You guys remember the modern server I set up to mine Monero? Yeah, I gave up on trying to make money with that thing. After months and months of absolutely nothing happening other than me doing updates and reconnecting the possibly failing wifi card, I realized that managing it has ultimately been nothing more than a dull, pointless chore.
I'm not getting rid of the server though, I'm going to finally go through with an idea I've been playing around with for years, and make it into an AI server. Of course, I'm going to have to refamiliarize myself with the world of chatbots and all the relevant software I've been ignoring since I stepped back from the IT game, but I have the feeling I would've ended up doing that anyways.
It's a relatively capable machine: certainly no older than seven years, featuring six cores (twelve with hyperthreading) with 48GB of ECC-DDR3 RAM. Not exactly top-of-the-line, and the 4TB of mechanical hard drive space (closer to 2TB with a RAID 6 configuration) leaves much to be desired, but it's a functioning starting point, and there's four additional RAID cage slots if I really feel like sinking some money into more storage. I also slapped an anemic old GTX-960 I had lying around purely to squeeze as much power as I can out of the machine. Naturally, I'm not expecting any miracles out of this setup, but at least I'll be able to feel like I'm accomplishing something by attempting to cram an AI waifu into this thing. I also got rid of the finicky old WiFi card in favor of a firewall server (which has more stable built-in wifi) which is adorably tiny. It's probably the smallest proper computer I've ever owned, including laptops, and it's not too bad specwise either (8GB DDR4, 8th gen i5, and 250GB of NVME storage minus the NVME storage, the whole system cost me a grand total of ten dollars, thank God for recycling centers). I have some long-game plans for that little computer, but that's neither here nor now.
Both servers will have Debian Unstable because I want my computers to reflect my mental state I want up-to-date software and libraries (something that Mint, unfortunately, isn't very good for), so hopefully I won't have to fuck around trying to solve dependency problems too much. If I'm lucky, nothing will break the system or be completely unuseable.
To be quite honest, I should have started this project in earnest years ago. It's time consuming, mentally stimulating, and has the potential to become something, dare I say, I could lastingly enjoy.
It might not work, and I might fail in my endeavours once more, but I'm going to try.