FrankenServer Part 1: The Plan, The PC, and The Ethernet Situation
For my latest tech adventure, I decided to repurpose an old office computer as a server and home theater PC. What could go wrong?
The Plan
After roughly a year of using Fedora Linux as my daily OS—and with summer break in full swing—I was in need of a new tech project. The only problem was that the world was still in the throes of RAMageddon, which continued to drive the prices of many crucial (no pun intended) computer components to double or triple what they were a year ago. What could I do to occupy myself and satisfy my need to tinker?
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| Even 1TB SSDs are priced like it's 2019 |
Well, I've considering a few different PC-related ventures over the last few years, with the top two being 1) a server for backups and media and 2) an HTPC (Home Theater PC) that could get me away from the awful operating systems that plague modern "smart" TVs. Both options have become much more expensive since last summer, so they've been on the back burner...that is, until I stumbled across a few videos about repurposing used/refurbished office PCs for a variety of low-budget builds. This particular market has stayed relatively stable amidst all of the aforementioned tech turmoil. I say relatively because while these older models steadily drop in price as the hardware ages out, many resellers have started removing the drives and RAM while still charging the same price for the "barebones" kit. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of off-lease Dell, HP, and Lenovo, office PCs floating around made this path infinitely easier and cheaper than planning a new build from scratch.
My concept for this project was that I would start with a simple server housed in an SFF (small form factor) PC. I absolutely did not want another mid or full-sized tower in the house; my main PC is housed in a roughly 19" X 9" 19" case, whereas an SFF unit's footprint probably wouldn't exceed a square foot. On the other hand, a mini PC would be better suited as a dedicated streaming box in the living room. They are absolutely tiny—usually around a liter in total volume—so there's not much room for storage. They will certainly not fit a standard 3.5" hard drive, but even when scaling down in size, you're lucky if you can fit one additional m.2 SSD and a 2.5" SSD or HDD. They're built to be unobtrusive, mounted to the bank of a monitor, desk, or TV, but the convenience of being able to hide it out of sight was outweighed by the prospect of expandability.
Why not buy a cheap compact NAS from UGREEN or ASUSTOR, which could get the job done for around the same price as a SFF PC but with less setup? Well, I wanted to have a bit more flexibility with the hardware in case I ever wanted to use the server as an actual PC down the line. A two-bay NAS would be ready to host all sorts of media and services right out of the box, but my tinkering would be limited to the software side, as would be the case with a mini PC—and where's the fun in that?
The PC
• An 8th, 9th, or 10th gen Intel i5, which are solid for transcoding video (plus, the T-series chips are low-power variants: perfect for long periods of uptime)• 16GB DDR4 RAM (honestly overkill, but nice to have)• Two m.2 SSD slots: one for the included boot drive and one empty for more storage or another OS in the future• Two 3.5" HDD bays (for the time being, I planned to reuse a 4TB data drive from my previous Windows install)• An optical drive for ripping DVDs (though I'm also in the market for a slim Blu-Ray drive...)• Several PCIe slots for potential upgrades (e.g. a low profile GPU, RAID controller, more SATA ports, etc.)
I initially ordered from a seller who had an EliteDesk 800 G6 with an i5-10500T for $200, which was an incredible deal...and too good to be true. They erroneously sent me a mini PC version of the model I actually ordered, and, as I noticed when I revisited the listing, it was a used unit, not refurbished one, which meant that it came with no warranty. Thankfully, this first seller was apologetic and accepted the PC back for a full refund. I wasn't able to find a similarly specced unit for the same price, so I ended up settling for a G5 with a previous gen CPU (i5-9500T) and slightly slower RAM (2666Mhz vs. 3200Mhz).
The Ethernet Situation
While I waited for the PC to arrive, it just so happened that I randomly solved a year-long mystery that slightly altered the course of this project. I am of course referring to "What Is The Deal With That Ethernet Jack In the Kitchen?"
