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a macbook for cheap

so over the past few years i’ve had somewhat of an on and off interest in Macs due to this sort of exclusivity they’ve always had in my mind. i grew up using Windows and Linux which as i’m sure you’re all aware can run on a very vast number of machines, unlike macOS which is made to run on specific, usually very expensive, almost purpose-built machines (quite literally purpose-built now that Apple Silicon is a thing). as a result of their differences to the average computer, i’ve always wondered what it’s like to use one. and so every now and then i’ve been known to have a look on eBay at their prices when i’m looking at things i want to get. i remember in late 2023 for example, looking around for 2012 Mac Minis, specifically because they’re the last fully upgradable ones you can get.

well, a little closer to today a friend of mine was setting up a macOS VM on their home server and that gave me the thought “fuck it, let’s go hackintoshing again”. so after plenty of time messing about with OpenCore and an old ThinkPad with like a Haswell i3, 8gb of ram and a probably 5200rpm mechanical HDD, i had macOS 12 installed. i messed about a little bit but honestly gave up quite quickly on it due to the unsurprising slowness of the OS given the machine it had been installed on. weirdly enough though at first animations were really smooth on it. next i tried installing it on my main machine. this allowed me to install the latest version of macOS (15 at the time of this post) as it has an AMD GPU, as opposed to the now unsupported Intel integrated graphics the laptop had. this gave me a better experience. a considerably better experience. an experience so much better that i was considering getting a MacBook as a new laptop because either way i wanted a new one. my current laptop, a Lenovo Flex 2-15, while it has a touchscreen that i learned i really love, has a really bad keyboard and trackpad that results in me making frequent mistakes just trying to navigate the OS or type something simple and a battery that lasts about 30 minutes. (what is it with me and laptops that last 30 minutes on battery, my last one done the same thing too. it’s battery was so fucked that some Windows hardware info tools would report it as at like 300% once fully charged.)

as you should know by now if you’ve been here for any amount of time, “new” to me means “some decade-old thing, sometimes even older, that lost mainstream support ages ago that i’m willing to give mainstream support back to thanks to the use of some free and open-source tool i found on the internet”. so after some research, off to eBay i went! thanks to the information i found online, most notably these two videos from the YouTube creator “What’s on Your Screen?” (whose content i have now begun to watch religiously) i had a look for a mid 2015 MacBook Pro for reasons very obvious to anyone interested in Intel Macs and now very obvious to me. the 2.5 and 2.7GHz models could be configured with dedicated AMD graphics which should mean that future macOS releases will continue to run smooth whether officially supported or not, their trackpads are solid state, meaning they don’t move at all when you press down on them which allows for them to generally feel and work a lot nicer while being a lot less prone to damage, and their keyboards aren’t affected by the decrease in quality MacBook keyboards had starting in 2016 up till the release of the M1 Macs.

and turns out that now seemed to be a pretty good time to go looking for one of these things too. not long into my search i found one being sold with everything it originally came with, including the box, and with a replacement iFixit battery that had ~40 cycles on it for around £100. the only other example i could find at the time of one similar to that was around £360, so obviously there was a couple of catches to this. first, the left speaker was advertised as sounding distorted. no problem for me, i don’t really use the speakers on my laptops anyway. second, the machine took several hours of charging according to the seller to power on. again not an issue, just sounds like the battery needed some time after being left alone for a while. third, in the seller’s words charging can be a bit temperamental. that’s something i’m willing to put up with. fourth, while charging the seller noticed a faint crackling sound near the charging port. that’s fucking weird. the laptop’s mine now.

upon receiving it, i reset the NVRAM and booted the system into Internet Recovery mode to reinstall the latest version of macOS the machine officially supports (which is 12). once that was done i installed the OpenCore Legacy Patcher and had a look through the 3 currently supported macOS versions (13, 14 and 15 at the time of this post) to see which ones would run best on the machine. what i found was that 13 and 14 run great while 15 is a little slow at times. looking back at it though i assume it would have ran as fine as 13 and 14 did if i just gave it some more time. 14 needed some time and a reboot too before it ran as well as it does now. i also tried Windows and Linux as i did want to dualboot with Linux at first and as for Windows i just felt like it really, part to see what it’s like and part for the age-old joke of running Windows on a Mac. Windows installed on the machine considerably quicker than on any of my PCs and worked just fine honestly, apart from the machine running weirdly hot. Linux however was a bit funny for me. i tried Debian and Mint, both with Cinnamon and KDE. Cinnamon had issues with fractional scaling which made the machine’s graphics lag up at random points. i kinda expected it considering the fact that the fractional scaling toggle in Cinnamon does say its an experimental feature. as for KDE two thirds of the screen would just be white for some reason when i first booted. i later found out adding the kernel parameter “intel_iommu=igfx_off” fixed this issue and allowed me to load into it a little more correctly. once in fractional scaling worked fine but in some software (most notably the terminal) there would be tiny little lines of white pixels at the bottom of their windows. i was unable to find a fix for this and due to that i just decided to keep only macOS 14 on the machine for now.

