Yeah, using a 9 year old work laptop as my home server.
Then with the surging energy prices last year I decided to switch out that laptop with a raspberry pi 4 as server.
Conclusion: I now have a laptop and a RPI running 24/7 🤦♂️
My RPi4s and 3s will out perform my older laptops, apart from the just retired P50 (gpu nearly died). That one is 6y, the others are 11y old HPs and a 16y 32 bit Xxodd (wierd brand). tje RPis are sufficient for normal server use, the nwew laptop (last gen i9 with 64G mem) can host (nested) kvm clients, so no need for extra hardware. (And still I save them, just in case ;) )
I'm glad I don't need computing power then. It just runs a webserver, 2 databases, mail environment, puppet master, icr client and some random stuff I just start and forget.
It does the trick here and it and it's predecessor Rpi3 and 2 managed, are quiet and enough for here. Both 3s boot from microsd and run from USB SSD for the OS, data is on nas. All are stock, no extentions, apart from an extra USB nic on my firewall. (Somehow having 2 different physical interfaces sounded preferable to me for a firewall)
The old 3s are now interface for my smart meter and a domoticz system.
BTW I see the Thinkcenter you mention for €250 online, My RPi4 cost me as kit €108 (8GB version). That was before all prizes went trough the roof though, as I see the separate board now for €125.
undefined> I was put off of RPis since the RPi3 too, the way they misled people with their marketing about it having a gigabit port which was on a shared bus so it was not really true put me off of them.
Yeah, that was the main drawback of the 3, the 1 GB port that was linked to the USB hub, which couldn't do more then 480 Mbps, in total, shared over all USB devices. At least it did a GB handshake and managed more then 100 Mbps. ;)
The 4 However, has a separate chip for the on-board GB interface and I manage over 900 Mbps with it. When you use one as firewall and want to use 2 separate interfaces, you still have to use an USB interface, which here results in 300 Mbps trough both interfaces (after kicking the internal interface irq handling from cpu0). I'm probably one of the few so crazy to use an RPi that way. I came from 50 Mbps line, so anything faster is ok by me. (especially for the same monthly fee ;) )
This article talks about turning a laptop into a rack mounted computer. Each computer will be different recreating something like this based off what ports it has and where.
My problem is that the ethernetports Clip is part of the case, without it, the Ethernet cable just doesn't stick. Do you have a solution for this problem? A photo would be really cool.
Get a M.2 ethernet card and put it in where the wifi card was. You don't need wifi if you're gonna use ethernet, and the M,2 ethernet card will have a clip.
I'm talking about the LCD/monitor. Maybe @penguin_knight keeps the LCD and mounts it to the board as well. If not, it's headless. Mouse and keyboard are not the issue. I always set up raspberry pi headless because the OS allows it. All you have to do is add an ssh file to the /boot dir and wpa_supplicant.conf file in root dir. Other distros typically don't, they need a monitor to be installed.
I know, that's why I wrote external peripherals and not external inputs.
I don't want to sound cocky or be an asshole (we all know how easy it is by just reading a message someone you don't know wrote), but after 24 years of being in system administration/engineering/architecture I may have sufficient grasp of what I am talking about. 😅
My laptop for home use is almost 15 years old. My desktop is almost 11 years old. My work laptop is 8 years old. Here they are talking about more modern and powerful equipment, defining them as obsolete. I don't know, maybe we should start questioning if these consumption dynamics are a bit harmful.
You're right, but the vendors don't support products very long, vulnerabilities stack up, safe batteries become expensive and hard to source, applications become incredibly bloated as they're tailored for newer hardware, the power costs stop making sense...
...and we can avoid all of that by getting a newer more feature rich machine every few years.
Companies need to make 'repair and upgrade' the cheaper alternative before any sort of critical mass is going to get onboard with serious reduce, reuse, recycle.
So again, you're right, but it's a complex issue, especially in computing.
The battery is usually long gone by the time it becomes a server though.
Absolutely. I still have my laptop from high school, and it's battery has been long gone. The screen is on its last legs.
Maybe it will be a server one day, but for now it's my DnD laptop. Sucks a bit when somebody bumps the power cord and the battlemap turns off. But it's still limping by.
I got a free laptop from work that is an old engineering workstation. Problem is, our IT pulled the hard drive and I haven't found motivation to take it apart and put on in it.
