Running Linux, we can give the old machines a second life.
Because hardware becomes obsolete fairly quickly, many computers end up underutilized or discarded.
Install Proxmox and use the old PC to set up multiple “virtual machines” or containers, each can run different services or experiments.
This is really cool and perhaps the best option of all.
We can also use the PC to host our own private VPN, routing our network traffic through it.
This is useful for security.
We can turn the spare PC into a remote-access machine and connect to it from elsewhere, using it as a remote computer without risking our main machine’s security.
If we enjoy Linux, we can install and test different Linux distributions and learn, without affecting our main system.
We can use the old PC to run a self-hosted ad-blocker (for example, a DNS-based solution). Then all devices on our network benefit.
We can use this PC as a dedicated server, maybe to host multiplayer video games.
We can even deploy our own local AI text and image generator.
Now this takes a stronger machine, but AI image generation is pretty useful these days.
Of course, in such cases, it is best to run #linux
User Comments
I still have floppy disks, hot swappleable hard drives, and jumpers for IRQ settings.
I use old computers for distributed science projects (boinc). They are as efficient a space heater as any other electric heater , especially if you use SSD. I run them at night on cheap electricity. The main issues are fan noise and finding distros and apps that will run on 32bit.
https://mr-ives.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-return-of-dell-dimension-2350.html
FWIW, only the Dell Dimension E510 on the bottom right with a Pentium 4 processor had VT-x instructions.
not enough ram ...
Yep... take your old desktop, throw linux on it and turn it into a local storage system, media server, etc.
So true. Vintage electronics can teach us so much about simplicity and practicality. The computer that got me fascinated in IT was a 1994 windows 3.1 machine I have in my basement.
I see a bunch of retro game systems.....
Or you can also build a Beowulf cluster for HPC (Hight Power Computing) especially for those into research and development. Especially for those that need high power processing through MPIs. This is great for a home lab. Even though the power won't much today's high-power computing requirements, but it will pass for a miniature HPC home lab.
You'll see how that will cost you €€ in the electricity bill... 😆😆
#endof10 https://endof10.org
Any one of those can be upgraded to AM4* 12 or 16 core with ECC RAM with ZFS 12TB spinners and a couple of SSD. If nothing else, virtualize Windows - it belongs in a cage - and when it crashes, use Snapshots to roll it back like the cheap Walmart trash the OS is.
*AM5s run too hot for these boxes. It just isn't cool.
Not worth it unless your electricity is free. Otherwise, new hardware is just better.
I've had or worked on all of those
I had bad experiences trying to do a similar thing. The pcs would crap out all the time :D
I suspect solid state drives will change that. When something boots in 5 seconds and gets online in another 5 it will take a while before people tire of it. IDE and SATAs were more like 45 seconds with Microsoft's program bloat and running 70 services at startup. Like people need to fax from their computer in 2025. Lose the outmoded stuff.
I am a fan of using older machines for Linux, better ones for Proxmox with VMs, but you have to be carefull. The older the systems, the higher the risk of failure. So keep that in mind when using them for storage or running special VMs.
There are plenty of used server vendors. Grab one or two, stick it in a half rack somewhere such as the garage and run all you want on it as VM’s. The other benefit is that the garage will be warmer and dry, so yours tools don’t go rusty as easily.
I keep thinking of my old, still functional, machine sitting on my office floor, but then I think of the extra space and power it would need and say “nope “.
With how the computer industry is going im about to buy a reheat bed for removing components from boards!
Micron? man how old are you 😁 I'm surprised you do not have a spotted cow box with a Gateway in that photo 😂
what is that linux distro that claims to mimic windows gui? It's becoming quite popular since w10 is EOL.
I have refurbished many old desktops and laptops, installed Linux, giving them a second life. Also have donated them.
I use an old boxen to detonate malware. The last one that runs my NAS is going PI in a few months.
Nice sleeper cabinet!
I never used to think much about the cost of electricity, but for reasons best known to our regulators, the UK now seems determined to have some of the most expensive power in the developed world.
As much as I love Linux and Proxmox, legacy hardware running 24/7 can very easily add £100+ per month, per server to your bill. Suddenly that “free” homelab doesn’t feel quite so free. 😅
Indeed, but in winter and if you have cheap overnight electricity, it's a lot easier to justify. I use them for volunteer science projects using boinc, so its a form of charitable giving, and I get some welcome heat in return
You reminded me... I am not a big fan of "crypto" in any way, but I saw something the other day, a proof-of-concept room heater, that generated heat as a by-product of its crypto mining.
I have a 2.5Kw space heater in my room, now imagine, rather than costing money, it could break even or even subsidise its usage.
