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Comment by vocx2tx

2 days ago

Looking at the issue their builders seem to be Opterons G3 (K10?)[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_10h

at this point they're guzzling so much power the electricity is more expensive than replacement platform

I can imagine this has to be like that as they usually get $1500 per month in donations.

You could buy a newer one but I guess they have other stuff they have to pay for.

  • This is a bit of vicious circle. How much of that money goes even into keeping those servers running? The electricity bill alone, geez. They could do a dedicated fundraiser to get themselves two boxes that are a decade old and still have spare parts available, coming from Broadwell era, they will have enough instruction set support to cover the baseline towards which multiple distros are converging (Haswell and up).

    • Given their target audience, they could probably just request a hardware donation. Some sysadmin out there is probably getting rid of exactly what they need.

  • For $500 you can get a decent refurbished server on ebay that supports those “new” extensions

  • $1500 / month is probably swallowed by how much of powerpigs those Opertons are, like they are bad, real bad.

  • I am 100% sure that if they put out a call for action and asked for hardware donations they would be able to get newer stuff. Ryzen 7 1700 goes for as cheap as 50$, DDR4 ram at supported speeds (2133 MHz) is also dirt cheap.

  • >$1500/month

    Wow, i just got into newpipe/fdroid. Its neat to think even a donation the size of mine can be almost individually meaningful :)

I have a home server with a 9th gen i7 that's doing jack sh!t most of the time, is there a way to donate some compute time to build F-Droid packages?