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 π€¦ββοΈ
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Conclusion: I now have a laptop and a RPI running 24/7 π€¦ββοΈ
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 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
Cool. A friend had one in a fireplace that played a fire video in the evenings - with the crackling sounds too.
That is so awesome!
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
Ummm... I need to know more. Photos? This sounds interesting!
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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.
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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.
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
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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!
Old laptops can are actually great serversβhear me out:
- Built in KVM
- Low power consumption
- Battery = UPS for power blips
- SSD (sometimes)
- Wifi + Ethernet = Redundant NICs
- Quiet (sometimes)
- Small form factor
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!
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'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.
My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.
those where the days :)
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.
My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.
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.
Old laptops have little resell value. They work well as low powered hobby servers though.
I love when people find useful tasks for older tech or extend the life of older tech. There is enough e-waste out there.
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
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.
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For years I had an Asus EEE PC as my home NAS.
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.
Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!
My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
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.
Sure, I even have an old Samsung Galaxy S7 running sshd right now :)
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.
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