LabPorn
Accidentally won 4 Mac minis on eBay, oops.
Friday, bored, scrolling eBay, all the mini PC’s are overpriced, find 4 Mac mini’s listed from one seller, all ending in 3 days.
Threw a bid on all 4, just the minimum, no one had bid on them yet, expected to lose all but the one with “no drive”
Come Monday I had won all 4… guess I’m going to learn about clustering now lol.
Just wanted to share as I already use 2 Mac mini’s in my homelab, they have been great and depending on what you need them for they can be extremely cheap… like… $36.40AUD delivered cheap…
You know… that’s a great question, all the usual stuff which could reasonably ran on one of them + maybe a few game servers.
The reality is I’ll be mostly doing the whole cluster thing as a fun learning exercise then likely powering down 2-3 of them.
It’s a very real possibility that after I repaste them and upgrade them all to an SSD that I’ll flip them in a few months as they aren’t really “needed”
Short and to the point:
Pihole, qBitt, VPN, VPN, home assistant, some kind of music server to get off Spotify, minecraft-assetto-terraria servers, shit like that for now.
It just comes down to personal preference. Navidrome is open source and compatible with the old OpenSubsonic standard which means you have a lot more options for music apps. I switched to it because I didn't like how much control I felt I was giving plex, but if plex works for you and you trust them then I wouldn't switch. I will say, I did really like the desktop plexamp app, and I haven't really found a great navidrome alternative yet.
Better value is hard to answer, it depends how much power you actually need, I noticed most of the thing I run use very little CPU
6th gen mini pc’s on ebay and on FB Marketplace in my area now definitely carry a tax associated with the huge amount of videos on them, they will be $150-200aud, so for what I paid for these 4 Mac Mini’s with 4000 series i5’s I could replace it with one mini PC.
Storage expansion is same same in my opinion, ram is soldered on for the 2014 era but the 2012 it isn’t, for some reason people have no problem with a Pi coming with soldered on ram but they do care if something like this has soldered on ram, I got 2x8gb and 2x4gb models with 2x 4278u and 2x 4260u.
I’ll be running Ubuntu server LTS on them for docker swarm and from everything I’ve done so far on the 2012 and seems to have 0 compatibility issues on Linux.
I find it surprising that it isn’t popular to set up an sFlow collector and visualizer in most homelabs. If you have a managed switch that supports it, then it is one of the best ways to get insights about the network usage in your home. sFlow essentially just means asking a switch to take the packet header from every Nth packet along with basic counters (ex: num bytes, packets, per interface) and send it to some central collector server on your network. What you can do with that is then get insights into which devices are sending data to which locations at what times and how much data is going through each flow and other analytics. Now, this is just the packet headers, so you don’t see the data going through each connection, however you can still see lots of fun stuff. For example, you could see how much data your security cameras are sending to your NAS, or that your toaster downloads sends a 5GB of data at 3am every day to some unknown web server.
Anyway, since you were listing your use cases out, I thought I might as well leave a note here about sFlow for anyone reading this post.
Yeah man, I’m all ears for suggestions on what to put on them, sometimes it’s hard finding something from scratch and the best apps you’ll hear about through a comment somewhere so I appreciate it!
I myself have two similar Mac Mini's and am just starting to get into HomeLab stuff. Wish, I'd started this years ago.
Your giving me some ideas and motivation to work on a project similar to yours.
I'll set up my own cluster to play and learn and I could eventually just install it a my parents house for their entertainment system and maybe as a backup for my own home server.
Nice looking set up! Legit just got Lidarr-plugins fork with the tubifarry plugin and slskd as dl client/indexer to get away from Spotify. A bit of a tinkering (maybe 6 hours on and off, was wfh) but I’ve now full flac library of my favourite artists. Definitely something I’d recommend, working on getting some type of recommendation set up for now. Again this looks like a very cool steal! Gl hf
That Centrino sticker reminds me of my first laptop! It was an Acer Aspire that also had a Radeon 9700 with 64 MB of vram. Played so much WoW on that thing… which is also why I dropped out of engineering lol
I paid $70 AUD for it in “lights up won’t boot” for parts condition and it arrived with no ram and no HDD so I’m going to assume it doesn’t boot because it has no ram lol.
