Trainguyrom

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/39467662

A recent storm damaged the siding of my house so I'll have to have it replaced. The thought occurred to me to run some network cabling behind the new siding (and likely new insulation) while its all pulled off. Should I run standard riser cabling or outdoor-rated cabling if I do so?

Obviously the most ideal solution is standard in-wall but I don't have the appetite for such a project given half the house was built in the 19th century and I know such an undertaking would involve quite a few surprises that I almost definitely lack the know-how to handle, and I'll probably be moving in a couple of years so I don't want to invest too much time or money into the endeavor.

Alternatively is there a good type of conduit I could run instead?

I placed a low bid on an auction for 25 Elitedesk 800 G1s on a government auction and unexpectedly won (ultimately paying less than $20 per computer)

In the long run I plan on selling 15 or so of them to friends and family for cheap, and I'll probably have 4 with Proxmox, 3 for a lab cluster and 1 for the always-on home server and keep a few for spares and random desktops around the house where I could use one.

But while I have all 25 of them what crazy clustering software/configurations should I run? Any fun benchmarks I should know about that I could run for the lolz?

Edit to add:

Specs based on the auction listing and looking computer models:

• 4th gen i5s (probably i5-4560s or similar)
• 8GB of DDR3 RAM
• 256GB SSDs
• Windows 10 Pro (no mention of licenses, so that remains to be seen)
• Looks like 3 PCIe Slots (2 1x and 2 16x physically, presumably half-height)

Possible projects I plan on doing:

• Proxmox cluster
• Baremetal Kubernetes cluster
• Harvester HCI cluster (which has the benefit of also being a Rancher cluster)
• Automated Windows Image creation, deployment and testing
• Pentesting lab
• Multi-site enterprise network setup and maintenance
• Linpack benchmark then compare to previous TOP500 lists

I'm currently decluttering and reducing to get a handle on my home, and I've come to a conundrum of how many plates/bowls/cups/etc do I actually need? I have 2 young kids that we'd prefer not to have to run to the store at 8pm to buy more plates because someone ruined a plate, but very limited cupboard space (small 120-something year old house with a kitchen that was built in the 50s)

I'm just going to be vulnerable for a minute here. I met the first person in real life who had similar server-y linux-y obsessions to me and we'd send eBay links of systems to drool over to eachother. They ended up being a terrible person but hid it from me pretty well until they couldn't anymore and now I no longer have someone to chat with about those things.

So um, I guess I'm open for applications for the position of "nerdy friend who I nerd too hard with about network infrastructure and Linux packages" now

Edit: Autocorrect errors manually corrected