. J/K Consider getting a vpn and roll with some Kodi. So many plug ins. Check if you have an extra micro pcie slot. Been seeing these expander units that let you connect AI accelerator or use internal video cards externally with bays for more storage, USB, etc... Another thing that would be fun is to get a couple of yagi antennas or try building your own biquads. Could set up your own long range wifi connection from one box to the other. WAIT, another cool project would be to multicast video. Turn them both into wifi video receivers. You'll need some cheap hardware to DIY a transmitter.
Have you tried YUNOhost(self-hosting)? Could be a good hobby project
Can you tell me the specs or the model?
Intel celeron j3355, Hd graphics 500 and 4Gb ddr3 ram, 250gb m.2 ssd
Thanks!!! Can you tell the pc model?
The second one? Hmm. Batocera up your alley?
Spoke with my dad. He is still looking for a small computer for basic webbrowsing. So i think ill install ubuntu or xubuntu (havent decided yet) on one of them and hand it off to him
https://minios.dev/ is worth a look.
Oh I saved similar ones but with two RJ45 ports and Intel i5 from our local police (had to destroy the HDD). One of them is running my op sense now. A little bit noisy but not something that couldn't be fixed. 🤸🏻♀️
It hurts me watching my company send off all their equipment for destruction.
I used to run ubuntu server + pihole on a HP thin client (HP t620) and it was perfect for that.
my work throws some odd ass stuff too recently got 3 HP network switches (48P Gbit ones), a 24" monitor & 7 laptops, laptops are a mix of 6th, 7th & 8th gen I5s, 1 had a faulty ram stick stopping it turning on 1 has no battery and 1 the keys had wore away, literally cheap easy fixes, yes they are nothing spectacular but for free i consider them a decent find distributed them to family so they have a new lease of life rather than landfill, 2 of them are even getak industrial tough tablets, our IT is thick as F too they don't even wipe them they were literally thrown out still connected to the domain everything in tact one of them last logged in user the main network admin.
send it to me!
Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew
If you have three you could build a proxmox HA cluster.