Do you mean a server with a built-in UPS, monitor, keyboard AND mouse? Hell yeah! My old Samsung Laptop has been running my game servers for quite a while now, and I have an old Asus running PiHole and Headcale. Works great!
I used to use my 10 year old old netbook (intel atom n270 2gb ram - ubuntu server) as a server for Plex, calibre, pihole, ssftp.
Now I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB Ram, as it consumes less electricity. Old laptops are consuming (except HDDs/SSDs) 10-30 watt. Raspberry Pi in indle consumes 2watt and when i am using it at mac power with an external hdd consumes 12watt.
It's hard to get a hold of the raspberry pi model 4 where I am unfortunately. I had wanted to use it to host some hobby projects locally and maybe as a low powered game sever, though i doubt it could handle it. It might be a fun project to try run an older laptop off solar l, I must look into it anyone has tried that.
I am using my Raspberry Pi 4 server for Jellyfin(movies), Kavita(ebooks), home assistant, ssh, sftp, nextcloud, pihole,pivpn dns recursive server. All of these services are running with containers and Caddy as the reverse proxy for the local's dns address. I am streaming even VR content to my Oculus Quest 2 and it works without any problems!! Also, I am using it as an extra 5ghz access point hahah.
Yep... The only reason I bought it was that it consume less electricity... Otherwise, you can buy a refurbished ThinkPad for exactly the same price, witch core i5 6nd gen...
Yeah, one of my main priorities for a home server is its energy efficiency (and fan noise). Older laptops rarely fit into that. But newer 'ultrabooks' might be good.
Laptops will typically always use less power than a desktop.
But desktops can be cooled much more silently than laptops.
And performance will almost always be better in a desktop. But might also be overkill for what you want to do.
Personally, my 2 servers are a Raspberry Pi 4 running off a USB SSD, and a Synology DS220+, where I found an 8 GB stick of RAM that it would boot with for a total of 10 G.
This perfectly suits all I want to have at this time, with a combined continuous power draw of around 15W.
A busted up acer netbook on a shelf in my basement ran a Final Fantasy XI private server for several years till it died and I migrated to something sturdier.
Display was wrecked, keyboard destroyed, trackpad gone.. but a single usb port and a vga port still worked so I was able to install an OS. then I removed those and only ever remoted into it. I actually removed the busted display and keyboard to it'd vent heat better - it ran pretty hot and the ventilation on that thing was designed poorly. The reason the keyboard died was actually heat related, melting its underside and warping it.
FFXI Private servers will run on a 2 decades old potato, so this worked until it finally died despite some seriously pathetic specs.
(1gb ram upgraded to 2gb, 1 ghz intel atom single core cpu, yes really)
@rockhandle That's how I started. Proxmox on a 9 year old laptop with LXC and VMs. Even now that laptop runs proxmox with pfsense and pihole VMs and is serving as my home router :)
I'm actually hosting things on my 2 year old gaming pc (which is no longer used for gaming) and using my 8 year old laptop daily... How the turn tables.
I use old Lenovo tiny units... Can pick them up cheap when businesses upgrade, chuck in a bit extra ram, a new SSD, add it to my proxmox cluster... Then look for excuses to use it so I can justify having yet another one
At work we had lots of old laptops, poor battery life, small hard drives, etc. I cleaned them up and installed pfsense on them and gave them to colleagues as home firewall/kid web filters. Others we popped xp on them and set up mame / emulator to give to their kids.
Thats how you get a Spicy Pillow. If youre running linux on the right hardware you can look into tlp or similar and set the battery to not fully charge, which will delay the Pillows Spicyness.
Wouldn't you be able to set the battery to stop charging at 100% and a level to start charging the battery so it runs through charge cycles and you avoid the spicy pillow
Wouldn't you be able to set the battery to stop charging at 100% and a level to start charging the battery so it runs through charge cycles and you avoid the spicy pillow
My home server started as an HP Pavilion P6803w desktop PC. A decade later it has a better case, better power supply, more RAM, better CPU, more drives and runs Debian instead of Windows 7. The only original part is the motherboard.
a) Buy a usb hub with hdmi port, to connect to a monitor or tv
b) Either use hub from point a or bluetooth to connect keyboard and mouse or a joypad
c) Either use android if you want to make a tv box, for example, or a gaming console (with emulators or microsoft xcloud) or install Termux on Android or Linux directly to use it as a Linux server
d) If you want to connect via remote you can use Linux apps, if you installed Linux, or Android apps like Airdroid
This works even if something is wrong with the smartphone, for example I am using one with touchscreen no longer responding, since if works with hub from point a and a cable mouse.
