Linux "pc in basement" / everything-over-optical / "remote" workstation

Hardware Hub Build a PC
1

Hello there,

I’ve re-written this post 3 times now because it kept on getting very long. I hope that with headers and bullets its manageable. Considering at least part of this is related to building a PC, I hope this is the right topic.

Overview

I want to start work on my dream setup, featuring:

  • A new Linux only PC for mostly software dev and some non-FPS gaming.
  • PC in the pantry/technical room (!!)
  • Keep my 4 monitor setup, or replace it with an equivalent ultra widescreen / dual widescreen setup.
  • Connection to my TV as an extra/switched monitor for seamless switching from desk to couch. The same should later be applicable to the bedroom.
  • Improved networking to take full advantage of FTTH.

If anyone could tell me of this is even possible, and if so, how to get there, I’d be grateful. Advice on my PC part choices or other parts of the setup are also appreciated.

PC

Usage: Primarily software development & electronics engineering, some (non-fps) gaming (Factorio, Minecraft, …)
Budget: I was aiming for € 2000 max, but its flexible.
I generally prefer to max out once every ~5 years, and tend not to upgrade in the meantime.
For PC parts especially I would like to order from BE or NL, preferably from 1 store.

Currently:

  • AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
  • 32GB RAM (3000 MT/s)
  • Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB
  • 3 x 4TB 3.5" in btrfs for local storage

I’ll probably end up selling this, maybe after some homelab usage, so I’d rather not cannibalize (except storage). Any thoughts about a fair second hand price? (I’ll replace the SSD with a new equivalent).

Next gen:

  • Preference for AM5 platform over Intel.
  • AMD graphics. I don’t want to deal with NVIDIA’s drivers on Linux anymore.
  • 64GB+ RAM
  • 2TB+ Fast SSD
  • Existing SSD for migration and secondary storage afterwards.
  • The HDDs could be transferred to my NAS, or an external drive enclosure if required.

Desk

I tend to have a lot of open windows/tabs. My typical layout is 2 side-by-side panes on all of my monitors.

Current hardware:

  1. 27” Dell U2720Q (DP) Primary, 1440p. (Borrowed from office, has to be returned at some point)
  2. 23” Dell P2317H (DP) 1080p on an arm
  3. 24” Dell P2418D (HDMI) 1440p
  4. 23” Dell U2312HM (HDMI via DPI) 1080p, balanced on a pile of stuff

They are setup like this:
monitor layout

I would like to replace the 3 bottom ones with an ultrawide at the equivalent density of the P2418D (1440p @ 24"). If such a thing exists I would not mind a 48:10 ratio for a bit of extra height.
I would to keep 1 extra small monitor, probably the P2418D on an arm, because of screensharing in calls, raspberry pi usage etc.
Occasionally I use my work laptop at my desk, then I use the USB-C port on the U2720Q to get a second screen and power. This is a nice to have I’d like to keep, preferably via a KVM in the primary monitor.

I have a standalone mic, Bluetooth dongle for headset and webcam. Occasionally I use some high-speed USB peripherals like a SATA dock, NVMe adapter etc. More often its USB-serial adapters and SD cards to interact with some piece of hardware.

Utility room

This is where I want to put my PC. A proper full rack would take up too much space, but I’m open for ideas.

I included a floorplan & photos to make explaining easier.

floorplan
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photo1
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photo2
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From the utility room (0) I have wires to:

  1. Master bedroom: 1 conduit with 2x ethernet and 1 conduit with coax (all currently unused)
  2. The living room: same as master bedroom (currently used by wired TV, Chromecast and unused cable TV)
  3. Office: 1 conduit with 1x ethernet and coax. Coax is unused.
    From 3 there is an conduit to 4 with 2 homemade ethernet cables for rPis etc.
    There is a 5 port switch under my desk for those 2 wires, my laptop and my PC.

The ethernet cables are all CAT 5E running in 20mm conduit. It is not possible to pull any additional wire, only to replace existing runs. I would prefer to leave the coax in place to the TV and bedroom.

My internet comes in via fiber (XGS-PON I think). Currently I’m on a 500/100 subscription, but there are options for up to 8500/1500, which I would like to prepare for.
My router is an owned FRITZ!Box 7530 AX, plugged in to a mediaconverter from the fiber company (separate from the provider). Starting from november they are supposed to allow me to plug my own SPF equipment, but I suspect that will be a difficult exercise with lots of cursing and support calls.