after a week or two of using it, my thoughts on it are that the keyboard is great for a laptop keyboard, i can achieve a fairly good typing speed and accuracy on it and when i make mistakes it actually feels like the mistake was made because of human error as opposed to the keyboard being bad, the trackpad is quite honestly the nicest one i’ve ever used and macOS for the most part is a very nice looking and working operating system, especially for use on a laptop. i don’t appreciate the amount of password entries that pop up to do things like change settings or open already installed software that hasn’t been verified by Apple, nor do i appreciate the idea that basic features Windows and Linux have had for years are paywalled on Mac through third party software (please excuse the slight rant but the idea that an entire subscription service that just lets you download paid quality of life software or basic productivity apps to your machine because getting all the ones you want is too expensive actually exists is mad to me but it is 2025 so…) but apart from that I do like the OS. and either way that last point is starting to become a bit less of an issue now as Apple makes efforts to build these features into the OS natively and a lot of alternative utilities are appearing that are free and open source (Rectangle, DockDoor and Stats are great pieces of software for example).

(note: this post has had its publish date edited to reflect the date and an approximate time it should have gone up on. i was not able to publish it at that time because of a technical error. no other edits have been made to the post since that date apart from this note to reflect that.)
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i invested in the gear vr lens mod

so if you didn’t know, i’m pretty big into vr. quite the enthusiast i’d say. i unfortunately don’t have like a big collection of vr shit for now but i am trying to save up and what i do have has really given me quite a positive experience with the technology. to give some context because i don’t talk about vr nearly enough here, i started off with the original vive in late 2021 as the main thing i was looking for in a headset was a cheap entry point into the steamvr ecosystem. i really enjoyed using it and believe that if you have no experience in vr it’s a really solid way to start if your main priority is the same as mine, especially now that you can find them for ridiculously cheap prices (in the UK often just over £150 for a full kit). when i decided that it was time for a new headset, i found a used vive pro for around £190 and a wireless adapter kit for around £150. my experience with that was equally as amazing. the same deep blacks and generally more vibrant colours i had come to expect when in vr, screen door effect noticeably reduced, and a headstrap that is so much better than anything htc made for the original.

a big downside of the vive though was of course the controllers. not for the reason you’d expect though surprisingly. at this point i had never experienced any controllers other than the wands, apart from using a friend’s quest 2 for a short amount of time. i really enjoyed using the touchpads (to the point that even today with the index controllers i make great use of theirs), and the click on the triggers felt great to me too. the problem i had with them funnily enough, was build quality. for as much as i loved the wands’ touchpads, they were built like shit and i had to buy 4 replacements over the time i was using them because of how often they would fail. this left me with a lot of wands sitting around doing nothing so i ended up following a guide online to convert 2 of them into trackers and stuck them onto an old pair of shoes. i was originally planning to buy a vive 3.0 tracker in order to get tracking of my hip/waist for proper full body tracking but due to the fact that i had bought a link box and tether for my vive pro i no longer had any way to power the original vive to use it for its built in watchman dongles so instead i bought the gear vr lens mod (and looking back at it i’m happy i did because not long after that purchase the 3.0 vive tracker went on sale lol). it was about £40 for the lens mod itself and a handheld manual air blower to blow out any dust that entered the headset when i took the lenses off.

fast forward a few days, everything arrived and i popped off the vive pro’s original lenses by pushing a small flat-head screwdriver in between the lens and the casing and then prying up. they got stored separately in plastic bags then i dusted the screens inside the headset and pushed in the new lenses. when i started up the headset and opened vrchat i was fairly amazed by how much cleaner things seemed now. the sweet spot felt much bigger, glare/god rays were noticeably reduced, the rings you could see through the old lenses due to the way they’re made were no longer visible, and things were generally a lot less blurry. the screen door effect i do believe is a little more noticeable but i don’t really mind it, weirdly enough i’ve been known to quite like the look of the vive pro’s screen door effect in some cases. after testing i then put the headset away for a bit and went to do other things.