The big issue with laptops tends to be cooling, but something with a decent CPU and enough RAM can still do a good job since in many cases you're not tapping the graphics chip/core, which is often the biggest source of heat.
That said, for small personal services even an 8GB Pi4 can do a pretty decent job.
I have like 3 spare laptops, and another spare computer. I'm not running anything right now because this router doesn't support port forwarding no matter what I try (it's a firmware issue apparently), but they're always there for me when I need them.
I'm really poor and hate paying for things monthly. I had been asking my friends though if I could use their networks through tunnels, but no one was able to understand what I meant enough to be able to help. They would have to know how to set up SSH.
That's the whole thing. I was on CGNAT, and decided to pay $10 monthly to fix it and get a public ip. But NOW I find out the fucking router doesn't even work. It's apparently this exact model that has the issue. And only this one. I don't know if I could replace the firmware.
My employer lets us keep our old work laptops when we upgrade so basically every two to three years I get a new home server. I remove the battery just to be safe
Yup! Usually running some local/dev docker containers for work, so I don't slow down the laptop I'm actually using with background stuff. They get hot, and I keep them in places where they get hot, but they haven't died from the heat yet.
I thought about it, but the additional display, made me think about power saving, how to shut off screen, while keeping the headless service loaded? ... premature optimization?
Might happen if the fan stopped due to collecting dust and the heatsink needed to repasted. Also in linux you can install TLP or laptop-mode-tools to make it more power-efficient. I've been using laptops for servers for years this way.
I'm having this issue as well. I have a laptop in there. It stopped working because of overheating. It worked fine again, and now that I'm out of town for a month, it decided to die. I need to physically turn it on, so at this point, I'm thinking of replacing that laptop from 2010.
Yea, my laptop is definitely going to be a Framework partially for that reason. Being able to harvest the motherboard and throw it in a chassis easily is a great feature to reduce waste.
I have an 8 core i7 Alienware 17r3 with 32GB RAM I use to host a pen-test lab. It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.
I used my wife's old laptop (a slow N3540) for samba, pihole, and qbittorrent server for a couple of years until recently I replaced with a used HP PC.
I've never had an internet connection that allows normal server connections. I guess I could set it up with Cloudflare or something.
I've been more likely to use old laptops as thin clients... run Linux on my desktop, then connect to it with VNC so the laptop doesn't really have to do anything. Or set them up with a really lightweight Linux desktop like WindowMaker and use them to play music out in my studio.
Kinda depends. I have one that makes an excellent Plex server with an external USB drive for the media. It's ancient, got it for nothing from an school that was going to throw it out, it's got Intel QuickSync so it transcodes media in hardware. I even got the 2TB USB drive for nothing, friend didn't need it any more and was going to throw it out, now it serves him media with the Plex server I built. Did the same with another Chromebook for Pi Hole. Now thinking about a slightly beefier one for Home Assistant. Might set up a Lemmy instance on another one, just for the fuck of it.
I think I'm going to have to buy a wattage meter plug-in to see what my laptops run at with nothing running, a single Docker image of nginx, and then an API image on top of that. I wonder what my RaspberryPi 4 is pulling with my docker images running on there.
Keep in mind that the person your replying to may not live in Australia so it's always a good idea to give a general recommendation to someone where a product is avalible internationally or in the majority of countries
It's a good idea to ask someone what country they are from to give more specific recommendations if you are able to
This is a good way to avoid country defualtism
Reddit has a problem with american defualtism but this isn't reddit
Looked into selling my old gaming laptop just recently, and it just doesn't seem like its worth selling them, if they are any older than 5 years, and not top spec.
Making a server/node/test machine, might be the best option. Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
You probably already looked into it, but just in case:
Depending on the model of the laptop, the battery might be removable using simple tools and without having to deal with adhesives.
when I first explored the world of kubernetes my nodes consisted of discarded laptops I've dubbed "half-tops," or truly "headless" servers. it was a beautiful abomination.
Yeah, using a 9 year old work laptop as my home server. Then with the surging energy prices last year I decided to switch out that laptop with a raspberry pi 4 as server.