Next to the router I have my an 8 port switch and Home Assistant (Raspberry Pi 5), Adguard Home DNS (Pi 2 zero with ethernet hat), NASes (Synology DS220+, DS1817+ with DX513) and a few other home automation gateways.

At some point I may want to replace all or most of this extra stuff with 1 box and some virtualization (baby forbidden router?), but that’s low priority.

Solar power & why it's one of the reasons for putting my PC here.

One of the reasons I want to put all of my tech together in the utility room is that it would enable me to better utilize my solar power. My current setup just injects all extra power into the grid, at roughly 20% the price per kWh used. This and the ability to have UPS/backup power for my tech have had me looking into a home battery system. Especially the backup system would be much simpler if I can co-locate all of the critical loads in the same room and avoid having to change over circuits from my existing electrical installation.

I only have 1.9 kW of solar panels, and I live in Belgium, so grid independence is simply a non-option. But being able to take advantage of hourly pricing markets and self consuming all of my power would be cool. And maybe over time it can pay back the installation cost.

Ok that’s it for context.

I’ve done some research already before making this post and for the TVs, there seem to be a few providers of 4K HDMI-over-ethernet extenders, so I’m not too worried about that.
But given my constraints (existing conduit), I think pulling a pre-terminated 12 core multimode fiber to the office would be best, but I can’t seem to find reasonably priced media converters for things like USB / Displayport / HDMI / Thunderbolt(?). I would have thought this is at least possible…

Has anyone (except for Linus/LTT) actually done this? I can’t seem to find much info about it, but I might be using the wrong keywords. Maybe I’m looking for the wrong kind of solution entirely?

Thanks for reading, I look forward to whatever you can come up with :wink:.

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I am going to guess “Strong maybe”

Dual-monitor will make getting video over there way easier.

Depending on how you do the above, this is either easy or somewhat difficult.

While you could send Audio over the network (DANTE-protocol), I would recommend avoiding that. Webcam could also be surprisingly easy (for a price).

This would be easiest to solve by having a “media ingest”-computer that just acts as a NAS but for removeable storage.

Make and Model would help.

Two ideas:

  1. Remote Desktop of some sort. Be it Steam in-home streaming (which works surprisingly well for some non-games), RDP, VNC, etc. This has some advantages in ease to get video to display and HID back to the PC.

  2. Broadcast-protocols (NDI, SDI, etc.) and USB-device-server. While I do not recommend grabbing a Kiloview N60 (the USB-port looks so tasty, I had mixed success with it for more than webcam footage) and just hoping it works, the protocol it uses (NDI) is at least worth trying for this. In the best case, NDI is “install client, open OBS on the other side, new source, picture!”. If you got some more money spare, SDI-over-Fiber may be worth having a look at. The difficulty in this case is getting HID back to the PC serving the picture.

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There are off the shelf solution for waht you want, if you can accept basic limitations on number of display + hard cap on resolution + 60 hz.

Kvm over fiber like this 4K HDMI USB KVM Extender over Fiber, Kit - KVM Extenders | Server Management | StarTech.com Europe.

But its extremely expensive option in world where RDP and VNC is easy solution.

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display and usb are the most tricky ones. I think a displayport over fiber cable or thunderbolt would work best. Translating video signals can do weird stuff with how the gpu transfers the video signals. So you want to have only encode/decode step in between with no clock sync problems. But it those cables come with connectors. so you have to fit those inside.

There are boxes for usb over fiber as well.

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I’m willing to experiment and turn that into a yes or no :slight_smile: I don’t expect any guarantees.

Do you mean dual widescreen instead of the existing 4 monitor setup or just limiting to 2 “normal” (16:9) monitors?

In the research I’ve done, I’ve found a few things that claim 4K (or some 8K) transmission of video, but most of the time they list “supported resolutions”, which never include (ultra)widescreen of course.

I’m OK with 60Hz, but I wouldn’t turn down an option that supports dynamic refresh rate.

I was thinking, if I connect my normal desk monitors via some kind of displayport-over-fiber solution, I can use more “standard” HDMI-over-CAT boxes for the TV. I’ve seen a few videos of that working well, so I’m not to worried.

If it turns out to be too hard to do the remote PC thing, I’ll probably end up trying to get a dedicated ethernet cable pulled from my PC to the TV. That would have to go the long way around (PC → util room → TV), but it’s still only about 30m of cable maximum, which seems doable. (That is, if the existing CAT 5E from util room to TV is not good enough for 4K)

I would prefer to get at least some kind of USB and just plug in the mic & cam locally. I need it for keyboard and mouse too. I’ve seen there is at least 1 USB3-over-fiber solution from Startech,so I’m sure there is others.