The concept you describe is somewhat the model of heata. They have what is basically a GPU-powered immersion heater. Their customers fit them and it heats their hot water running distributed cloud workloads. Rendering lends itself to this sort of application. @heata reimburse the customer for the electricity. Customer gets free hot water, Heata get a distributed cloud with no need for big data centre carbon foort print (no A/C)
In my case I do work for causes or hobbies which interest me - a mixture of cancer research (https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/mcm1/overview.s) and astronomy. An equivalent spec'd electric radiator does neither. I find old mac pro towers, headless, are aesthetically acceptable as space heaters , and quite cheap to buy.
Desktop what a deranged department 😂
Using these ancient 32 bit. single core machines, with a max of 4GB of memory. and IDE hard drive interfaces? Good luck with that.
shhh he thinks he can run multiple AI vms on there
You can run bookworm on them, but not trixie. There are cheap IDE to SATA convertors.
Yes, there are 32 bit versions of Linux you can run, but you cant run 64 bit software on them. And yes, you can get IDE to SATA adapters. However, they wont be very useful limited to IDE bus speeds. Simply put, for the cost of upgrading these PCs to their max, you will be spending more than just getting a cheap, used newer machine.
With the price of electricity in the UK this would be insanity. And likely to go pop at any minute.
Those machines all look really old, though. 20th century? Are any of those machines x64 or are all 32-bit?
https://jellyfin.org/
Our organization, bdproj.com, is a registered non-profit 501(c)(3) dedicated to making a difference. We are currently accepting donations of any and all old network gear. We can arrange for pickup or accept delivered items, and donors can write off the value of the products.
If you are interested in supporting our project through a donation, please contact me directly for more information. Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season.
nope.
sprawling mess
Just dont6
we can give the old machines a second life
Google Flex too.
https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/
Ah the memories.... The sound of the disk drive popping out, the fan blowing, the beeps...
Or openwrt - pretty handy...
The problem nowadays is not the efficiency or speed of old h/w but the security.
No critical cpu , bios/uefi patches on a hypervisor is not a good idea unless it stays offline or isolated from the internet.
Even hardware considered new is having a hard time running certain software. I have my old laptop with 8 thread CPU and 16gb of RAM as a proxmox node in my (homelab) datacenter. Since i'm a private mentor in backend development, I host Gitlab on it and Gitlab drains so much of it's resources it crashes sometimes, so It's not always possible to use even older hardware unfortunately
I have been doing this with "throw away" computers for over 2 decades. You can make some great "web surfers" out of systems that won't run late-model operating systems from other platforms.
I say ignore the haters and keep putting these to work. They may not be the "sexiest" beasts on the 'net, but they don't have to end up in a landfill.
Hey now, there's something sexy about a big boxy CRT monitor and a Frankenstein circa 2005 eMachine PC for tinkering.
my only addition to this is that you can replace the CRT monitor with the network cable. Unfortunately this means I can salvage any old PC (and usually many PC parts into existing salvaged PCs), but not so much CRT monitors. Luckily I have another way to keep them from ending up in a landfill and that is give them to an electronics recycling company (of which there are a few in my country -- I'm lucky)
Needto aggregate all the innerds into a head end
As a person who builds and restores old Solaris and HP-UX systems for a hobby, I find your love of Intel troublesome.
Oh, and NetBSD over Linux 35 times to Sunday.
Those tan machines need Windows and Duke Nukem 3D 💪😄
It it a very insightful way to use legacy computers as a base for virtual machines if they are fast and powerful enough.
The man posted Pentium machines and talked about containers and AI.
HOW DID YOU GET A PICTURE OF MY CLOSET?😉
That’s my garage! Need throw in a few AIO machines and old Mac towers too.
The old laptops I’ve already scrapped out.
Linux but emulate windows xp
Like using a Ferrari to deliver coal. Though the coal is useful.
Be careful with hardware older than 10 years under Linux. CPU aren't microcode safety proof nowadays.
yeah, but the power/efciency ratio is small. If you use raspberry pi's and make a cluster it would be more efficient, right. Look into swarm OS, operating system on multiple devices. It's ok to use them because they're available, but what's the elecrticity ussage? I'm asking because I'm not a green dweeb, just interested in the pure efficiency of this. Thought about making a rasp pi cluster as a mini-datacenter, but they're price is insane right now, gone are the days of 5$ boards.
Please show me running Proxmox on these 4 32 bit CPU computers (please ignore the bottom left that just deserve to rest in peace). In cluster, please.
Sometimes it worth selecting proper picture for the post.
making net only drops the performance and stability unless you have 10G optics between nodes and highly tuned distcc
Fully distributed builds bypass that network bottleneck.
via?