Conclusion: I now have a laptop and a RPI running 24/7 🤦♂️
Sounds like a win to me. lol
My RPi4s and 3s will out perform my older laptops, apart from the just retired P50 (gpu nearly died). That one is 6y, the others are 11y old HPs and a 16y 32 bit Xxodd (wierd brand). tje RPis are sufficient for normal server use, the nwew laptop (last gen i9 with 64G mem) can host (nested) kvm clients, so no need for extra hardware. (And still I save them, just in case ;) )
I'm glad I don't need computing power then. It just runs a webserver, 2 databases, mail environment, puppet master, icr client and some random stuff I just start and forget.
It does the trick here and it and it's predecessor Rpi3 and 2 managed, are quiet and enough for here. Both 3s boot from microsd and run from USB SSD for the OS, data is on nas. All are stock, no extentions, apart from an extra USB nic on my firewall. (Somehow having 2 different physical interfaces sounded preferable to me for a firewall)
The old 3s are now interface for my smart meter and a domoticz system.
BTW I see the Thinkcenter you mention for €250 online, My RPi4 cost me as kit €108 (8GB version). That was before all prizes went trough the roof though, as I see the separate board now for €125.
undefined> I was put off of RPis since the RPi3 too, the way they misled people with their marketing about it having a gigabit port which was on a shared bus so it was not really true put me off of them.
Yeah, that was the main drawback of the 3, the 1 GB port that was linked to the USB hub, which couldn't do more then 480 Mbps, in total, shared over all USB devices. At least it did a GB handshake and managed more then 100 Mbps. ;)
The 4 However, has a separate chip for the on-board GB interface and I manage over 900 Mbps with it. When you use one as firewall and want to use 2 separate interfaces, you still have to use an USB interface, which here results in 300 Mbps trough both interfaces (after kicking the internal interface irq handling from cpu0). I'm probably one of the few so crazy to use an RPi that way. I came from 50 Mbps line, so anything faster is ok by me. (especially for the same monthly fee ;) )
I turned my ten year old Toshiba i7 with a cracked LCD into a virtual fish tank after the last fish died.
ATBGE!
I salute your creativity haha
That is so awesome!
Cool. A friend had one in a fireplace that played a fire video in the evenings - with the crackling sounds too.
i disaseemble all my laptops so they are just a motherboard, screw them into sheets of MDF, place vertically, and use them as servers.
NAS, pihole, plex, etc
Do you have any photos of this?
Would love to see how this looks in practice!
Up! Also would love to see how it looks
You have a tutorial? That sounds awesome.
This article talks about turning a laptop into a rack mounted computer. Each computer will be different recreating something like this based off what ports it has and where.
Ummm... I need to know more. Photos? This sounds interesting!
My problem is that the ethernetports Clip is part of the case, without it, the Ethernet cable just doesn't stick. Do you have a solution for this problem? A photo would be really cool.
Get a M.2 ethernet card and put it in where the wifi card was. You don't need wifi if you're gonna use ethernet, and the M,2 ethernet card will have a clip.
Hot Glue or if you wanna be fancy Silicone.
I looked at my old boards again and I think tape will be my material of choice.
I'd also like to see what this looks like with a photo
Do you do a headless install like Ubuntu Server Preseed?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Cobbler/Preseed
Or do you install linux on an SSD from a different machine, then plug it into MDF mounted laptop mobo?
I would guess by plugging external peripherals to the motherboard.
I'm talking about the LCD/monitor. Maybe @penguin_knight keeps the LCD and mounts it to the board as well. If not, it's headless. Mouse and keyboard are not the issue. I always set up raspberry pi headless because the OS allows it. All you have to do is add an
sshfile to the/bootdir andwpa_supplicant.conffile in root dir. Other distros typically don't, they need a monitor to be installed.I know, that's why I wrote external peripherals and not external inputs. I don't want to sound cocky or be an asshole (we all know how easy it is by just reading a message someone you don't know wrote), but after 24 years of being in system administration/engineering/architecture I may have sufficient grasp of what I am talking about. 😅
Got it.
My laptop for home use is almost 15 years old. My desktop is almost 11 years old. My work laptop is 8 years old. Here they are talking about more modern and powerful equipment, defining them as obsolete. I don't know, maybe we should start questioning if these consumption dynamics are a bit harmful.
based and sustainability-pilled
I can even run the latest Stable diffusion models on my 8 year old GPU.
So what's loading up a YouTube video like? 100% ram and CPU usage constantly?
The website maybe, but not the browsers and their video players.. >;)
As someone who first started to load programs into his computer with a cassette tape recorder, I'm aware of that.
Between that and apps on a phone, nothing else comes even close in the percentage of usage for viewing a video on the internet.