In an ideal world I would like a thunderbolt dock on the desk/in a monitor, like Linus had, but he used pre-made cables (which seem to be unobtainium). The bandwidth of that would be enough for what I need, except for the displays I guess. But then you also end up with the AMD and Thunderbolt compatibility thing.

Meh, it’s only 15 meters away. If I truly need high bandwidth I’ll just walk over there.

Some unmanaged gigabit model from TP-Link I think. Whatever was cheapest at the time.
It can stay in place for the “low” bandwith links, but for the NASes, PC and WLAN I’d like an upgrade.
The Synology nases can do bonding (2x and 4x gigabit), but the switch has to support this, so currently I’m using the second port for a direct link between the two.

I was looking at some of the mini pcs with many ports, but this is not a high priority for now.

I had not considered some kind of “thin client” setup. I do want to make sure it works for everything, so no VNC for desktop, then switch to Steam streaming for games.

I assume it would involve the GPU in the host to used hardware-acceleration to encode the full display output. What would be a minimal power solution for the thin client then? Assuming I still want the same kind of display output.

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This is something I’d like to learn more about as well. I strongly recommend not using remote desktop or game streaming, as even with ethernet cables in the same room remote desktops are nowhere close to the same experience as directly using the PC. Streaming games is better, but you get icky latency.

For displayport cables, I found these:

Club 3D Optical Displayport 1.4 20M for 105 - Club 3D DisplayPort 1.4 20m/65.62ft Active Optical Cable LN122908 - CAC-1079 | SCAN UK

Adding KVMs to the mix is another point of failure with VRR, but idk if they’re a necessary thing. My uneducated ideal is to have the cable run up through the walls and ceiling with a hook to loop the cable round. Rather than doing PC → cable → terminal → cable → terminal → cable → monitor, just do pc → cable → housing → same cable → housing → same cable → monitor

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I live in the land of solid brick/concrete walls, floors and ceilings, so I only use existing conduit, which is too small for the connectors to fit trough.

Replacing the existing ethernet with a fiber bundle is possible I think, but that means I need a converter at both ends. I would plug the converters direct into the PC and monitors, no need for extra complexity.

In the meantime I’ve come across a “KVM extender” that supports DP1.2: DisplayPort KVM Extender Over Fiber, 4K - KVM Extenders | Server Management | StarTech.com
According to this, 5120x1440x60 should be doable over that link, assuming they it doesn’t have issues with the resolution for some reason.
It’s not cheap, but not as extremely expensive as some of the other things I’ve seen around.

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After some more searching, I came across these guys: 8K DISPLAYPORT FIBERPLUG® | Extender DISPLAY PORT Terminations for any
They use a multi-core fiber connector and just pipe over the full bandwith.
Although I must say I don’t trust the site, so I did more digging and found a reddit thread pointing to this instead: 8K DisplayPort 1.4 to MPO Fiber Terminals/Ends – LightOptics®
Which at least has a UK address listed and doesn’t disclaim all warranties. They also have the same for HDMI and USB3.
From what I gather every adapter uses 8 cores and they sell a 3 way Y splitter to use with a 24 core cable.

I’ve sent them a message with some clarifying questions, but in the meantime I thought I’d post this here for some additional scrutiny.

My setup would be to have 2x DP and 1x USB3. The DP adapters should support MST, so I should be able to use a MST hub until I upgrade my displays. With my required 15m cable lengt the total cost would be €550 or €650 (which depends on the answers I asked) + the 2 MST hubs (2 x€ 40 = € 80), which is at least acceptable compared to everything else I’ve seen so far.

The one thing I’d be missing is extra fiber channels for extras like networking for my laptop / an access point, but from what I can see that MPO/MTP cable should be able to fit along with the existing ethernet…

(I hope double-posting is not against the etiquette, if yes, please tell me and I’ll edit in the future)

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Ok that’s cool. I’ll check these out too

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The forum will prompt you when you are going off the rails :slight_smile:

Those adapters are something I have to keep in mind, may come in handy.

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I am very interested in those adapters. I have an optical DP 1.2 already but it isn’t long enough to go from my garage where the rack is to my room on the other side of the house. Those adapters look really versatile being able to use off the shelf fiber cables. My biggest question is if the USB one has a lot of jitter since that was the issue I ran into using a AOC USB 3. I couldn’t use audio DAC’s over it.

