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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It’s… Not great. It’s on par with other $300 laptops, which isn’t saying much. 8Gb of RAM in current year isn’t really enough anymore, and the screen is basically the cheapest possible. You’re looking for a laptop with a screen resolution near 1920x1080, and ideally 16 Gb of RAM.

    It’s gotten very hard to recommend laptops based on the brand name, since pretty much every brand has started pumping out crappy laptops to capitalize on the brand.

    Like others said, try looking at business laptops, either surplus or liquidation sales. They’re not great either but at least you’re ideally not getting fleeced.

    If you’re feeling adventurous (and I’m mincing my words, this won’t be a breeze if you don’t know much but you’ll learn a ton), the best bang for buck you can get in a portable format is a Steam Deck with USB hub + mouse and keyboard (could be travel size if you want). Can be had for less than $500, if you have the budget portable screens also exist, and for that price it beats any modern laptop under $1000. I understand that it’s not exactly for everyone though.










  • SNMP does what you want. You just need a good monitoring solution that’s not as involved as Prometheus+grafana (I feel you, I’ve been there)

    I really enjoy PRTG, but it’s way too expensive for a home lab, still throwing it out there if you feel like you have money to burn.

    I hear good word about libreNMS, it’s next on my list when my PRTG licence runs out.

    Be warned that monitoring is ultimately a fickle thing; what you don’t write in yaml config for grafana, you get to dig through obscure SNMP libs to find out (though I find that’s easier for me, ymmv) for other tools.

    I recommend against: nagios (I like it but if you hate Prometheus it’s definitely not for you), checkmk (throw checkmk into the sun please it just fucking sucks), cacti (NO!), solar winds (why?)

    if you feel like you want to become a datacenter admin: zabbix scales very very well, both in performance and ease of admin against hundreds of servers, but it’s overkill for a home lab, and it can get you lost in configs for hours.







  • I’m not fully familiar with the overheads associated with all things going on on a chipset, but it’s not unreasonable to think that this workload, plus whatever the chipset has to do (hardware management tasks mostly), as well as the CPU’s other tasks on similar interfaces that might saturate the IO die/controller, would influence this.

    B350 isn’t a very fast chipset to begin with, and I’m willing to bet the CPU in such a motherboard isn’t exactly current-gen either. Are you sure you’re even running at PCIe 3.0 speeds too? There are 2.0 only CPUs available for AM4.