Thanks. ]:D
It's not so much about the age, but about the mileage.
You're right, but the vendors don't support products very long, vulnerabilities stack up, safe batteries become expensive and hard to source, applications become incredibly bloated as they're tailored for newer hardware, the power costs stop making sense...
...and we can avoid all of that by getting a newer more feature rich machine every few years.
Companies need to make 'repair and upgrade' the cheaper alternative before any sort of critical mass is going to get onboard with serious reduce, reuse, recycle.
So again, you're right, but it's a complex issue, especially in computing.
My Desktop is still rocking an Intel 4790k. 8 years later and Ive had no reason to upgrade.
Old laptops can are actually great servers—hear me out:
The battery is usually long gone by the time it becomes a server though.
Really old laptops have PCMCIA slots too that you can hook into newer interfaces. I used a PCMCIA eSATA card for a laptop NAS!
Absolutely. I still have my laptop from high school, and it's battery has been long gone. The screen is on its last legs.
Maybe it will be a server one day, but for now it's my DnD laptop. Sucks a bit when somebody bumps the power cord and the battlemap turns off. But it's still limping by.
I'm patiently waiting for someone (anyone) I know to decide to throw out an old laptop.
Gonna bite their hand off for it, install Linux and proceed to fuck around and find out.
When you do, take a look at howtoforge.com.
Then throw on a bunch of containers from linuxserver.io
Quick & easy for testing & learning.
EDIT: fixed link formatting
I got a free laptop from work that is an old engineering workstation. Problem is, our IT pulled the hard drive and I haven't found motivation to take it apart and put on in it.
Oh man, ssd storage is cheap as fuck right now. you can grab a terabyte for less than 40$ shipped.
Do you mean a server with a built-in UPS, monitor, keyboard AND mouse? Hell yeah! My old Samsung Laptop has been running my game servers for quite a while now, and I have an old Asus running PiHole and Headcale. Works great!
No, I use the old desktops for that.
Old laptops usually seem to go to other people:
U a good person.
Unless her house burned down due to the battery in the old laptop...
I too am using an old desktop, but it is also functioning as my NAS, which a laptop would struggle with
Old laptops have little resell value. They work well as low powered hobby servers though.
I used to use my 10 year old old netbook (intel atom n270 2gb ram - ubuntu server) as a server for Plex, calibre, pihole, ssftp.
Now I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB Ram, as it consumes less electricity. Old laptops are consuming (except HDDs/SSDs) 10-30 watt. Raspberry Pi in indle consumes 2watt and when i am using it at mac power with an external hdd consumes 12watt.
It's hard to get a hold of the raspberry pi model 4 where I am unfortunately. I had wanted to use it to host some hobby projects locally and maybe as a low powered game sever, though i doubt it could handle it. It might be a fun project to try run an older laptop off solar l, I must look into it anyone has tried that.
I am using my Raspberry Pi 4 server for Jellyfin(movies), Kavita(ebooks), home assistant, ssh, sftp, nextcloud, pihole,pivpn dns recursive server. All of these services are running with containers and Caddy as the reverse proxy for the local's dns address. I am streaming even VR content to my Oculus Quest 2 and it works without any problems!! Also, I am using it as an extra 5ghz access point hahah.
I
Whoa, these little boards are powerful!
Shame that it's hard to find and when i find one it's very expensive :(
Yep... The only reason I bought it was that it consume less electricity... Otherwise, you can buy a refurbished ThinkPad for exactly the same price, witch core i5 6nd gen...
Sure, I even have an old Samsung Galaxy S7 running sshd right now :)
I am curious, the read/write speeds are useful o how is that practical ?
I love when people find useful tasks for older tech or extend the life of older tech. There is enough e-waste out there.
My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.
They're usually very inefficient energetically though
Yeah, one of my main priorities for a home server is its energy efficiency (and fan noise). Older laptops rarely fit into that. But newer 'ultrabooks' might be good.
do you think they would be better or worse than a desktop? i’m here trying to decide to use my old laptop or desktop as a headless server
Laptops will typically always use less power than a desktop.
But desktops can be cooled much more silently than laptops.
And performance will almost always be better in a desktop. But might also be overkill for what you want to do.
Personally, my 2 servers are a Raspberry Pi 4 running off a USB SSD, and a Synology DS220+, where I found an 8 GB stick of RAM that it would boot with for a total of 10 G.