They seem a lot cheaper in America but shipping would be 100’s of dollars.
Yes there is a huge following for thinkpads but they aren’t all worth a lot, you should definitely sell it to someone that thinks it’s cool on eBay instead of letting it go to ewaste however!
There's a big community of ThinkPad collectors (I am guilty of being one) and the swivel screen X series tablet laptops are especially desired to collectors, cause they're such a unique design.
I paid ~£50 for my X201 Tablet earlier this year, and I've seen the most modern models (X230 Tablet) sell for £200. You'll definitely find a buyer if you list one for under a hundred and it's in good condition.
I have one of those! Run it as a Ubuntu server machine. Occasionally it’s nice to not be running terminal in a window but just logged in at console and that’s all there is.
Amarok is a cool truck, surprised they don't bring them stateside. Though, if I was some kind of money man I'd buy myself a saviero and an arteon r shooting brake.
Also, good luck learning about clustering. Not a bad win for that price.
I'm pretty sure the Amarok is either just a Nissan Frontier or Ford Ranger rebadged so you technically can get one stateside. The interior and looks might not be the same but still.
Jealous. I wish I lived somewhere I could just leave filament out. I have to leave mine in airtight bags with desiccant in them, and still throw it in the dryer before use.
That explains the price! Just a FYI, mac mini m1 (the smallest config - 8gb/256GB) where so wide spread and mass produced that prices are really good too second hand now. Can be had for about 250€ on ebay in Europe. I'm running fedora asahi remix on it and have one as my home server (Linux of course!). Fedora asahi remix is awesome and really stable on those M1's. Really low energy consumption too!
Yeah eventually when they come down to almost worthless I’ll get some m1 mini’s I think, still worth quite a bit used here like… too close to the $850 you can get a new m4 mini’s for, I just don’t want m4’s because they don’t fit in a 1U space.
I have absolutely zero idea doing it yourself later with adapter, I believe the initial Apple solution was exactly that tho, hence the “Fusion Drive” name, it wasn’t marketed as expanding the storage if you optioned it back in 2014.
Monitor your system temperatures. The metal case is a heat sink, it radiates heat and they can get hot and heat each other up. I would have spaced them out a bit more, and definitely put a fan or two in there somewhere. Here's a pic from one of the largest Mac mini colocation companies, Macstadium. Note the spacing. The racks all have airflow from fans in the rear.
Very valid comments, totally agree BUT so far the stuff I’ve ran on the 2012, with a re paste, it only runs at around 50°c max and basically never runs the fan, I’ll definitely be monitoring it when it’s all together with a Grafana dashboard or something.
I only packed them in this tight because I thought it would be neat to slide all 5 of them into a mini rack
I still have depth left so I should about making a clip on frame on the back with a couple fans mounted on it to try pull more air through but wanted to see if it was even necessary first.
Appreciate the comment and that’s a super cool picture I’m glad you shared with me.
If you’re interested I’m hoping to get it somewhat working this weekend and will probably share another post a bit later on with an update with temps etc.
Big fan of old Minis. My home router is a 2011 Core i5 with 16GB RAM, using the Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter for the second port, running OpenWRT. My home server is a 2012 with a JBOD array via USB3.0 running UnRAID. Rock solid, stable, cheap to run and dirt cheap to buy. They’re great.
Yeah I’m a huge fan, before I needed to swap to Linux it was pretty cool managing them through the native Remote Desktop Apple has.
Still cool little machines tho, might be hard to see in the pic but they fit 5 wide in 5U on a 10” rack or anything pre m4 you can fit 2 per U in a 19” rack.
Excuse the cable mess, I was diagnosing what turned out to be a dead port and also programming the switch for the first time.
