this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
253 points (98.8% liked)

Selfhosted

40332 readers
445 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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 πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Conclusion: I now have a laptop and a RPI running 24/7 πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

Sounds like a win to me. lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 ;) )

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I turned my ten year old Toshiba i7 with a cracked LCD into a virtual fish tank after the last fish died.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I salute your creativity haha

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Cool. A friend had one in a fireplace that played a fire video in the evenings - with the crackling sounds too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That is so awesome!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have any photos of this?
Would love to see how this looks in practice!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Up! Also would love to see how it looks

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You have a tutorial? That sounds awesome.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ummm... I need to know more. Photos? This sounds interesting!

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, I use the old desktops for that.

Old laptops usually seem to go to other people:

  • My first one I gave one to a girl who's house burned down in my street.
  • The second one went to my ex who is on really hard financial times and the old Macbook she got from another good soul died on her.
  • The third one I traded in with my mom who really wanted a light one, and in exchange she contributed to...
  • My fourth one that had more power for compiling things in my studies. This one I still have and use occasionally.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

based and sustainability-pilled

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're usually very inefficient energetically though

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Old laptops can are actually great serversβ€”hear me out:

  • Built in KVM
  • Low power consumption
  • Battery = UPS for power blips
  • SSD (sometimes)
  • Wifi + Ethernet = Redundant NICs
  • Quiet (sometimes)
  • Small form factor
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.

those where the days :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Old laptops have little resell value. They work well as low powered hobby servers though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I love when people find useful tasks for older tech or extend the life of older tech. There is enough e-waste out there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For years I had an Asus EEE PC as my home NAS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sure, I even have an old Samsung Galaxy S7 running sshd right now :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

load more comments
view more: next β€Ί