I have some desktops (the tower kind) lying around and I’m wondering if there’s a way that I can connect them all to one display and combine their computational power or at least make them all accessible in one place. I want to get into server hosting but only have one monitor. They’re currently running LMDE.
Any ideas?
connect them all to one display
The X Window System was invented originally with this idea. It can even connect multiple machines to multiple displays seamlessly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
It still works fine, but after most people have been using it only on 1 PC and screen, they abandoned it in favor of Wayland.
Nowadays even self hosters, the cream of the crop of all nerds ;-) usually prefer headless servers and only 1 PC with many screens connected to it.
Back in the day I used to use Synergy to have one mouse and keyboard across multiple monitors and OSes
https://symless.com/synergy/software-kvm
I could seamlessly scroll across 3 monitors pushed by 3 different computers.
Are you telling me Beowulf clusters are back?
Jokes aside, it depends what you want to do. You can’t really build one powerful gaming PC out of multiple, but your can run parallel workloads in a number of different ways. What exactly, comes down to what you’re doing. A kubernetes cluster is different from a Blender render farm, for example.
As others mentioned you can just remote into the servers with ssh, vnc, rdp, etc. if you want physical displays on them, you can look for a cheap KVM which lets you control multiple PCs with one keyboard, monitor, and mouse.
Holy Slashdot batman!
I saw you comment that your thinking of hosting a minecraft server on it. Just FYI your going to need access to the router for port forwarding to let the minecraft server be accessible to anyone not on your LAN. Which i saw you may not have in another comment. As for actually controlling them just ssh into the server from the other one.
If you really want to do a server that other people can join and cant use port forwarding you may be able to get it to work with a VPN like hamachi and get your friends all on that. But ive never done that with an actual server just used it for LAN games so im not sure it would work. Id think it should but cant say.
You can install a Proxmox virtualisation cluster, a popular (the most popular?) option for self-hosting services. All nodes in the cluster are visible in a single web interface. For additional system coordination, you can set up High Availability and clustered file systems that the nodes can share.
Do I need to have elevated network permissions to do that? I don’t have admin access on my WiFi network and it is shared with a lot of people.
It depends how much shit is blocked on the network at the user level.
I’m old enough to have clustered some 16 desktop PCs using openMOSIX a long time ago, before the era of multiple cores and threads.
The whole cluster would function like a single Linux system, automatically spreading the work between nodes.
I used it to run SETI@Home for a bit of fun.
It was a neat idea, but never went mainstream. Soon single PCs were powerful enough to run virtual machines and be partitioned instead of clustered.
Now software bloat has caught up to the gains we’ve made in hardware and we’re back to it taking 15 seconds to load a word processor.
Bloody got a new Windows 11 lenovo something today. It’s so slow to just open settings up.
I know the Windows vs Linux thing is like beating a dead horse, but I use both, and the Linux machine never gets slow like Windows does. Windows does so much crap in the background that you and I don’t need want or care about, and Linux just does what it’s told when it’s told. Give it a try if you’re feeling adventurous.
Yeah, I’m in the planning stage of buying a new personal desktop that I’m going to run Linux on from the get go, I’m just tired of Windows.
Once I’m a little more financial I’m going to pull the trigger and build my next gaming pc