later i put it back on and upon entering my vrchat home world i immediately noticed something was off. the world’s skybox distorted a lot when i moved my head and the main menu looked like it was bulging forward. in an attempt to fix this i shut down the headset and used the lighthouse console accessible in SteamVR’s program files to write the v14 config found here to the headset. after doing that the skybox distortion became a lot less noticeable. it was definitely still there but not at all in an amount that annoyed me personally. now, the menu’s distortion. after a bit of searching i found out that adjusting my headset’s ipd should fix it, which it indeed did. a few weeks in i noticed what i thought was a set of stuck pixels in the bottom left of my vision in one eye. i paid no attention to it for that day while simultaneously worrying that the green screen that shows up in vr when your computer’s locked might have caused some pixels in my headset to go stuck. later on i thought that maybe it might have been some dust stuck in the headset so the next day i took that lens off and dusted the screen again. that fixed it.

now that it’s been a month since i first installed the mod, i can say i quite like it. its not perfect at all, the lenses that were chosen for the original vive (and presumably by extension the vive pro because they seem to use the same ones) were chosen for a reason and by installing this mod you will be introducing distortion to the optics of your headset, distortion that in the worst case could end in you becoming very motion sick without even realising it (to quote the comment i linked a little bit up above, “Most concerning is that swimmy HMDs cause nausea at an almost subconscious level, you don’t need to perceive it for it to make your experience using the HMD unpleasant.”). in my experience though i’ve felt none of that, even after the fixes i still notice distortion but for me personally it’s not at all an issue. people claim as well that by installing this mod you will lose a small amount of fov, i never noticed this either myself which could be to do with the fact that i use the original vive’s facial interface on the headset which does push my eyes closer to the lenses. my apologies if you just so happened to find this post while deciding whether or not to install the mod but your mileage will absolutely vary when installing it and i feel that’s a really important thing to let you know. for a bit more of a definitive answer on whether or not you should do it though, do consider it if you’ve been using vr for a good while, know that you have a good tolerance to anything that causes motion sickness in vr and don’t at all mind taking a risk.

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vr performance

… has always been kind of a mess for me. it’s not really surprising since i started out with an i7 4770k (that i still use) and an rx 570 4gb then upgraded to an rx 6600 but ever since around the release of steamvr 2.0 i’ve been noticing performance degradation that i never noticed before. display errors/purple frames all the time, constant slowdowns in the steamvr system menu, unplayable amounts of stuttering in beat saber, hell it was allocating all of my ram at one point for no reason specifically when i was using my original vive to play specifically beat saber and never any other headset or game. funnily enough that happening does indeed cause everything on my machine to crash and reset but thankfully that one seems to be fixed now at least. only the other day i tried accessing my steam account management inside of vr to add money to my wallet and it caused my entire frame graph to go purple.

i decided to play beat saber yesterday and surprisingly it was working well enough that i could stream it to a friend group i’m in with fairly minimal stuttering. that experience caused me to look a bit further into what’s causing my performance issues…

much like many other developers on steam, valve allow you to download older versions of much of their software by opening the betas tab of said software. under steamvr’s beta tab are many different options. two for the macos build, the actual beta itself of course, an option that allows you to go back to the previous version, and a few older windows builds. as of right now one that’s just labelled “Temporary branch […] (for testing)” and the one I decided to install, “oculus_win7and8”, version 1.15.12, which exists primarily from my understanding to allow windows 7/8 users who need to use an old version of the oculus software to still be able to use steamvr to some extent. today i’m using it to prove a point, it would seem.

so i install it and unsurprisingly half of my overlays don’t launch. the reason for this ends up being a pretty important issue later on so i won’t spoil my fix for that. in the meantime i just downgrade all the ones that have a downgrade in their betas tab and disable the ones that don’t. i open beat saber and immediately the game no longer stutters in a way that makes it completely unplayable. i set some of the best plays i’ve set ever, including my actual personal best scoresaber play as of the day i wrote this, and feel really happy that i’m actually able to play the game again. additionally somewhere in the process it turned down the intensity of the controller vibration in game which ended up being really nice for me, i tend to switch between having them on and off and the subtleness of the vibrations now are actually a great middle ground between on and off. and even better, now opening the account management page on steam doesn’t cause my graph to go purple! it just opens in the steam client itself instead of the big picture mode web browser in vr.

