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 🤦♂️
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 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.
Ummm... I need to know more. Photos? This sounds interesting!
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]https://www.linuxserver.io/)
Quick & easy for testing & learning.
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.
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!
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.
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
My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.
those where the days :)
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.
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.
My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.
Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!
Duplicate
Old laptops can are actually great servers—hear me out:
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.
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.
For years I had an Asus EEE PC as my home NAS.
Oh no! It's the EEE PC!
My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
One of my home servers is an X230
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.
Yeah until it stopped working. The heat is the problem. It lasts for like 6 months of 24/7 usage.
Duplicate
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.
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.
All day long. I ssh into mine & run docker. Works surprisingly well. Better than the $5/month droplet.
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