Sure thing

FWIW I am in America, if that helps. And for America I found it helps immensely to be in a city. Which is obvious, probably. But since I moved to a less urban area I’m a few hours from the nearest recycler and the closest one never has anything good; whereas the one by me in the city was a 20m drive and always had great shit from various offices shutting down throughout the city and places from basically a 1-2hr drive radius. They would make the drive to clear out a building of gear

Sometimes you can find them on ebay but usually the thing that wrecks ebay deals is shipping. A switch for $40 isn’t as much of a deal if it costs $60 to ship to you because it’s gigantic and weighs 30lbs

If you use ebay sort by distance instead price and look for deals.

The best thing though is to find actual recyclers in your area. Look on ebay sorted by distance, look on Craigslist, etc. I don’t fuck with meta shit but fb marketplace is maybe somewhere to look? If you can find a recycler near you that sells direct to consumers (not all do) then hit them up.

Especially if they’re a small business (that’s one of the things corporate overlords haven’t overtaken in my experience), you might find being a repeat customer is helpful to you. I bought most of my networking stack from them but I also got a bunch of stuff to refurbish and resell. They also refurbish and resell but they didn’t do board repairs, just simple shit like lcd and battery swaps. Anything more wasn’t worth their time to diagnose and repair. So I would come and buy their pile of consoles and phones and weird industrial equipment that needed board work, water damage, etc. I could usually fix 6/10 and resell which is probably good for the world and certainly helped my wallet.

But it also meant they threw me mad deals. I have a tape drive for backing up my nas. It’s like a $3,000 LTO8 drive (new) that wasn’t working and they sold it to me for $200 with a bunch of other stuff I was buying. I fixed it by cleaning it and now I have a practical way to back up hundreds of terabytes

Even if you’re not buying up tons of shit like that though just being a repeat customer can be helpful. Of course this assumes you find a good vendor. Some I went to prices were firm even though it was some busted old switch from 10 years ago I could get cheaper online with shipping and they wouldn’t budge. And this was a while ago (like 4 years), I’ve since moved and don’t do business with them anymore. Who knows what the market is like now. I feel like the used market may be surging a bit with tariff nonsense

The oldest existing democracy is Iceland depending on how you define democracy. But that was around 930 ad and had free men participating in making laws

come to my house, i look like shit

Suppress

I was considering purchase a Japanese switch 2 because my Japanese is decent enough for most gaming but then I saw it was region locked pretty hard so I can’t use any of my us e shop purchases. Plus fuck Nintendo, even without the tariffs the price on this thing is a bit much and their behavior is garbage

If I ever do get one it’ll be because someone broke theirs and I got it cheap as fuck and fixed it. That’s how I got my switch, had a busted battery management IC and a fucked usb C port. I think in total I paid like $90 for it with parts. It would also help if the console was exploited for piracy

That sounds fun. Looking at the picture again I feel like over time eventually the stress of opening and closing the panel would weaken something at least. Although tbf maybe it’s rarely opened

it’s clean and orderly now but when a wire breaks in the middle of that loom and needs a bodge repair that thing ends up looking fucked

And maybe you have to be a landowner too

The long term play is regulation but good luck with that

Why do you think the tech oligarchs are banding together to dismantle the government? They see the future you describe and recognize that we are at a key juncture to get there. Once the groundwork is laid they can go back to focusing on fighting each other for total dominance of the market

But what’s the net benefit if they overall lose a ton of market share? Sales of, absolute best scenario, 10 million dollars? That’s a lot of money but it’s also really unlikely they’d get that level of sales and is it worth having a shareholders meeting in 1 year where they have to address questions about market share continuing to slide noticeably? Apparently I guess

It seems like it would mainly be a good deal for oem pc manufacturers. If I was lenovo or whoever I’d be jazzed about it, let microsoft take all the negativity and sell more thinkpads

This makes sense, the tinfoil hat shit is one thing but it’s much easier to just explain it as tpm and secure boot will enable more data collection, which is probably a stronger revenue stream than keeping windows on 75% of pcs vs 72%

Of course some nerd will probably figure out ways to defeat it all eventually but microsoft is probably (correctly) banking on your grandma not knowing how to install extensions and whatever 3rd party shit that will require

The sad thing is at one point I would have said that’s a foolish way thing to bank on and eventually those computer illiterate folk will die out but it appears that that younger gen z and below have many people that are slightly more advanced than boomers in tech knowledge. They know how to use their phones but have no clue how to do anything interesting with them and have barely any idea how to use a pc.