quite quickly into this i realise that staying on an old version of steamvr isn’t really going to be sustainable. vrchat is completely unable to launch in vr mode when you’re running a version of steamvr this out of date and i assume many other games share the same issue. this is the pretty important issue from earlier! and here’s the fix.

the old ui still exists in steamvr, you can access it if you close the steam client in vr. i assume it falls back to the old ui when steam is closed because all the features of the new ui wouldn’t work without steam open. but either way it’s still there which is a good thing in my eyes. this means that you’re still able to use it as your main interface, even with steam open, because it still exists in basically its entirety. choice, we love it! and surprisingly enough the way to change it is an official thing, you just need to add a line to steamvr.vrsettings (located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\config\). under the block of text labelled “dashboard”, add the line “allowVRGamepadUI” : false, including the quotation marks. make sure that everything is still comma separated and that the option at the end of the block doesn’t have a comma at the end of it, save the file, then start steamvr.

a picture of my steamvr.vrsettings “dashboard” section, for visual reference.

congrats. you should notice that you’re now back to the old ui, with a bit of a steamvr 2.0 twist. if you’re running a machine as underpowered as mine, your first thought might be “let’s open vrchat and see what the performance is like now!”. so, as a result of the fact that i am indeed running a machine as underpowered as mine, i opened vrchat and basically all of my purple frames are gone and my performance has increased in some cases. for example my most definitely very feature-rich home world used to run around 70 fps. it now runs considerably closer to 90. as another example, my framerate in Cozy Cottage is still sub-30. but in my case the purple frames are gone and that’s what matters to me really. if you’re getting purple frames you’re getting constant really strong and noticeable, almost sickening stuttering along with a mad amount of compression if you’re using any wireless solution no matter what your framerate is. despite my main issue being with the purple frames however, this does seem to just be a universal performance boost. games are more stable now, the less intensive of them now getting closer to actually reaching their framerate targets.

i am going to continue testing this. i’ll record some frame graphs of me playing various games with the new ui enabled and disabled, and i’ll post them in a page along with an analysis of the data right here to share with you all.

edit: between the time that i wrote this and now, i have received a vive pro link box and tether cable in the post that i’ve been using for about a week. using that has significantly upped my performance too, to the point that i now am getting considerable increases in my framerate everywhere, with the obvious trade-off being that i no longer feel as free while standing up in vr. (although i must say i remember being tethered on my old vive as a lot worse than what i’m experiencing with the pro. maybe there’s some sort of difference in how the cables feel on a pulley? i never upgraded from the triple tether cable on the original vive so…) i will also be testing the performance of the new ui enabled vs disabled using the tether to see if it makes any noticeable difference if you’re not using a wireless solution.

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1 year of this website

… as of April 1st and i actually managed to post at least one thing every month. well done me. so as a bit of a celebration of the fact that there’s at least one thing i’ve been able to keep going consistently for a year i’ll talk about some things. some good things. some happy things. some present things. some future things.

first off, the Nia avatar’s done now. here’s the link. it’s actually public and people can use it (once i’ve put it in the world). the mobile/quest model looks a bit shit in some places due to the decimation but it has all the same outfits the PC version has (they don’t take up much vram at all either) and for general use i’m sure it’d be perfectly fine. (apart from a bug with leg movement that’s currently present in it.) the PC version of course more so, as it does just use a copy of the actual model ripped from my own copy of the game (with some modifications to make it work well in vrchat).

as well as that i’ve got some updates to make here. my physical collection has increased a good bit since i last modified the collection page so i’ll be sorting that out shortly before or after this post is up. i have a ps4 now, i’ll make a post about it soon. unfortunately can’t go too in-depth on this one though cause its firmware was too new to be exploitable. i’ve got a guide on how to diagnose (and potentially fix) some hardware faults and bricks on the wii u using only software (and an sd card) in the works too. that should be up soon.

it’s been quite a nice first year. making this place has given me somewhere to talk about anything and being able to do that is indeed quite nice.

