September 9, 2023

New Computers; Bad Network

My eBay game has been strong lately. I won two Lenovo Thinkcentre M700 Tiny computers for less than $100 last Wednesday. And while it took the seller ages to ship them, they finally arrived yesterday. In the meantime, I found a Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro in Facebook marketplace and picked that up, too. Updates include 32GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe drive for the Dell, and 16GB RAM and 500GB M.2 SATA drives for the Lenovos. All the machines are clean and work great. The Lenovos are older than the Dell, but the have 6th-gen i7 processors, so they are both pretty spritely. They should all be complete and ready to go by tomorrow.

The Lenovos will replace the aging MacPro as Proxmox nodes on my homelab. I plan on making several of my virtual machines part of a high availability cluster. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the Dell, yet; it, too, may join the other machines as a hypervisor, but I haven’t decided yet. I might try a Hackintosh.

I also picked up a used 21" Lenovo monitor from a kid on Facebook to set all these bad boys up. In all, I spent about $500 for the equipment and upgrades.

Of course, I woke up this morning to the Internet not working. After the usual attempts to troubleshoot, it appears I’m not going to be able to solve the issue without a visit from a Cox technician. The earliest appointment is Monday. Well maybe it’s for the best: hopefully he or she will be able to not only solve the network issue, but finally get me the gigabit speeds I pay for. The fastest download speed I’ve been able to achieve has been around 300 mbps. Old wires? We’ll see.

How am I writing this entry, you ask? Well, my MacBook Air is using my iPhone’s personal hotspot. It’s a tad slow, but not bad at all for some light browsing.