I priced up a Ryzen/zen3 based replacement for bottom the ... bottom machine in the homelab rack, which is running an i5-650, a first generation i5 from 15 years ago. It works but it's much worse than any other machine in the rack (that isn't a Raspberry Pi) and so I can't / don't use it for virtualization etc. Also it has old and few PCIe lanes, although enough to keep a 10GbE NIC happy.
Anyway it was approximately ~500 CAD when I added the PSU, cooler, mobo, CPU and case. I was going to re-use RAM I have because paying $10/GiB is nuts. Then I thought a bit longer and just decided to not do the whole thing at all. Perhaps I'll get an old SFF or workstation from eBay, or (for the price of $0), I will just put up with it. It's only a homelab, after all.
I think, in the back of my mind, I was thinking that if we can build good quality (but barebones) rackmount servers for a few hundred dollars maybe we wouldn't buy all of our stuff second hand but: it's nice re-using old stuff. And I think the RAM thing cinches it -- it's cheaper to buy a whole second-hand server with 128GiB of DDR3 than it is to buy 32GiB of DDR4.
I met SN and PD to arrange the next OttawaSystems. It's fun to get that ball rolling again and always nice to meet up with friends.
I impulse bought an Aruba switch with 4x10GiB uplinks for my rack. I'll probably replace (and then sell) my Mikrotik. Ideally I would replace my Ubiquiti switch too (this thing has 48 ports of 1000BASE-T) but I have three PoE+ devices that I'd need to power some other way. Unlike the old APs that I had from Ubiquiti, these ones don't accept passive power. They really do want to negotiate 802.1af. 🤔
I've also bought 4x 300GiB 10K SAS disks for the homelab. I already have an IT-mode HBA, so these will probably go in the Ceph pool to replace some older drives with marginal performance. While I've not suffered any completely failed drives, I'm starting to get corrected errors and these (decade+ old) SATA drives are really heading towards the end of their life. Some of them were ex-iWeb stock! Ceph docs basically say disks under 1TiB aren't worth it, but they are also talking about datacenter deployments, not my house. (Or: we'll see, I guess!)