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
If I were you I might try deploying a mini enterprise network with permissions and things. It would be fun to do it with active directory to try to practice pentesting, or it would also be fun to do with linux to try to learn more about deploying linux in enterprise environments.
This is pretty high on the to-do list. I plan on virtualization a bunch of it, but it would be pretty easy to have one desktop hosting each subnet of client PCs and one hosting the datacenter subnet. Having several hosts to physically network means less time spent verifying the virtual networks work as intended.
Also playing with different deployment tools is a goal too. Having 2-3 nearly-identical systems should be really useful for creating unified Windows images for deployment testing
I don’t like windows, so I don’t deploy any of this for real, but yesterday and the day before I set up a windows server, a few clients, and a Kali VM and manager to get in. I found out if you type “\\anything” into the windows bar it will send that user’s name and hash out very easily with llmnr poisoning on every keystroke. What’s worse is that is the default behavior. It is super fun to learn about all this though.
Edit: upon posting this comment it made the double backslash look like a single backslash so I changed it to a triple so it looks right on my end but just know I meant for it to be double.