How it may avoid network bandwith for the very first time ?
people talk about apocalypse prepping but they rarely have a homelab...
Longer term, I think the Internet will shift from cloud back to distributed node systems in people's houses (its a peer to peer protocol aint it?) You can only choke bandwidth for so long while turning the network's content to shit, so I think collecting old compute is going to be relevant for running all manner of lightweight services in the post-ISP Internet of the Future. I hope anyway.
Check out the prices on the last generation of server blades that don't fit GPUs, the Dell R630/R730 and machines from around that generation. They're basically being thrown away, and while they surely eat too much power for minor services basically the entire backbone of the 2015-2020 Internet is up on a fire sale right now, $5,000 blades for under $200. Probably free if you know a guy, they may just throw them in a pit in the desert next to the E.T. cartridges soon.
Using a years old PC as a NAS (running 24/7) is a noble undertaking but they tend to be very energy inefficient. The initial 'saving' made by doing so (instead of buying a modern single-purpose device) is annulled fairly quickly.
Don't sell people fairy tales: If that PC became too old and obsolete to perform its original job, it is by definition too weak to run a hypervisor like ProxMox and host muliple virtual machines that then in turn run demanding production tasks.
Also, if Linux can magically do a useful job on a decommissioned PC... Why haven't you used it on that same machine before? Something is off with your IT strategy.
It is only because of vendors that hardware/software are becoming obsolete! Else until it power on, there is always plenty of solution to make it run!
I have old laptop, like 7 years old, where windows 10 works fine, bit Linux not, because it has only 8 gb of ram. Modern Linux, I talk about Ubuntu, require more than windows 10.
Also it is very fragile, if during work laptop unexpectedly power of, because of battery. I need to fix file system manually, I use ext4. Modern Linux is not bullet proof as I remember ((
I also was surprised that with 8 gb of ram I se times have freeze and crashes.
I start searching and found minimal requirements for Ubuntu 22.04: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
Minimal requirements 4 GB, after that I install visual studio code, some python/rust compilation and chromium with 10+ tabs and if one of the tab is media like YouTube, I has crashes in some time. On same laptop windows with with exact same settings works fine.
When I increase ram from 8 to 16 Ubuntu works perfectly and better than windows. I also was surprised, chatgpt and Gemini point that it was because small swap and ram.
Issues related to ext4 also has described in a lot of topics.
This is image about problem with file system, in my case happens if I lost power during work. You could google image and will see that this happens in different cases
If you're not using the GUI, run Ubuntu Server. The requirements are a lot lower and, in almost all cases, you're still going to be able to do what you want.
https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/reference/installation/system-requirements/
for server yes, I'm talking for standard work that in most cases happens with GUI
I have a Dell 5410 or 5420 I believe, by all accounts built in 2014-2015. I run Debian 13 with 4gb ram. Granted I mostly use it to write automation scripts and test them before deploying to other Linux machines, probably nowhere near the workload you need a machine for. However Debian does "claim" 2gb ram is the minimun needed.
I also thought about Debian but decide to try mainstream Ubuntu and now I think how to better migrate on Debian if something happens )
Been doing that for years, well up until OEMs decided to integrate what was once Field Replaceable Units onto the motherboards. These efforts have turned PCs into doorstops once there's a need to upgrade or said integrated part proves defective. PCs hsve definitely gone the way of the smartphone, sadly. The fact is, The most modern PCs, are that way now, with the only three FRUs being the CPU fan, Drive, and PSU. Next thing to go is the drive, like Apple has already done in their laptops.
Afraid not for those machines pictured. 32bit at best. Most of those are 386, 486, or pre-64bit CPUs of some vintage. I don’t believe any of the mainstream Linux distros support 32bit hardware anymore. But even if they do, you’ll run into the clock problem on Unix/Unix-like OSes in 2038. About the best use for them is running old MS-DOS and use them for DOS games.
I guess that depends on what is needed from the system.
Like it or not
in their day, they were awesome machines. Now? Collecting dust. Rusting away. Like watching old battleships being towed away for the museum if lucky or the bottom of the ocean if not. Not sure I like either ending.
I’m not too worried about 2038, ha ha.
I'll buy the p3 and og pentium machines off you!
cases and power supplies are good
PC become obsolete because users cram them with crapware and they have no strategy. Most of my front line computers exceed 10 years because they are decentralized over my network and have small SSDs that can be clone in 10min bring the system back to "less crapware". This is mix of Tablets, laptops, server, NAS and base PCs. Thinking about energy consumption - one uses one or two computers at time, rest are off and NAS servers consume very little energy in standby mode.
😄 can I buy some of those bay covers from you?