I worked in a school for a bit a few years ago and the amount of kids that didn’t know about something as basic as Adblock was shocking, let alone how to navigate the file system. Modern phones as a primary computing device really fucked that generation

It’s crazy that microsoft, a company that once had 90+ market share of the OS market and is now down in the low 70% range and falling, would rather force this shit and potentially lose people to ipads than simply just make an upgrade path for older hardware (that isn’t even that old)

What could possibly motivate this? They have to see the folly in such a decision with all their market research and shit. Do they really have the hubris to think that people will just go out and buy new hardware en masse because they said to so they could check emails, go on social media, and do streaming shit? Tinfoil hat time: were they influenced by a three letter agency or something to include the need for secure boot and tpm? Is there an exploit or backdoor in these?

I mean that’s is frustrating but it’s also frustrating that the overwhelming majority of your tax dollars go to the war machine. Why should I pay for Israel to destroy Palestine, the destruction of Yemen, and for endless nato expansion? I do not agree with these things. If my tax dollars paid mostly for like roads and education and shit I’d be far more willing to pay them

Some of my stuff is consumer level (the netgear modem, which tbf I’m genuinely surprised has lasted this long). some is in that weird “prosumer” space like the synology stuff; they are a bit pricier but have, in my experience, more resilient hardware. They also had much better support but in recent years they’ve kind of scaled back on this, bummer

My best advice is to not overlook the potential of e waste. The best and most resilient networking gear I have also happened to be the cheapest. The brocade switch? $45, 48 gigabit ports and 8 10 gigabit sfp+ ports. The hp POE switch? 24 gigabit poe ports and 2 port 10g sfp+. The server for pfsense was $50. These were good deals from local sellers, ebay prices are higher, sometimes quite a lot (especially with shipping). They also use much more power than just a consumer router which is worth mentioning. I’m transitioning to solar so I’m less concerned about it

My network stack has been running for many years now.

netgear cm1000 cable modem - since 2018 pfsense running on an old 1u supermicro server as router - since 2020 brocade icx switch - since 2016 hp procurve poe switch - since 2022 synology rt2600ac - since 2018, was router 2018-2020 and is AP since pfsense took over routing synology mr2200ac - secondary AP since 2020 cyberpower 1500va ups to run them - mentioning because power conditioning is maybe a factor in longevity Plus zwave and HA shit

Some of the stuff is way older too. The switches were bought from computer recyclers for real cheap and had definitely been in service for some time. The brocade is probably 10-15 years old at this point and the hp is probably 8 or so years old. The server running pfsense is from like 2009, maybe older.

house is running gigabit internet, 10g intranet, poe cameras, iot devices, etc with no issues. Probably over 100 devices on the network.

This is an argument I regularly make

I have several shows in objectively better quality than streaming. We can argue about bitrate (mine definitely has more) but putting that aside, my anime has better subtitles almost always, many of my movies combine physical releases for best quality (eg video from release a with audio from release b)

But more so than anything my library doesn’t have to deal with stupid licensing and reactionary bullshit. My library has Daria but with the original music spliced back in, not the bullshit version you get on streaming now that has all the licensed music stripped out. My library has beavis and butthead with the original music videos and all the parts they had censored. My library has the dungeons and dragons episode of community. Etc.

Mine is similar to this except it’s a rack mount case with bays that holds 15 drives (using 14 right now, 252tb -36tb for parity). All of my drives are 18tb and were bought refurbished in the 160-200 range depending on where prices were at.

To anyone looking to do this I strongly suggest reading about raidz expansion. You do not need to just go out and buy 15 drives, you can do what I did and get 2-3 drives many years ago then just keep popping in another every time it gets full and/or one dies

I’m at 80% utilization. Next project: disk shelf to add more drives

My home servers time to shine

Everyone shitting on me for having a nas with ~ 200tb of storage and tape backups would finally have to eat shit because I’d have the only streaming service in town

I got enough anime to make crunchy roll blush, I have something like 3,000 series of manga and like 8,000 books in my komga server, I got non weeb shit. I archive tons of webpages and youtube channels, terabytes of music, etc.

In a situation like this I could even throw a lemmy instance on it or something. I don’t do that now but I could

Also all my anime has dubs stripped out to save space and the majority of my manga is in Japanese. 英語しか話せない奴らはクソくらえ

So I eschew your 1tb limitation. I have seen this scenario coming. I planned for it. I’m ready for it. There are others like me on lemmy in the home server page, plus if you look on the truenas, proxmox, unraid, etc forums you’ll find even more

No need to be sorry, I did not take it that way, we are best friends forever. More to clarify that there are a ton of old server parts out there for dirt cheap if you’re okay with saving e waste from the trash heap.

You are absolutely right that homelabs are totally fine on consumer grade hardware but check server parts too, you might be surprised at the deals you find, especially locally. My build was a 10th gen intel build and cpu/mobo/32gb ecc ram/heatsink missing fan was $125. That was several years ago though and now we got tarrrrriiifffsss