Anybody out there #selfhosting on good used #server hardware? The kind you can find on eBay? My current rig is a Cisco ucs c220 that’s kinda awesome for the price. $600 4 years ago got me 32 cores, and 256G of RAM. Bare metal OS is xcp-ng (#Xen).
The problem? The server management software is FLASH (adobe flash) based. I don’t have a way to interact with it.
If you were building something this size and this budget today, what would you search for on #eBay? Feel free to boost.
@paco I've got some of that kind of stuff.
I don't have to deal with Flash, just with Java 7, thankfully fairly easy to work around.
However, in reality I have to access the lights-out once every 3 years. Usually when a shitty LSI RAID controller has decided to implode. In these situations it's often easier just to go and visit, since it's usually multiple disks which went pop.
I'd focus far more on making what you run on the hardware tolerant to failure, than managing the hardware.
@paco I run KVM, Ceph.and a custom control plane / network stack.
Most of my boxes are older IBM kit, since they still offered free firmware. I'd also consider Dell. I avoid HP.
My networking kit is Quanta reference designs and Dell open HW.
The biggest mistake I made was using a bunch of consumer laptop drives for bulk storage. It's far better to pay the extra 20% on used server grade drives, I got a bunch of EMC drives cheap, well worth it.
Also easy now to get good prices on SSDs.