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the two more wii u systems have arrived.

i’ll start with some context as per usual. so one night i was on ebay just searching for broken wii u systems cause i thought it’d be fun to fix another one. i find a pair of broken systems for ~£33 and as i explained in the previous post the seller claimed that one had error 160-0103 and the other they had no clue. so i decide to buy them.

fast forward to the following monday, they’re here. and in quite bad condition too. not dirty or dusty thankfully, just a load of scratches which i suppose isn’t unusual for a wii u now that i’m thinking about it. i then take them upstairs and plug one of them in. it’s the error 160 one! using udpih to boot the unofficial wii u recovery menu shown me that it was on firmware version 5.5.2 (e). i then use said recovery menu to dump the system’s error logs and have a look through them. media error. hynix. unsurprising. now that i know what’s going on though, i download MLCRestorerDownloader and use it to download the MLC titles (which for the most part is all the software on the wii u that you as a user interact with) onto the sd card. i then use udpih to launch into the isfshax installer and install it to the system. now that’s on there i use the minute menu to wipe the system’s MLC and scfm.img (which i now kinda regret not doing after i had dumped the MLC but oh well). then the new MLC titles go on there and the problem seems to be fixed. for now. a kinda funny side effect of doing it this way is that the system’s MLC has effectively been updated while its SLC is still on 5.5.2, meaning it’s using 5.5.2’s iosu to boot the 5.5.5 MLC titles. doing this doesn’t seem to cause any issues at all and it’s easy enough to just update the system now that i’m in but despite that it still made me laugh a little when i first saw it. a less funny side effect of doing this is that because i’m not using a rednand this error could come back at any point due to me having just reinstalled the MLC titles onto a failing MLC. that won’t be an issue though now that isfshax is on the system because i can just use that to either drag the MLC through the pits of hell one last time or make a rednand.

now this second one’s a bit of a funny one. i connect it up to my switch to run udpih and boot it. it does fail to display anything so i download the dc_init variant of the recovery menu and try it. it works. i then install isfshax and boot with nothing but the plugins required to boot now that it has isfshax installed. it’s perfectly fine. no issues whatsoever. i have no clue either. all i know is that it’s actually my main wii u system now, turns out this one doesn’t have a hynix nand. it’s a toshiba! as far as i’m aware toshibas seem to be the most reliable of the three MLC manufacturers. unfortunately i can’t move my NNIDs over to this new system as that requires you contact nintendo’s support and ask them to unlink the NNIDs and looking through their support pages i can’t tell if they offer this service anymore. but that’s not much an issue when you can make backups of your digital games i suppose.

man i love homebrew.

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i have 2 more wii u systems on the way.

they’re both broken. one’s showing my personal favourite wii u error (160-0103), the other they have absolutely no clue what’s going on with it. i will be making a full blog post about them. also you ever seen how many of those boxed white 32gb japanese splatoon wii u systems there are online? i want one.

you’re the one with the wii u problem. not me.

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i’ve been thinking a lot.

not about anything bad, quite the opposite actually. so why dont i talk about what i’ve been thinking about here. as i predicted back in june the stress i had been experiencing back then has got significantly better, to the point that i’ve finally been able to enjoy going back out, walking, shopping, all those things i used to do before school fucked me up. over christmas and the new year i had a great time, spent loads of time with friends and family, ate a good bit, done all those things you do with people over that time. i hope you had an enjoyable time over the holidays too. i’ve been sleeping quite well as well, finally got back into a sleeping routine and now it feels like a day lasts both 8 years and 8 seconds at the same time. a lot more time to spend in the day since i’m getting up earlier but as i’ve learned the hard way time really does go by quickly as you age.

now let’s talk about the future. the very near future i mean. like next month. now that the holidays are basically over, it would make sense to start exercising properly again. i should get back into a routine really, before i decide to retreat to my chair yet again. i’ve got high hopes i won’t though, turns out listening to music while you exercise sure makes it go by quickly. and now that the cooker’s fixed i can eat a bit more properly again so that’ll be nice, believe it or not i enjoy eating healthily and microwave meals aren’t exactly appetising after the third week of them. regarding vrchat avatars absolutely no progress has been made, regarding actually playing vrchat, well turns out my index controllers had faulty finger tracking from the factory. first couple weeks in i just didnt care cause i wanted to actually use the things but now i’ve sent the broken controller back and am waiting on a replacement. its been two weeks please help.

well, that’s what my january thoughts have been like. why dont you share yours with me? my discord, steam and bluesky are linked on the website’s footer, or if you’d like to use a service that gives you a bit more freedom of choice my email is lana at woomy dot sh. i’d love to hear what you have to say! :D