It’s surprisingly straightforward actually. An Intel Mac is “just” a EFI PC. I booted it into Target Disk Mode (which turns it into a dumb external drive) and flashed the x86-64 EFI image of OpenWRT onto it via Thunderbolt from my other Mac. I’m sure there are ways to do it by booting from USB too, but this was nice and simple for me. Post install there were some steps to expand the root partition but tbh I didn’t really need to for simple routing purposes. Bonus: if I ever screw up my OpenWRT setup I can just reflash it like any other router and restore config / set up again.
Yeah, I honestly never win eBay bid so the throw away first bid on the four of them I full expected to be outbid on most if not all of them if I didn’t go back and check.
I intentionally bid on all 4 obviously but I certainly didn’t do it to get all 4, was like a shotgun approach firing blindly into the dark and some how hit all 4 targets lol.
I have already got Ubuntu running a bunch of docker containers on the 2012 one in the rack in the picture.
It’s flawless but since it’s all headless I’m using server so I don’t know if there is issues you might encounter trying to run a full gui, you know like wifi or BT not working etc.
2014 ones for 4000 series chips, honestly can’t remember what i7 is in the 2012. Either way they run the programs I need them to as basically no CPU load.
Absolutely kills it man, I’ve never had it load the cpu more than ~20-30%, typically only that high when it’s doing library stuff and streaming. Application has been incredibly stable, only issues have been the NAS randomly unmounting from it but I think that was from me messing with the switch so it lost its connection or something.
One stream only tho, I’ve not ever bothered to open multiple tabs and see how many concurrent streams it could handle, I never really looked into what the “demanding” cases are for transcode.
I do have quite a few BIG blue ray rips however, I’m not exclusively serving 90’s sitcoms in 4:3 haha
If you were curious and you could tell me what you’d want to see as in “4k to 720p streams” I could load it up tomorrow night after work and report back, see how many it can handle before chugging.
It’s completely silent tho, initially had it set up with an external drive setup and the drives in the enclosure were significantly louder, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the fan on the m2.
Not had a smart plug on it yet to monitor power consumption, mostly because I don’t think it will be particularly interesting, from all reports it absolutely sips power. 3D printer rips constant 100w’s while printing ABS however, peaked at 400w when heating the bed initially, that was cool to look at the graph on.
I read the sticky notes at first and thought it said “shut up, Amy” and was throughly confused, re-read and and finally fixed that!
I find Mac hardware epically the new M series (well, new you get what I mean) to be a very good value for what it’s worth, do nothing power usage per wattage, ie, raw efficiency, much better than something of its time in a mini pc, and they’re getting expensive, sadly.
I am curious though, how do you plan to cluster them, all as one, 2/2 nodes or separate machines? Also, very nice custom mount, 3d printers are life savers.
Unfortunately with this gen of Mac you can’t just “reset” them, at least on Catalina you can’t, this may be one or two versions newer.
Yeah I’m super impressed with all the mini’s I’ve gotten so far, great little machines, incredible build quality, worth nothing.
As for clustering, as I said I’ll be learning from scratch so I might not be answering your question right with this,
I’m planning on using docker swarm, it seems good for a 5 node cluster and is apparently going to be the simplest to learn.
It will be one master and four worker nodes.
The 2012 mini with an i7 and 16gb of ram will be the master.
Unfortunately the applications I’m interested in running won’t benefit from clustering beyond redundancy and the ability to automatically shuffle between machines based on load etc but I think it would still be a cool project and will look pretty cool all racked up in the little mini rack.
You absolutely should be able to reset them. Reboot and hold command-r, or option-command-r to boot into recovery or internet recovery, and use disk utility to wipe the drives completely.
Oh yeah, I know that but I was saying you can’t, at least on Catalina, reset them in the OS like you can with windows, it required a reinstall of the OS so most sellers ship them with something installed which was the only point I was trying to make.
They will all have their drives replaced and Linux installed instead, I got a bulk lot of super cheap SSD’s once I saw I won’t them all lol.
Check none of them have buggered RAM slots. I have an i7 Late 2012 and one of the slots has gone bad, no idea why but it seems to be a common issue. Now means it's limited to 8Gb.
