yuman

got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I’m very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn’t find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain’t got.

what I’ve concluded is that all that’s needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I’m sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

don’t got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it’ll likely look super-janky, but that’s not a huge concern for me now. I’ll do a write-up if I succeed.

lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn’t pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.

I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

thanks. the notification went away after login and I wasn’t able to find its text anywhere in the myriad of pages.

also I’d take this “does not” coming from them with a bag of salt.

PSA: Oracle Cloud Free Tier halved

In case you were one of the lucky ones able to snag a free account in the olden days, the terms have changed. Instead of 4 CPU and 24 RAM that you were free to whack up amongst 1-4 VPS, now you got 2 CPU and 12 GB RAM, so either one dual-core VPS or two single-core. If you keep using the old setup beyond a certain date (can’t be bothered to look up when that is) you’ll get billed; at reasonable rates, I’m sure.

If I’m reading this correctly, the block volume storage allotment hasn’t changed, but their whole setup is hella confusing, so might be off on that.

Was really a matter of days when they was gonna axe the thing, they fired half a planet’s worth of workers, I’m amazed they left even this much.

edit: I’m behind the times, this was reported more than a month ago: linuxiac.com/oracle-quietly-cuts-free-tier-ampere…

this thing here. I’ve dramatically reduced support work at two shops I’ve set this up for. incidents went from from coupla times a month to once a year. not to mention - you don’t need no VPS no more, don’t need no database, nothing, the simplest web hosting will do and it’s very cache friendly.