All posts categorized games

PLAYING PLAYSTATION 2 GAMES USING NETWORK SHARE

Keeping the theme of re-using old hardware, I decided to take the non-working PlayStation 2 (PS2) off my brother’s hands and try to get it to work. The CD/DVD reader had stopped working and after a few tries I gave up and decided to use the FreeMcBoot bootloader to modify the PS2 so that it could load games off an SMB share on the network. You have to use a wired ethernet connection for this. Here’s how to do this in the year 2020.

BUILD A MULTI-GPU CLUSTER FOR HASHCAT WITH LINUX AND NVIDIA

Building a multi-GPU Hashcat password cracking cluster can be very economical if you choose a combination of budget GPUs with a reasonable hash rate.

Nowadays, due to the AI craze and before that due to the cryptocurrency craze, there has been a serious price inflation and price gouging by GPU vendors, such as NVIDIA, for graphics cards that can perform a lot of password cracking at scale.

In this post, I show you how to build a multi-GPU cluster and achieve a better price/performance ratio with several budget GPUs as compared to buying one expensive one.

The goal for my use case is to optimize on both price and risk. There is a risk that if you run a lot of password hash cracking on a GPU, that it may wear out earlier. When you use budget GPUs, you may wear them out but they are cheaper to replace, and hence, cost effective.

Except for the GPUs, and their PCI-E risers, everything else I bought pre-owned on online marketplaces, since you don’t need some parts to be new.

I used 5 GPUs for this cluster, and a 6th one can be added to it. This is a self-contained cluster and you do not need a monitor as I use an HDMI screen as part of it.

NOTE: This cluster can be used for machine learning and other CUDA programming too!