Obsolete hardware but in Cyber Warfare these old computers with Ubuntu or Debian it works very well 😎👩💻
I wore out my 4x Creative drive.
Creative CD drives with remove control were the kings! :) (I still have 2!)
The only problem with these antiques is how bad their efficiency is. You'll be using 30W constant just to run a VPN node.
True. Much as I want to keep old hardware out of landfill, I also have to think about the energy bill (and carbon footprint) compared to something more recent.
Hopefully, there is a VM Host solution installed, so the old boxes can host your experiments or goo dold fashioned odwntime fun along with that VPN solution.
vendors made their job well. 30W in all case is much less environmental and carbon footprint impact than building, shipping and trashing new one….until it dies
in early days of IT power consumption reduced by 50/80% when buying new stuff, nowaday it is 5/10% at max
Unless it's 30W running 24/7 on an old desktop instead of 0.5W on a specialized board.
Now, generation to generation, the differences are minimal. So there's no need to upgrade every 5 or so years. But upgrading from machines from the early 2000's is an enormous improvement.
But a new PC will have a carbon 'cost' of something like 200 to 300kg CO2e just to manufacture?
That's a lot of additional energy you'd need to use over and above what the new one will use as well before you break even, when compared to the older hardware?what is that « specialized board » you run an OS or a service with 0.5W? The lowest machine i do have with no much activity in DC is around 120W but average is most around 200W
My meaning if speaking the same size able to take over the load, not a specific stuff that is nit able to provide same service, could be desktop, laptop or server.
♻️ at 30g CO2 / kWh and 30W, 300 kg would be generated in 333k hours, so 38 years? You're right, building a whole new machine for such a task is a waste in terms of CO2 alone. Cost-wise (which is the main thing companies care about, let's be honest), I haven't done the calculation, and it varies a lot depending on cost/kWh + one time investment for the board or dedicated hardware (relatively small, can be even smaller if 2nd hand or reused hardware).
I was thinking of a Raspberry Pi Zero or A+ for example, for a small service like a proxy or VPN. They use less than a Watt when idle.
that's ok, but the price of them is insane. You're better of with creating a cluster from smartphones.
Yes indeed.
What I was thinking was "if you have anything lying around that's more recent and can be repurposed, use it in priority" and "if you have the choice between buying old and buying newer, go for the more recent option", not "buying something new is better", which would only be the case if you have nothing working atm.
For example, if my GPU broke today, I'd rather buy an RX 6700XT than an RX 480.
public Proton Sheets time!
♻️ That would be a good point if I were buying brand new. But at my level, I'm replacing an old power-hungry PC with a second-hand thin client device. So the carbon output for manufacture isn't so much of a concern.
yeah if I was really concerned about power usage, I'd probably go with a 2017 and up desktop and probably underclock it and rely on the built in video out vs having a PCI-E video card.
Exactly, actually no need to underclock these days. CPU's dynamically change clocks as a function of load and power profile, so as long as you don't stress them, they'll stay at the lowest supported clock speed.
Undervolting + underclocking RAM's however, does save power.
Do not use as is. Carefully replace motherboard with AM4 B550, run Unix/Linux with SSDs (2x m.2 on B550) and still have 4 usable SATA slots. Low power draw, modern hardware.
This is an illusion (best case) or clickbait.
If it's not about one time toy, you'll almost inevitably finish with dedicated case, ECC RDIMMs, hot swap HDDs and TrueNAS inside. With 64 GB, obviously. (I have 48, and it's quite not enough).
My home ESXi server has 256GB RAM. 😉😊
Just stop recommending proxmox please.
Thanks
Yap. Why not just run hosts under KVM?
Small scale systems does not need any orchestration services. They only make things more complicated and waste time.
Simple KVM virtual machines. On NAT or test labs could be bridged into the same local network.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ProxMox. If anything, especially in this economy and with the Vmware overlords completely having lost their grip on reality, ProxMox is not promoted enough.
Winfried.
There is a problem indeed on Proxmox:
It has been and it still is a "nagware".
Just like VMWare is pure commercial.
Why not go better? Go towards Kernel inside KVM?
Or maybe even on VirtualBox on local dev machine. It is OSE too.
And then for orchestration. Hmmm, openstack? ...name them.
are many api calls to VMware also available on proxmox? That seemed compelling. KVM, qemu and Virt-manager are pretty good by me.
I think a lot of hobbyist home labbers are looking to kill time, I think it’s a great intro for people to quickly learn about things in their basement with less barrier to entry. I feel the same way about vibe coding and hobbyist programmers playing with things. Neither are what I would recommend professionally, but I’m happy that more people are getting interested in making things.
Well, that was exciting. See you in the next one!