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an update for december

hello again. in all honesty i haven’t been all too motivated over the past couple months to write anything, if you couldn’t tell. therefore i’ve decided to make another monthly update post as opposed to a more ‘proper’ writeup of something i’ve got over that time. said writeups will return soon however, as i’m beginning to get more motivated.

so regarding the vr hardware i promised to talk about last month: i bought index controllers like 5 years late!!! believe it or not, they’re considerably better than wands. before i got them i loved the wands and their massive trackpad, thought it would have been easier to use than sticks, didn’t really understand the point of the extra buttons either. i now understand. only issues i’ve really had with them is that the right ring finger will not track at all, no matter how much i drum on the controllers and the right controller’s tracking is a bit dodgy too.

and regarding vrchat yet again: more avatar work. bought rusk and some extra outfits for it, i’ve been setting that up. blade nia is now being worked on. the xenoblade avatars i briefly talked about last month are closer to being done.

thanks for reading, happy new year! :D

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an update for november

this month i haven’t had any new things turning up for me to talk about so i just thought i’d talk about this month as a whole for me instead and a few things i’ve been doing.

so i got back into vr. quite a bit. on the vrchat side i’ve been doing more avatar work, figured out how to make metallic parts of a model actually metallic, started work on a Pyra avatar as well, i’ll probably have all my public avatars actually public soon which will be nice cause as far as i can see xenoblade 2 avatars aren’t really a thing on quest, much less ones that are rated a higher performance rank. the models on my quest versions did unfortunately have to be decimated a bit but doing that means that they’re currently rated Good. regarding actually gaming in vr i got back into beat saber a bit, streamed it for around 10 days and i’ll probably start streaming it again soon cause i found that it is a really fun way to play through the game, not giving a damn about rank and instead just focusing on random shit nobody’s ever heard of. and i’ve got some new vr hardware on the way that i’ll save for december’s post.

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the new server post, as promised

so to start this one off, i’ll provide some context (as per usual). one of my mates was spending a load of money per month on server hardware so that he could host websites and discord bots and game servers and such. he realised a while into it that it was costing him a lot so he wanted to cut back. his way of doing that was outright buying server hardware for us all to use. he found on ebay for himself a HP ProLiant ML350e Gen8 for ~£100 that he’s currently using for i believe backups and media serving, and generally just as a main while waiting for some more hardware. after that purchase, he let me know that he was willing to buy some hardware for me too.

after much searching, i found a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 with a 2 TB hard drive pre-installed for ~£130. seemed good to me, the CPU needed upgrading because it was a small 2 core Celeron G1610T and I was planning to use the machine for virtualization, which also made it unfortunate that the RAM limit was 16GB but honestly definitely a limit i can work with. the machine made up for it with it’s built in iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) chip which if you’re not familiar with, would allow me to have complete remote control over the machine, even when it’s not powered on. helpful considering my unfortunate lack of working USB keyboards.

now with the server chosen, i moved on to finding a network switch. my criteria was very simple, gigabit with more than 4 ports. i have one ethernet cable carrying internet and i needed it to reach 4 devices. some expansion for the future would be nice too. i found a brand new sealed Netgear gigabit 8-port switch on sale for ~£20. nice, i’ll be taking that. for the RAM i found 16GB of the stuff it wanted (DDR3-1600 unbuffered ECC) for another ~£20 and i needed some thermal paste so that was another ~£5, as well as a couple cables to route power to an SSD i’ll be using as a boot drive, ~£4.

for the CPU, i had a good bit of choice. due to the Gen8 having a motherboard with a socket unlike the Gen7 systems which have soldered CPUs, there are a good few different chips that the system can take. people seem to recommend the Xeon E3-1265L V2 as the best all-around chip for this system. only 10W above the TDP limit of the cooler (35W), 4 cores with hyperthreading and a good base/boost clock combo for what it is. it can be hard to find sometimes and a little more expensive than its alternative though so failing that there’s the Xeon E3-1260L for a lower price with a couple hundred MHz lower clock. you wanna know what they don’t recommend? the Xeon E3-1240 V2. over double the TDP limit of the cooler at 69W and a boost clock speed that really does not make that increase worth it whatsoever. but i found one on ebay that i would soon learn had a dent in the IHS for only £9!

a few days later, i was exercising while i notice a van park up on our driveway. i greet the man in the van and he hands me a parcel. i thank him and open it in my room. inside it i found the server. it seemed a bit dusty but i thought nothing of it because it didn’t seem too bad. i continue exercising then once i’m done i get some stuff to clean the server out and hop into a voice channel with a friend. i then open the server up…