This perfectly suits all I want to have at this time, with a combined continuous power draw of around 15W.
Depends how old they are
My X230 idles at 10W
Much less inefficient than old it infrastructure.
Yeah, that's sadly the reason why I do have a pile of old pc/laptop hardware laying around and raspberry pi's for my local server needs..
True, but probably better in terms of net environmental cost though. As there is no need to make new sbc board, casing, etc etc.
Can you please elaborate why?
A busted up acer netbook on a shelf in my basement ran a Final Fantasy XI private server for several years till it died and I migrated to something sturdier.
Display was wrecked, keyboard destroyed, trackpad gone.. but a single usb port and a vga port still worked so I was able to install an OS. then I removed those and only ever remoted into it. I actually removed the busted display and keyboard to it'd vent heat better - it ran pretty hot and the ventilation on that thing was designed poorly. The reason the keyboard died was actually heat related, melting its underside and warping it.
FFXI Private servers will run on a 2 decades old potato, so this worked until it finally died despite some seriously pathetic specs.
(1gb ram upgraded to 2gb, 1 ghz intel atom single core cpu, yes really)
@rockhandle That's how I started. Proxmox on a 9 year old laptop with LXC and VMs. Even now that laptop runs proxmox with pfsense and pihole VMs and is serving as my home router :)
I'm actually hosting things on my 2 year old gaming pc (which is no longer used for gaming) and using my 8 year old laptop daily... How the turn tables.
yep!
I used to run an old Dell R610. Used a decent amount of power.
Switched to an old 4th gen quadcore i7 laptop.
Been running great, uses less power, has a built in display and keyboard.
Linux base, Docker Env for most everything else.
And a built in ups if your battery is still good
yeah that's nice. Though I've read that it's a good idea to bypass the battery due to the device being on more it could cause the battery damage?
most modern laptops automatically switch to A/C power at 100% so it's not much of an issue nowadays
But the point of self hosting is to physically have your data ?!
I have one that runs my bookwyrm, owncast, calibreweb, and matrix (WIP) instances.
Gotta love self-hosting federation c:
Absolutely and you will feel right at home over here on our self-hosting community: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting
I use old Lenovo tiny units... Can pick them up cheap when businesses upgrade, chuck in a bit extra ram, a new SSD, add it to my proxmox cluster... Then look for excuses to use it so I can justify having yet another one
One of my home servers is an X230
X230 is nice!
I'd rather take it out tho
Well mine has a KO battery and keyboard sooo
Understandable....
All day long. I ssh into mine & run docker. Works surprisingly well. Better than the $5/month droplet.
At work we had lots of old laptops, poor battery life, small hard drives, etc. I cleaned them up and installed pfsense on them and gave them to colleagues as home firewall/kid web filters. Others we popped xp on them and set up mame / emulator to give to their kids.
For years I had an Asus EEE PC as my home NAS.
Oh no! It's the EEE PC!
Holy crap mine would just get so hot. Like an inferno. Otherwise world have been a Linux server.
My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.
those where the days :)
Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!
If the battery still works it's got a built-in UPS.
Although, isn't it a potential fire hazard? Having a lithium battery always at 100%?
Thats how you get a Spicy Pillow. If youre running linux on the right hardware you can look into tlp or similar and set the battery to not fully charge, which will delay the Pillows Spicyness.
Wouldn't you be able to set the battery to stop charging at 100% and a level to start charging the battery so it runs through charge cycles and you avoid the spicy pillow
Wouldn't you be able to set the battery to stop charging at 100% and a level to start charging the battery so it runs through charge cycles and you avoid the spicy pillow
My home server started as an HP Pavilion P6803w desktop PC. A decade later it has a better case, better power supply, more RAM, better CPU, more drives and runs Debian instead of Windows 7. The only original part is the motherboard.
Old smartphones too...
Teach us!
Howwww
You can
a) Buy a usb hub with hdmi port, to connect to a monitor or tv
b) Either use hub from point a or bluetooth to connect keyboard and mouse or a joypad
c) Either use android if you want to make a tv box, for example, or a gaming console (with emulators or microsoft xcloud) or install Termux on Android or Linux directly to use it as a Linux server
d) If you want to connect via remote you can use Linux apps, if you installed Linux, or Android apps like Airdroid
This works even if something is wrong with the smartphone, for example I am using one with touchscreen no longer responding, since if works with hub from point a and a cable mouse.
Excellent solutions!