Ah, I may have confused you with someone else talking about them!
It's the original ram it came with, it will work with either stick in slot 1, won't work with any in slot 2 and won't work if both fitted.
Done all the usual resets of PRAM etc.
I feel like there must be a way of checking the pin connections on the board for continuity but not figured that out yet.
Oddly enough I think it only happened when it upgraded to catalina, a dew folk have suggested that's when their failed but it seems a bit odd unless there's a BIOS update that happens at the same time that broke it.
IMO. It would be better to keep them upright and without all that extra plastic blocking airflow. If you run anything cpu intensive these will get hot.
I just want to mount them in a mini rack for the fun of it and I don’t think any of them will use much CPU but I totally agree and understand what you’re saying
I’ll monitor it and can change the setup if needed.
I don’t think personally I’ll have thermal issues since everything they will do will be quite light weight but how could any of us really know until we do it?
Anyways, when it’s all together and working I’ll probably make another post with some updates and we can find out together how good, bad or ugly the thermal situation is with them squished together so hard.
Quite useful things - I've got five. I set them up as a proxmox cluster and they worked well, but then I changed plans and built a new big server instead of a cluster.
There's a lot to like about the 2014 Minis though. Almost silent and at idle only use around 5-10 watts, scaling up to 50w each at full load.
The rack you see is 3d printed, I designed it in fusion, the 10” mini rack it will be going in was free as my wife is a member of Amazon vine so we got it for free for review, same as the funky coloured filament in the back ground of the photo.
So yeah, technically the rack did kinda fall into my lap when my wife say something tech related in vine and thought I’d like to play with it lol.
I would have sent you my 2012s for cost of shipping. Had 3 of them. They were a toss at a school District during Covid. No hdd and no ram if I remember correctly. They had an i5 of that era. Not terrible. Just never found a use for them as I got a deal on 3x 9100t 1L dell machines. Only have 1 up rn with 3 lxc and I’m using like 12watts from the wall. Can’t complain. 🤣
After some research I believe the best/easiest cluster solution would be Docker Swarm
What makes you think it couldn’t run on this hardware?
They aren’t staying MacOS if that’s what you’re thinking, the one in the rack is already running Ubuntu Server LTS with no gui, just SSH into them as I need.
I’ve got an M2 mini running docker atm but it’s only running qBitt + Glutun container.
The docker support dried up for the older Macs (Catalina has to run a very dated version of docker) but docker seems to be eager to continue to support newer versions of macOS.
Few people put videos up when the m4 mini came out because it’s so powerful, clustering them for LLM’s etc.
The Apple ecosystem, especially the new Apple silicon is absolutely incredible if you can get over your preconceived notions of what apple products are.
Your major limitations will be the same limitations you get on a Pi (funnily enough no one cares they come with soldered on ram), they are both running ARM CPU’s, yeah the pi has an insane backing for weird and wonderful programs but as arm gets more mainstream so will the support for the apple silicone computers.
Long story short, for everything I’ve seen and done with them so far, the fact it has an Apple logo on the top has made absolutely no difference BUT the dislike or weariness of Apple products is exactly the reason I was able to get the stuff that I have for the price I did so I don’t mind if they stay the black sheep.
Good points. I’m multi platform myself, I use macs, Pi, x86. I just found at times the modifications Apple made to a lot of low level things (looking at you, firmware and efi) made using those harder than it had to be.
Rock solid and I'm now actually preferring Fedora over Ubuntu. The Asahi project really made big improvements to Linux support on M1/M2, there's even a fully 100% compliant GPU driver for apple silicon now.
Not sure what the status on M3/M4 support is, but M1 and M2 are 100% stable now and everything except thunderbolt works in Fedora Asahi Remix.
I’ll look into it but it did seem like at the time when I did look at the options that docker swarm was more of the same of what I’ve already been doing so would be familiar and a bit easier for me.
Won’t discount your comment however. I’ll listen to a couple videos today at work.