@wendell maybe worth a YT video or at least a small write up on the forum especially for KVM compatibility?

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Sorry to post again but look what I found direct from china:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807012518551.html

And it includes the patch cable

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Nice find!
I had found some solutions on AliExpress that where not claiming DP 1.4 comparability (based on 1 LC fiber, so lower bandwidth), but considering VAT & import, their prices ended up the same or higher than the lightoptics thing.
Time for some more digging I guess :slight_smile:

I don’t know how something like this normally works, but if I can facilitate a video / writeup somehow, I’d love to.

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@Dries007 I’ve read that the return on investment (ROI) for setting up solar power typically ranges between 10 to 20 years. The exact timeframe depends on factors such as the amount of kWh your site can generate daily and the cost of electricity in your area. It’s also important to remember that some of the power generated by your solar panels will be lost during the conversion from DC to AC power.

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That is true; I have figures from the past 3 years thanks to home assistant, so I’m working that out, including round trip losses.
I’d like to find a small DC coupled system (for efficiency) but they don’t seem to make those. The portable ones all lack in input voltage for my system I think.

EDIT: For context: My solar was priced as part of the purchase of the apartment. It’s required to reach a low energy usage certification, which gives some tax benefits. But a battery system was not part of that, so I have an existing inverter and panels I cannot change (without major headaches). Now we don’t get to simply subtract injection from usage (no net billing). We pay for all used power and get a separate (much lower rate) for injecting back. Except when you’re on hourly rates, when injection and usage are the same market rate.

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In Ohio, we are not allowed an independent power system, meaning we must connect our solar panels to the power grid. At least, that was the case about 35 years ago when I first looked into solar power. By connecting the power generated by solar panels to the grid, the generated power caused the meter to run backward. Hence, the only power we would pay for was the electricity we used that wasn’t generated by the solar panels. When I last researched solar power, my ROI was twenty years since the solar panels at that time needed to be replaced. Investing in solar panels didn’t make sense.

Welcome to the forum.

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Here in Belgium grid tied is the norm. As far as I know island mode is not outlawed, but basically non existent except for maybe some industry (farmers with bio mass for example).
We used to have analoge meters that ran backwards, which meant solar was very much worth the investment (payback period ~5-7 years, for a long time), but now digital meters are mandatory, which have separate metering. Existing systems where grandfathered in for the first 15 years of operation, but after that it’s separate billing. New systems (like mine) never got that, so we have an intensive to be creative. Like turning on the dishwasher at noon instead of night :slight_smile: The payback period is still roughly the same (on a reasonably well calculated system), due to how cheap solar had gotten.

The only reason for me to consider a portable system (like a blueetti or anker box) is that it would not require re-certification of my electrical installation (as far as I can tell for Da Rules); which means I can DIY it.
Plus, those systems tend to come with a UPS mode, while in grid tied systems generally that costs a lot more (due the the requirement of modifications to the existing electrical install mostly).

Thanks. I’ve been lurking on the Youtubes for a while now. High time I made an account and said hi :slight_smile:

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There are compute resources that can be silent or near silent, and others which can’t.

Hard disks are noisy, so they go elsewhere, my cpu fan and case fans and gpu are effectively silent.

I have an OLD antec P2 aluminum case from 2008 which has dual layer aluminum sides with sound absorption. The front panel has a baffle for the air path. When it is on, I can’t hear it.

SAS has a 10 meter maximum cable length. Ethernet is longer, for now for me that is not a concern.

3 years ago I took 2 weeks and hand dedupped my collection of hard drives and backups from 34TB to 1.7TB. For now I just use local SSDs and have the HDDs spun down most of the time, only spinning them up for backup tasks, or when I want to archive some data.

I put the computer next to me, and stick the noisy things in the closet.

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Just my 2 cents.

Sun Ray was quite an elegant solution for something similar with SOC stateless thin clients. Maybe a SOC would work as a thin client with RDP or just by using ssh -x?
Steam Play for gaming works surprisingly well but introduces some lag.
I would be a bit weary of virtualizing everything on one machine with Proxmox. It can work quite well but a single hardware failure brings everything down.

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not gonna lie, didn’t read ALL of the walls of text (OP or response), but @MazeFrame is pretty good at this shit

RDP/VNC is the solution here

Also this is my first edit, so here it is:

Came here to suggest VNC/RDP

edited again:
good first post