Over the years I’ve seen the changes in processors, memory and disk go up the curve of speed, capabilities and capacity. With the advent of the i series Intel processors (the i3, i5, i7 and i9) the curve seemed to flatten off and as a result, years later now, we have available a swathe of old computers that still have significant capabilities and are dirt cheap. I’ve got two examples for you, one where I repurposed a couple of Lenovo Tiny computers, and one where I purchased a machine off eBay and was blown away by it’s capabilities.
Let’s talk about the Lenovo Tiny’s first. They look like this:
As the name suggests, they are a very small form factor. The mainboard is a laptop one, and the two I have in production have the following specs:
- Intel i5-6400T @ 2.2GHz processors
- 8GB of DDR4 memory
- 250GB SSD disk
The solid state disk (SSD) is a key element of these things being useful into the future – let’s face it, the old disk drives with spinning internals are slow and prone to hardware errors, where the SSD is fast and less likely to die from mechanical failure. Each of my two M700’s use laptop chargers and draw very little power:
This particular M700 is running Ubuntu Linux Server, with CasaOS https://casaos.io/ and using JellyFin to organise my movies, music and TV shows and also keeping an eye on the internet speed. The instructions to install CasaOS are quite straightforward – it runs in a container and you can update it from within. The applications like JellyFin are a click to install. The site looks like this:
The challenge of the low capacity (at least by today’s standards) internal disk was reasonably straightforward to overcome. I had a 2TB external drive available, plugged that in and then I did have to do a little bit of fancywork to get the thing to appear to CasaOS and JellyFin – this was due to the containerisation of these applications. It wasn’t onerous though and half an hour of searching and trying stuff did the job. I can secure copy files to the machine via SSH and using logical links make it a nice easy transition between machines. JellyFin is a pretty good player – like Amazon or Netflix in many ways and I’ve enjoyed watching movies and TV shows on my computers or iPad and be able to pick up exactly where I left off.
My other M700 is a little workhorse still – running Windows 10 and doing internet work and the occasional bit of writing on. It’s not a gaming rig by any standards, but it’s still a very useable little machine. Having a great keyboard, mouse and monitor certainly helps – the HP monitor I have is lovely to behold and a joy to work on. I’m contemplating migrating this to Linux Mint – one of my favourite Linux distributions for it’s elegance, feature completeness and ease of use – https://linuxmint.com/ check it out if you’re a beginner and want to wet your toes in the Linux lake of love, or if you’re a power user that wants to make full use of it’s diverse and significant capabilities.
So that’s the little machines out of the way and they’re silently doing their jobs over on my shelf. Now to the big gun – my Lenovo P3 Thinkstation. The specs on this thing are:
- Xeon E3-1245v6 running at 3.70GHz
- 64GB of memory
- 2 x 256GB PCIeOPAL disk drives (SSD’s on a PCIe card)
When I got this thing home, I plugged in everything but power. I went under the desk, plugged the power cable in and by the time I had stood back up it was booted into Windows 10. It’s ridiculously quick. I know what you’re thinking – why buy a computer like that? Well it’s simple. I wanted to run TheHive and it’s associated applications. TheHive (https://thehive-project.org/) is a cybersecurity tool for the masses and one of it’s underlying associated applications that runs analysis on evidence, Cortex, requires 8 vCPU and 16GB of RAM (https://docs.thehive-project.org/cortex/installation-and-configuration/) to run. Now that’s a hefty load for any computer and a *lot* of virtual CPUs. I didn’t have anything that could run this, so I spent a whole $499 to get this second hand machine:
It’s a medium tower (not one of those massive gaming rigs that you see), and runs very quietly – except when I fire Cortex and MISP at a massive amount of evidence and then I hear the fans spin up. This is basically server spec hardware in a desktop box running a desktop operating system. Windows 10 supports Microsoft Hyper-V, a virtualisation application, so I run multiple, full Linux operating systems (almost exclusively Ubuntu Server) on this box, plus Windows 10. I upgraded it with an additional 1 TB of SSD for extra space, but I run TheHive on the SSD on PCIe cards – they are so quick I’m still surprised. If you’re looking to build a home lab, then one of these desktops is it – you can run a lot on a machine like this and over-provisioning is handled quite well by Hyper-V so you can really push the gear.
That’s a brief rundown on a couple of “old is new” options I am enjoying at the moment. Keep an eye out for a bargain if you’re building a home network and want some inexpensive and capable gear to build it out. Until next time.
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