The big issue with laptops tends to be cooling, but something with a decent CPU and enough RAM can still do a good job since in many cases you're not tapping the graphics chip/core, which is often the biggest source of heat.
That said, for small personal services even an 8GB Pi4 can do a pretty decent job.
Pi4 8GB is not easy to get these days
Ain't that the truth. Pi4 anything over 1Gb especially seems difficult to source
I use PiZero W to host a couple of small services in my home. DHCP, DNS, etc (the usual).
I used to but the fan eventually broke. It works if I flip it upsidedown so the vents face upwards but the CPU is still hitting 90 degrees idle 💀
For a while I was using a 10 year old Mac Pro G5 as a home server. Conveniently it also doubled as a space heater in the winter.
Old macs are particularly useful as build servers- it's not straightforward to get a fully featured OSX vm to build and test on.
Yeah it’s really difficult to get Mac OS virtualized… I don’t know why, but my VMs always slow down after about 15 minutes and are unusable.
It also has 2 Ethernet ports so it can
doubletriple as a cheese grater. :DShoutout to my 16 year old dell laptop running god knows what for all eternity
I have like 3 spare laptops, and another spare computer. I'm not running anything right now because this router doesn't support port forwarding no matter what I try (it's a firmware issue apparently), but they're always there for me when I need them.
You could maybe rent a cheap VPS and use that as a reverse proxy. Using Tailscale to create a VPN tunnel so you don't need port forwarding
I'm really poor and hate paying for things monthly. I had been asking my friends though if I could use their networks through tunnels, but no one was able to understand what I meant enough to be able to help. They would have to know how to set up SSH.
Any way to use other firmware? My shitty ISP is giving private IP address, so I just use tailscale instead.
That's the whole thing. I was on CGNAT, and decided to pay $10 monthly to fix it and get a public ip. But NOW I find out the fucking router doesn't even work. It's apparently this exact model that has the issue. And only this one. I don't know if I could replace the firmware.
My employer lets us keep our old work laptops when we upgrade so basically every two to three years I get a new home server. I remove the battery just to be safe
What does removing the battery do?
It's probably to avoid it being left charged all the time and potentially swelling into a 'spicy pillow'
I don't think I've discharged a laptop battery below 80% since 2011..
Anecdotal I know, but I had an old Alienware laptop battery swell and get fat and become unusable once.
So it can happen, but I think it's rare.
First time I've heard that term....using it from now on
What does removing the battery do?
Yup! Usually running some local/dev docker containers for work, so I don't slow down the laptop I'm actually using with background stuff. They get hot, and I keep them in places where they get hot, but they haven't died from the heat yet.
Many years ago I used old desktop PCs. But nowadays VPS have become so cheap that it's just not worth the hastle, in my opinion.
Ongoing they still seem to cost more than a slightly more powerful system would in a year.
My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
I actually used to host a pretty sizable minecraft server on a laptop.
Actually worked pretty well, was able to support around 150 or so concurrent users, and this was back in the bukkit days.
I thought about it, but the additional display, made me think about power saving, how to shut off screen, while keeping the headless service loaded? ... premature optimization?
In Linux it is possible to turn the screen off after a timeout and keep the system on with the lid closed.
Exactly, and what other OS to use for old device turned server than Linux?
You can use windows 7 or windows AME but not sure it's a good idea tho. What's wrong with using Linux?
I meant it as rhetorical question with obvious answer.
Yup, I have an old broken laptop that runs Ubuntu Server and doesn't have a physical screen. I named it The Headless Machine (ha!)
Yeah until it stopped working. The heat is the problem. It lasts for like 6 months of 24/7 usage.
Swapping out my laptop running Proxmox for two HP Elite desks for exactly this reason.
Might happen if the fan stopped due to collecting dust and the heatsink needed to repasted. Also in linux you can install TLP or laptop-mode-tools to make it more power-efficient. I've been using laptops for servers for years this way.
I'm having this issue as well. I have a laptop in there. It stopped working because of overheating. It worked fine again, and now that I'm out of town for a month, it decided to die. I need to physically turn it on, so at this point, I'm thinking of replacing that laptop from 2010.
Yes! My old framework laptop motherboard runs all my home services without issue. Just the right amount of power for my use case and it sips power.
Yea, my laptop is definitely going to be a Framework partially for that reason. Being able to harvest the motherboard and throw it in a chassis easily is a great feature to reduce waste.
I have an 8 core i7 Alienware 17r3 with 32GB RAM I use to host a pen-test lab. It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.