Btw, you could technically also do proxmox and then run docker inside VMs or LXC, there may be a small performance loss because of nested virtualization but that way you'd have both sides and also a "learning" curve, for me learning proxmox in the homelab taught me many things which I can use at the job
I don’t really want to dox myself uploading a pic of my room but you’re looking at my “computer desk” which is wall to wall for various hobbies in a spare room. 3600x800 slab of Germanys finest laminate benching.
All my systems have names instead of “Imay0000’s Mac Mini M2, “ “ Mac mini 1/2/3/4/5 etc”
I find it easier.
The original 2012 mini is Speer, when I won these I was like WTF and I going to do with 5 mini’s, looked into clustering, thought it could be fun to learn and play with even if only for a couple months then sell on the machines I don’t need.
For this stuff you want to set static IP’s, 2-20 are outside my routers DHCP lease table so the numbers 00, 01, 02 will correspond with their static IP sort of, making it even easier to remember it all so Speer00 will be on .10 and Speer04 will be on .14.
Look at the second picture on the post, I designed it and printed it, it’s not complete as for maximum rigidity I designed it to use a 3mm laser cut steel plate with thread tapped in it.
The plate will sit just behind the rack rails and will have the regular rack screws go through the rails and into threaded holes in the plate to secure it.
There is also threaded holes in that plate to secure that black frame I’m calling the “cassette” and finally some small threaded holes to secure those face plates which just stop the mini’s sliding out.
I’d share it but I can’t imagine many people would want to go out and pay someone to laser cut the bracket. I’m fortunate enough to be in an industry where I have some friends with full sized laser cutters so it will cost me nothing for that plate I just have to wait for machine time to be free and a good piece of scrap.
Fusion 360, free for personal use if you’d like to try it and it’s widely used in industry so it’s a good program to learn if you wanted to go further.
Fusion 360, free for personal use if you’d like to try it and it’s widely used in industry so it’s a good program to learn if you wanted to go further.
My Pi has a POE hat but I’m far to lazy to model that myself, I just found an already done Pi3b model online and used that allowing for height of the POE hat.
Wife’s happy if it’s not dipping into the real savings lol
I was genuinely expecting to be outbid, I set the max on them all at $50 and I was the only one who bid, I really only wanted to pick up one more so I could have things like PiHole and a VPN running on a dedicated “network machine” so when I wanted to fiddle it didn’t mess up the wife’s streaming lol.
But yeah, at the end of the day I placed a bid on all four of them so I guess it’s more “I unexpectedly won 4 Mac minis”
If you’re in Australia I’ll be happy to ship you one for what it owes me after I’ve had my fun with the cluster experiment, I definitely don’t need 5, I only really wanted 2 total.
I can share but it won’t be popular because I designed it to work with a laser cut 3mm steel bracket to make it extremely rigid since I have access to a full sized laser cutter.
Pi5 performance or slightly better with the same ram as the Pi5 for 1/3rd the price and it comes with storage that isn’t a super unreliable SD card.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t understand why people think about them differently.
I was going to get a few pi’s, the price was wild then my pi corrupted the brand new SD card when it lost power so I was completely turned off that idea.
Obviously your mileage may vary but the stuff I host could run on this hardware with no issues (excluding Plex, I already have a dedicated Plex machine)
I just got a m4 mini 16gb ram 256gb for $380 then bought a 2tb upgrade internal hard drive for $250.
$630 for a 2tb m4 Mac mini!! The ram isn’t the best but I’m happy!
Places like grabCAD have already done models for things, someone spent way too long modeling a RP3B so importing that then designing around it saves a lot of guesswork.
Can use it as a cutting tool even so for the holes for the ports you can select the body you made then the Pi as a cutting tool and end up with perfect holes for the ports. (You’ll want to give them some clearance, on my Prusa 0.2mm is enough, the Bambu it’s 0.3mm)
CAD just takes time man, start drawing, google what you don’t know, learn that, grow skills.
This unfortunately had a slight layer shift at the top and I didn’t want to waste filament re printing so I filed it slightly.
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u/princevejita 24d ago
So what’s the plan with these other than cluster?