Our house is poorly wired for networking. Despite the fact that the entire neighborhood was built in the mid-2010s, the only ethernet jack in the entire house is in the kitchen, presumably because the vast majority of people would only need one centrally located wireless router for all their internet needs. Instead of ethernet, most rooms in the house are wired with coax for cable TV and internet (which is bizarre considering how common Fios was becoming around that time). This inconvenient lack of foresight from the builders was compounded by the fact that our lone ethernet jack in the kitchen did not appear to work on move-in day. At this point, I didn't feel like digging through the networking cabinet, so I ended up putting the router on a shelf in the garage and plugging it straight into the Verizon ONT.
To make matters even more complicated, I was stubbornly insistent on having wired internet in the upstairs office so that our PCs would have fast, consistent connections, but I was not interested in running 200ft of ethernet cable through the halls or walls. The solution was found in the MoCA (Multimedia Over Coax) standard, which would allow us to use a $60 adapter to pass the signal through the existing coax jacks scattered throughout the house. We just had to connect the router to the coax cable that led to the office (which, thankfully, was the only one in the networking cabinet that was properly terminated) and then install MoCA adapter in the office. The adapter's average throughput was around 1.5Gbps, and while it might not match actual Cat5e speeds, this solution was leagues better than WiFi or powerline networking.
Now, throughout this whole process, I somehow ignored the blue Cat5e cable that was hiding in the back of the networking cabinet. Would you believe that this led to the kitchen ethernet jack, and all I had to do this whole time was simply plug it into our router?
It wasn't until mid-July that the jack caught my eye again and got me thinking. I decided to unscrew the plate to see if it was properly connected. It was. After about ten seconds of digging into the garage networking cabinet, I found that blue ethernet cable and plugged it into an open ethernet port on the router. Voila: there was now ethernet in the kitchen. This was great news for...all the high-speed networking needed near the pantry and toaster oven.
But then it hit me (and I swear this is where the digression becomes relevant): why not just run an ethernet cable from the kitchen into the living room and use the new PC as both a server and an HTPC, eliminating the need for a dedicated streaming box in the future? I had figured that the best place for the server was the garage, plugged right into our router for a direct wired connection to the office. But with a working ethernet jack on the first floor, I could now kill two birds with one stone. Backups and media access for our personal desktop PCs would work the same, but now I had access to a functional web browser with ad-blocking and more options for video content, light gaming capabilities (either simple 2D/retro games or streaming from my desktop upstairs), and whatever else I wanted to do with a PC in the living room. Basically, whenever the situation called for extra speed or flexibility, I could switch over to the PC for faster ethernet and a CPU that wouldn't lose a race to a first-gen mobile i3 from over 15 years ago. And if I was feeling lazy and wanted to keep using my TV remote, I could still use media server software like Jellyfin to access the videos and music I needed.
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| Not the most elegant wiring in the world, but at least it's not a tripping hazard! |
I used some cheap adhesive clips to stealthily run about 50 feet of white Cat5e along the molding and the bulkhead that separated the living room area from the kitchen. You can see it if you're on the couch and happen to look up, but otherwise, it's hidden from the rest of the first floor. Some quick testing confirmed what I had heard about TVs' pathetic 100Mbps ethernet jacks, but even with that handicap, the wired connection was still 15-20% faster than WiFi and consistent enough that I could stream games from my PC upstairs at 1440p with around 10-15ms of network latency. Not bad, but not great either, especially considering that my TV doesn't switch into the low-latency Gaming Mode for apps, only for external sources. Next, I connected my Steam Deck dock to ethernet, and this experience was truly eye-opening. In use cases where I used to get lag spikes over WiFi, games now streamed with hardly any hitches at a much higher bitrate. This boded well for the new PC. Even though the Deck's GPU runs circles around the integrated graphics on the i5-9500T, the Intel chip is just as capable of decoding a video stream, which is really all that Moonlight/Remote Play requires.
Now all that remained was to wait for the new PC to arrive and set it up. That complicated tale is best left for next time...
In Part 2 of Frankenserver: set-up and putting the PC through its paces as both a server and an HTPC! Plus, the sequel to The Ethernet Situation, which only becomes sillier over time.