I used my wife's old laptop (a slow N3540) for samba, pihole, and qbittorrent server for a couple of years until recently I replaced with a used HP PC.
Got a laptop with a busted up screen running Plex and it's pretty awesome! We don't need screens where we're going!
Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.
I use an old pc i got from some dude, for 100 bucks
thrown in a few hard drives etc for some storage.
I've never had an internet connection that allows normal server connections. I guess I could set it up with Cloudflare or something.
I've been more likely to use old laptops as thin clients... run Linux on my desktop, then connect to it with VNC so the laptop doesn't really have to do anything. Or set them up with a really lightweight Linux desktop like WindowMaker and use them to play music out in my studio.
End of life Chromebooks, baby!
I have 2 Chromebooks I want to do something with, but they’re double core machines with 16g Emmc. Not really juicy enough for a good server.
Kinda depends. I have one that makes an excellent Plex server with an external USB drive for the media. It's ancient, got it for nothing from an school that was going to throw it out, it's got Intel QuickSync so it transcodes media in hardware. I even got the 2TB USB drive for nothing, friend didn't need it any more and was going to throw it out, now it serves him media with the Plex server I built. Did the same with another Chromebook for Pi Hole. Now thinking about a slightly beefier one for Home Assistant. Might set up a Lemmy instance on another one, just for the fuck of it.
I just use an old laptop as my main computer. Now I have a reason to keep it if I ever upgrade.
You can run a debloated version of windows 11 like tiny11 in 1.1GB RAM these days.
Because some old software like Picasa have no offline alternative.
Yes I did, but nowadays I have nothing to host things on. Alpine Linux is excellent to host Minecraft servers and the like.
I think I'm going to have to buy a wattage meter plug-in to see what my laptops run at with nothing running, a single Docker image of nginx, and then an API image on top of that. I wonder what my RaspberryPi 4 is pulling with my docker images running on there.
Might be worth buying a smart switch with energy monitoring.
Arlec's latest model sells for about $30AU and can function as a power meter, temperature logger, smart switch and thermostat.
Keep in mind that the person your replying to may not live in Australia so it's always a good idea to give a general recommendation to someone where a product is avalible internationally or in the majority of countries
It's a good idea to ask someone what country they are from to give more specific recommendations if you are able to
This is a good way to avoid country defualtism
Reddit has a problem with american defualtism but this isn't reddit
I give what few old laptops I have away to people who need better laptops. My servers are made of all the PC parts left over from upgrades.
Nope. I’m using a Dell Optiplex 990 that my uncle no longer wanted.
As a test machine, yes. As a production machine... Meh.
Little memory, slow and small disk...
3 x laptops for a high availability Openshift deployment!
RAM and disk space are the cheapest and easiest things to upgrade.
Even my 10 year old laptops can have ssd. Depending on the laptop and budget could be a better fit for a lot of people.
Looked into selling my old gaming laptop just recently, and it just doesn't seem like its worth selling them, if they are any older than 5 years, and not top spec. Making a server/node/test machine, might be the best option. Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
what do you mean comfortable? It's basically designed for it.
Its the risk of getting a Spicy Pillow that's the issue.
I could definitely see that.
I'm guessing he's worried about the age of the battery and it's reliability.
You probably already looked into it, but just in case: Depending on the model of the laptop, the battery might be removable using simple tools and without having to deal with adhesives.
I feel personally attacked.
this is the way
Until very recently I was running one of the old black polycarbonate MacBooks as a server. I replaced OSX with Ubuntu and it worked a charm.
I still have it and could still use it if I wanted to but retired it as I bought a dedicated server.
when I first explored the world of kubernetes my nodes consisted of discarded laptops I've dubbed "half-tops," or truly "headless" servers. it was a beautiful abomination.
I have a 6-year-old gaming laptop with no battery in a damaged screen running my home security cameras
My websites tor service was hosted on an ancient laptop for the longest time, lol
Omg that’s a great idea I have an 8 thread 4 core from 2012 that was my main laptop 3 years ago.
I just stopped having one as my server. Using a Lenovo P330 Tiny that I got from my work. 10 years of laptop use before that.
I took my first foray into media hosting by running subsonic on an old emachines laptop! ain't nothing wrong!
Not laptops specifically but I use old PCs to run stuff. It's the best way to do it!
I do this lol!
Thinkpad T430, i7 gen 1,16gb home server
Duplicate