…oh my god its fucking disgusting. touching any part of the inside was absolutely horrible. it was clearly used in some sort of industrial hellhole or really really not taken care of or both. while disconnecting everything i thought the fan cable plug was meant to just pull out. turns out i was wrong. in my stupidity i believe i pulled the socket out of the board just a little bit. later on i realised that it hadn’t been pulled out enough to stop the fan from working thankfully. everything else went fine though, i slid the motherboard out (it’s screwed onto this really cool metal plate that you can just slide out of the case) and cleaned that up along with everything else in the case. after i felt like i wouldn’t cause dust to be sprayed all over my room upon booting the system up, i put it back together and booted it up into ShredOS to shred the drive (and some others i decided i wanted to fit into the system).

fast-forward to the arrival of everything but the CPU, i install the RAM and the SSD thanks to the molex splitter and molex to SATA cable i bought to tap into the PSU’s molex power, i connect everything up to the network switch and connect to the iLO. once i’m in i update it and the system’s BIOS (please don’t buy those ~£30 BIOS/iLO update packages on eBay, you can achieve the exact same thing for free by downloading the web installers for the BIOS/iLO on HP’s site then extracting the updates from those exe files using 7-zip) and then mess about with installing Debian onto the machine. the reason why i have to “mess about” instead of just installing Debian is because of a funny little thing with this machine’s BIOS. it allows you to boot from a drive connected to the motherboard’s SATA port (usually reserved for an optical drive) but as soon as you also plug a drive into one of the non-hotplug slots on the front it disables booting from that SATA port on the motherboard if you’re using the built in RAID controller for the backplane. now why it does this i have no fucking clue, but it means i have to store a bootloader on a different device that the bios can boot from when the backplane is in use. thankfully the motherboard has both a USB port and a microSD card slot that can be booted from, and i have a 1GB microSD card i can use for that. ultimately i decide on storing /boot on the SSD connected to said problem port so that i get fast speeds updating the kernel and other Linux boot files but also install a copy of GRUB onto a microSD card which i can use to chainload the GRUB install on the SSD.

now that Debian is installed, i secure the install and enable SSH so that i don’t have to continue using the really slow console on the iLO. after that i install Proxmox over the Debian install. i do it this way simply because there are no LUKS encryption options in the Proxmox installer. now that Proxmox is installed i whitelist the port and set that up. i download the ISOs i’d be needing (Debian 12, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC and the virtio drivers for Windows) and start to set up my VMs. soon i’ll make a page detailing all my VMs and what they do, but for this blog post i’ll talk about one in particular, which is the most important of the two “public facing” VMs on my system.

on this VM i installed a copy of Debian 12. it got secured the same way that the host machine did and after that i moved everything from my old VPS to it. now comes the fun part, how i got those public-facing services on the internet without needing a static IP address. some time between my childhood years having to use Hamachi to allow others to access services i set up and last month Cloudflare made this awesome piece of software called “cloudflared” that allows services on a machine to tunnel through their network to your domain, therefore not requiring a static IP of your own. i set that up using their dashboard and all i had to do (minus setting up certificates to give to the Apache web server) was run a one-line bash command to install the service, point the root of my website to the port commonly used by web servers for HTTPS traffic (443), then tell it to be happy with certificates made for my domain.

the CPU finally arrives. i take out the poor old Celeron, put this new chip in, repaste, clean the heatsink, and boot. it fails to boot. it’s stuck POSTing. i reboot. it’s stuck POSTing. this happens maybe once or twice more and then finally decides to complete its POST and boot. despite those POST issues, it’s completely stable once booted. i haven’t tried to benchmark or anything but i’ve not noticed any issues apart from the heat issues from running a 69W CPU at load on a 35W heatsink (which isn’t an issue anyway cause the server rarely sees load). after that first boot it seems a lot happier though, it might maybe fail once on a cold boot but apart from that it’s fine.

it’s now been a month and a half since i first got the server and the experiences i’ve had in that time have certainly made me more interested in self hosting, it’s only fueled my addiction to actually owning the stuff i use on a daily basis even more. you’ll likely see more posts here in the future regarding this sort of stuff if you decide to stick around with me. i’ve gotten back into VR as of recently too so talking about that could be fun. vive pro wireless post 6 years after its release, anyone??????

thanks for reading all this haha
happy halloween :D