honestly, systemd isn’t that bad. I’m finishing some free labs for the CompTIA Linux+ sysadmin course and learning how to compose bash scripts into services is going to be great for my homelab.

I completely ditched windows at home in early 2020 and used fedora until last year when I took the plunge into NixOS. I knew how to do things in Linux, but I wanted to understand the underlying system structure. NixOS helped pull back the veil a bit.

Using NixOS was when I finally felt like I started to understand Linux. I don’t think I could go back lol

I’m using a surface laptop studio with the linux-surface kernel (NixOS, btw :p).

It’s actually quite repairable compared to some other offerings and are generally available used on ebay. I won a $610 bid for mine with an i7, 32gb RAM and a 3050ti. I think all the models have the same 120hz 3:2 screen too. I’m incredibly pleased with it.

If using Linux is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I appreciate the kind words! Until recently, my day job was CAD monkey. I wanted to consolidate the hardware I was cobbling together, found a cheap 8 GPU mining rig and some extra 2020 extrusions to play with.

The seller for the mezzanine said it followed the mATX mounting hole pattern, (it does but is ~75% in the width and doesn’t use all the points). I have a tendency to overthink designs and kind of stalled for a bit before finally taking the plunge and whipping up these struts. I used some brass heat set inserts to accept the standoffs and everything pretty much went right together lol

I am using PTM sheets and they idle at decent temps, though I did ziptie some high CFM fans behind them lol

eBay has some rad Chinese mezzanine boards for these guys too. Nvlink works and everything lol

I bet you used a keyboard, instead of a magnetic needle and a steady hand to code this too.

/s

For real though, nice work. 🎉

Thank you! I actually 3D printed these. I couldn’t get my qidi ifast to play nicely with my generic ABS filament, so I sliced them in half and printed them in PLA on my prusa mini. They’re joined in the middle with a keyed lock on the top and bottom and 8x 12mm M3 bolts

😂 I can see how it looks that way lol

It’s been a fascinating experience so far and I feel like I’m only touching the surface. I’m exploring some of the various memory harnesses to hook into Hermes Agent and see how it learns with extended use.

Currently I’m running a Q6K quant of Hermes 4 14B with a 32K context window via llama.cpp that works pretty well. Generation output is a comfy ~50tok/sec. These v100s are 16GB each, but there are 32GB versions available too.

I’m running everything via NixOS and have to do package overrides to get inference engines to build with the right CUDA versions.

My goal is to get a cohesive environment set up for Hermes Agent to learn my system/lab/network and help my grow it over time.

Overall, I’m happy with them. The mezzanine board is good quality, I’m using PTM sheets under those massive heatsinks and some arctic p9 fans to keep them at around 60C under load.

It’s an older version of a heatset insert fixture. I used it to put threaded brass inserts into my 3d prints instead of trying to capture a nut or screwing directly into plastic.

https://www.printables.com/model/609644-stealth-press-1-heat-set-insert-press-legacy

“the front fell off?!”

They’ve been temporarily removed for about a year now lol

I’m actually quite happy with it. It’s a 24gb p40 which runs some of the older LLMs quite well. Repasting with liquid metal helped thermals a ton too

It’s a Tesla P40 24gb I got off eBay a while ago. Just like AllHailTheSheep suggested, it’s a server GPU meant for compute workflows so it relies on forced air from a server rack. I repasted the die with liquid metal and added a 3d printed duct to attach the radial blower to. The thing never cracks 60c under inference which is nice. Idles around 24c

(Edit: I’m mostly using it for LLMs, but it supposedly makes a good CAD card, so I might give that a shot too)

Thank you 🥹 It’s been quite the experience lol

I thankfully snagged this one pretty cheap off eBay. It’s actually an 8-gpu mining rig frame that conveniently fit my CEB motherboard lol

My janky homelab lol. Mostly ebay secondhand Enterprise stuff and a Chinese SXM2 mezzanine board to run dual NVLinked 16gb V100s. I also have a TrueNAS Scale mini itx server running upstairs with my “arr” stack and some other useful tools.

I used Fedora with the linux-surface kernel on a Surface Book 1, and everything pretty much worked out of the box. I bought it used on eBay and the battery in the tablet portion was pretty degraded, so I don’t know if it impacted performance, but it could be a little clunky at times.

It was my computer in exile while our house was being renovated after some water damage and I was able to run prusa slicer on of for my mini. I didn’t try a pen with it, but the touch controls worked with the custom kernel.

Eventually, I tried Aurora OS which is an immutable fedora distro with the surface kernel loaded by default and performance was about the same. Now I have it on cachyOS which needed the Ethernet cable installed so I could get the Marvell firmware drivers for WiFi, but it was much snappier. That’s an arch based distro, so I could load the surface kernel for touch driver stuff but you lose out on some of the more advanced kernel stuff that group is pushing.

Overall, I’ve been pleased with the experience. I didn’t have a surface device before, but when I heard about the linux-surface project, I had to try it.