After looking into an incident involving Kubernetes nodes running out of memory, I took a trip to the office kitchen to take a break and get a cup of the good stuff. My teammate got their drink first, and then it was my turn. Why is there a Windows 98 themed pop-up on the screen? I wanted to get my coffee, so I tapped on the small OK button. That may have forced the poor coffee machine to start swapping, for which I felt a little bit guilty. The UI was catching up with previous animations, and I got to the drink selection. None of the buttons worked. I reckon something critical crashed in the background. After looking into an incident involving a coffee machine running out of memory, I took a trip to the other office kitchen to take a break and get a cup of the good stuff. That one was fine. Guess it ran on something else than Java. laugh_track.mp3

Around 2003, my mother had a laptop: the Compaq Armada 1592DT. It ran Windows Me, the worst Windows to ever exist, whopping 96 MB of RAM, and a 3 GB hard drive. My mother used it for important stuff, and I played games on it. Given the limitations of the 3 GB hard drive, this soon lead to a conflict: there was no room to store any new games! I did my best to make additional room by running the disk cleaner utility, disabling unnecessary Windows features and deleting some PDF catalogues that my mother had downloaded, but there was still a constant lack of space. Armed with a lack of knowledge about computers, I went further and found a tool that promised to make more room on the hard drive. I can’t remember what it was, but it had a nice graphical user interface where the space on the drive was represented as a pie chart. To my amazement, I could slide that pie chart to make it so that 90% of the drive was free space! I went full speed ahead with it. What followed was a crash and upon rebooting I was presented with a black screen. Oops. My mother ended up taking it to a repair shop for 1200 EEK, which was a lot of money at the time. The repair shop ended up installing Windows 98 SE on it, which felt like a downgrade at the time, but in retrospect it was an improvement over Windows Me. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I assume that the tool I was playing with was some sort of a partition manager that had no safeguards in place to avoid shrinking and reformatting operating system partitions. Or if it did, then it made ignoring the big warning signs way too easy. Still 100% user error on my part. If only I knew that reinstalling Windows was a relatively simple operation at the time, but it took a solid 4-5 years until I did my first installation of Windows all by myself.

I’ve changed my home server setup a lot over the past decade, mainly because I keep changing the goals all the time. I’ve now realized why that keeps happening. I want the perfect home server. What is the perfect home server? I’d phrase it like this: The perfect home server uses very little power, offers plenty of affordable storage and provides a lot of performance when it’s actually being relied upon. In my case, low power means less than 5 W while idling, 10+ TB of redundant storage for data resilience and integrity concerns, and performance means about 4 modern CPU cores’ worth (low-to-midrange desktop CPU performance). I seem to only ever get one or two at most. Low power usage? Your performance will likely suffer, and you can’t run too many storage drives. You can run SSD-s, but they are not affordable if you need higher capacities. Lots of storage? Well, there goes the low power consumption goal, especially if you run 3.5" hard drives. Lots of performance? Lots of power consumed! There’s just something that annoys me whenever I do things on my home server and I have to wait longer than I should, and yet I’m bothered when my monitoring tells me that my home server is using 50+ watts.1 I keep an eye out for developments in the self-hosting and home server spaces with the hopes that I’ll one day stumble upon the holy grail, that one server that fits all my needs. I’ve gotten close, but no matter what setup I have, there’s always something that keeps bothering me. I’ve seen a few attempts at the perfect home server, covered by various tech reviewers, but they always have at least one critical flaw. Sometimes the whole package is actually great, the functionality rocks, and then you find that the hardware contains prototype-level solutions that result in the power consumption ballooning to over 30 W. Or the price is over 1000 USD/EUR, not including the drives. Or it’s only available in certain markets and the shipping and import duties destroy its value proposition. There is no affordable platform out there that provides great performance, flexibility and storage space, all while being quiet and using very little power.2 Desktop PC-s repurposed as home servers can provide room for a lot of storage, and they are by design very flexible, but the trade-off is the higher power consumption of the setup. Single board computers use very little power, but they can’t provide a lot of performance and connecting storage to them gets tricky and is overall limited. They can also get surprisingly expensive. NAS boxes provide a lot of storage space and are generally low power if you exclude the power consumption of hard drives, but the cheaper ones are not that performant, and the performant ones cost almost as much as a high-end PC. Laptops can be used as home servers, they are quite efficient and performant, but they lack the flexibility and storage options of desktop PC-s and NAS boxes. You can slap a USB-based DAS to it to add storage, but I’ve had poor experiences with these under high load, meaning that these approaches can’t be relied on if you care about your data and server stability. Then there’s the option of buying used versions of all of the above. Great bang for buck, but you’re likely taking a hit on the power efficiency part due to the simple fact that technology keeps evolving and getting more efficient. I’m still hopeful that one day a device exists that ticks all the boxes while also being priced affordably, but I’m afraid that it’s just a pipe dream. There are builds out there that fill in almost every need, but the parts list is very specific and the bulk of the power consumption wins come from using SSD-s instead of hard drives, which makes it less affordable. In the meantime I guess I’ll keep rocking my ThinkPad-as-a-server approach and praying that the USB-attached storage does not cause major issues. perhaps it’s an undiagnosed medical condition. Homeserveritis? ↩︎ if there is one, then let me know, you can find the contact details below! ↩︎

Yes, you read that right. I’m a prolific open-source influencer now. Some years ago I set up a Google Alert with my name, for fun. Who knows what it might show one day? On 7th of February, it fired an alert. Turns out that my thoughts on Ubuntu were somewhat popular, and it ended up being ingested by an AI slop generator over at Fudzilla, with no links back to the source or anything.1 Not only that, but their choice of spicy autocomplete confabulation bot a large language model completely butchered the article, leaving out critical information, which lead to one reader gloating about Windows. Not linking back to the original source? Not a good start. Misrepresenting my work? Insulting. Giving a Windows user the opportunity to boast about how happy they are with using it? Absolutely unacceptable. Here’s the full article in case they ever delete their poor excuse of a “news” “article”. two can play at that game. ↩︎