My solution to this problem was to buy a $180 Dell workstation off eBay and install Ubuntu on that as my main workstation. My gaming desktop is now in the basement and runs sunshine. Moonlight over LAN is basically native, and solves the annoying reboot to switch tasks scenario.
If you ran a raw Ubuntu/fedora/whatever, you can use qemu/libvrt to run small virtual machines as required. You start and stop them with virsh, define them with simple xml files, and can easily automate the creation/destruction of them if desired.
if you’re automating the creation and deployment of vms, and the downstream operating systems, and not doing some sort of HA/failover meme setup… proxmox makes things way more complicated than raw libvirt/qemu/kvm.
Maybe for the initial setup, but nothing is more repeatable than automation. The more manual steps you have to build your infra, the harder it is to recover/rebuild/update later
Don’t get me wrong, I use libvrt where it makes sense but why would anyone go to proxmox from a full iac setup?
I do 2 at home, and 3 at work, coming from 4 at both and haven’t looked back.
I do this with awesomewm. You define window startup behavior in the main config. Applications can have static behavior to start in certain places or will default to “wherever my cursor currently is”. I suspect i3 has similar functionality
99% of the waiting time in my case is either waiting for file copies or waiting on SAP programs to run.
I wish I had low hanging fruit like that to go after.
I copy the install media locally. Although there is probably a noticable performance hot to running my main VM disk over the network.
Building a fully functional SAP system just takes that long in raw install time when your process also includes a sufficiently large system copy, and your hardware isn’t bleeding-edge.
It’s a massive application stack
I wrote and maintain a zero-to-working SAP HANA/S4 installer in pure bash.
It takes a redhat compatible from base install to a working, production-ready SAP system in about 5 hours.
It’s like ~9,000 lines of bash
I’m with you that he doesn’t strictly need a gpu, but if the price is right (free from old gaming PC, cheap from a friend’s old gaming PC, cheap old workstation card, etc) I stand by that he probably wants one. A lot less fussy, a lot more capable, nad nvenc does better quality encoding at lower bitrates (and probably less power too if you take into account time spent encoding at full tilt.)
Generally power supplies are the most electrically efficient at 20-60% utilization, so there’s no issue with over-provisioning power, other than the (generally minor) upfront extra cost, which might very well pay for itself in the first months/years of usage. I’ll take a look and see what I can find on those sites.
Edit: okay, trying to shop through google translate / currency calculator is actually aids so I’m gonna teach a man to fish instead. This is what I should have done from the start anyway.
Power supply: Anything from a decent brand, at basically anything >450W. a 650W or 850W is totally fine if it’s at a decent price. They only draw the power they need, they don’t just constantly pull 850W if the downstream components aren’t calling for it.
CPU: 12400 is a fine cpu for what you’re doing. You’ll transcode at 720p no problem, 1080p maybe a single stream in real-time. I wouldn’t bank on more than that. Only downsides here are the relatively shallow core counts if you ever expanded into other workloads. Without access to used xeon boards/cpus, it might be a reasonable choice though. What I would say is look for something older but with more cores/threads if you can. For example, a 10900 or even 10700k would probably be a better server cpu than a 12400.
Memory: DDR4 platforms are a great way to save money, as long as you aren’t planning on expanding to inferencing on cpu. Get as much as you can. 32-64gb of ddr4 should be dirt cheap, especially if you find a cheap motherboard with 4 memory sockets.
Motherboard: If you want this thing to be versatile, you want 2x pci-e slots. Old gaming full-sized ATX boards are the way to go here. 1 slot for an HBA, 1 slot for a GPU, and that should be all you need. Bonus for as many open sata sockets as possible. 6-8 is pretty typical on 10th-12th gen gaming ATX boards.
GPU: gpus will be much more efficient at transcoding than an igpu, especially from older intel CPUs. A 1050, 2060, 3050, basically anything from the 10-series onward has a decent nvenc encoder that would work well with plex/jellyfin. My goto is generally old workstation cards, I use a p620 myself and it handles a single 4k encode job no problem. I’m not sure if they’re viably purchasable anywhere in your area, but I’d definitely look out for a P620, P1000, or T400. Great value in those cards.
Drives/HBA: there are inexpensive LSI HBA cards to expand how many drives you can attach to a system if you need them, all you need is a spare pci-e slot and a place to physically mount the drives. The cheapest way to start here is to look for a motherboard with 4-6 sata slots and use those. Hardware raid is functionally dead these days in the real world, just use zfs or mdadm under linux to create an array with your desired level of resiliency/capacity.
Once you’ve priced out what it would cost to buy all of this new, look for prebuilt gaming PCs and office PCs that might be able to be expanded to fit these requirements. Prices look kind of steep on those markets you listed, but I’m sure something exists if you look hard enough.
I am also curious
Thank you for letting me know what software not to use; good bot
Crossfading and normalization would both independently be dealbreakers for me. I can’t go back
I would be genuinely surprised if fair use draws the line on format-shifted, legally purchased media, at “remote watch-together”, leaving format-shifting and local watch-together in-tact.
If it were up to the studio’s interpretation of the law, you’d need to purchase a license for each person during local watch-together.
RE: backups, I’d recommend altering your workflow. Instead of taking an image of a box, automate the creation of that box. Create a bash script that takes a base OS, and installs everything you use fresh. Then have it apply configuration files where appropriate, and lastly figure out which applications really need backup blobs to work properly (thunderbird, for example). Once you have that, your backups become just the data itself. Photos, documents, etc. Everything else is effectively ephemeral because it can be reproduced through automation.
Takes a lot less space, is a lot more portable. And much better in scenarios where something in your OS is broken or you get a new computer and want to replicate your setup.
agree in principal, but in practice:
parents who live across the state
plexamp for music
Depends on where you work and what their policies are. My work does have many strict policies on following licenses, protecting sensitive data, etc
My solution was to MIT license and open source everything I write. It follows all policies while still giving me the flexibility to fork/share the code with any other institutions that want to run something similar.
It also had the added benefit of forcing me to properly manage secrets, gitignores, etc
My wife and I have both been using this setup for over a year and we’ve never looked back