Anyone else use their crappy old laptops to host servers? lol
Anyone else use their crappy old laptops to host servers? lol
113 comments
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I turned my ten year old Toshiba i7 with a cracked LCD into a virtual fish tank after the last fish died.
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ATBGE!
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I salute your creativity haha
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That is so awesome!
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Cool. A friend had one in a fireplace that played a fire video in the evenings - with the crackling sounds too.
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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
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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
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You have a tutorial? That sounds awesome.
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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.
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Ummm... I need to know more. Photos? This sounds interesting!
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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?
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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.
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Hot Glue or if you wanna be fancy Silicone.
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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.
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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.
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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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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!
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They're usually very inefficient energetically though
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My X230 idles at 10W
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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.
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Old laptops can are actually great servers—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
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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!
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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.
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All day long. I ssh into mine & run docker. Works surprisingly well. Better than the $5/month droplet.
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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.
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@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 :)
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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.
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U a good person.
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Unless her house burned down due to the battery in the old laptop...
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My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.
those where the days :)
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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
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Absolutely and you will feel right at home over here on our self-hosting community: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting
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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.
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And a built in ups if your battery is still good
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Shoutout to my 16 year old dell laptop running god knows what for all eternity
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Sure, I even have an old Samsung Galaxy S7 running sshd right now :)
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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.
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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
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Any way to use other firmware? My shitty ISP is giving private IP address, so I just use tailscale instead.
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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.
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As a test machine, yes. As a production machine... Meh.
Little memory, slow and small disk...
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RAM and disk space are the cheapest and easiest things to upgrade.
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when I first explored the world of kubernetes my nodes consisted of discarded "half-tops," or truly "headless" servers. it was a beautiful abomination.
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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.
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Yeah until it stopped working. The heat is the problem. It lasts for like 6 months of 24/7 usage.
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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.
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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)
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My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.
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Old laptops have little resell value. They work well as low powered hobby servers though.
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Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!
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Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.
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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.
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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 đź’€
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Yes I did, but nowadays I have nothing to host things on. Alpine Linux is excellent to host Minecraft servers and the like.
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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.
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Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
what do you mean comfortable? It's basically designed for it.
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Its the risk of getting a Spicy Pillow that's the issue.
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I have one that runs my bookwyrm, owncast, calibreweb, and matrix (WIP) instances.
Gotta love self-hosting federation c:
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Thinkpad T430, i7 gen 1,16gb home server
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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.
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Old macs are particularly useful as build servers- it's not straightforward to get a fully featured OSX vm to build and test on.
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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.
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I took my first foray into media hosting by running subsonic on an old emachines laptop! ain't nothing wrong!
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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.
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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.
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Ongoing they still seem to cost more than a slightly more powerful system would in a year.
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Got a laptop with a busted up screen running Plex and it's pretty awesome! We don't need screens where we're going!
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For years I had an Asus EEE PC as my home NAS.
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Oh no! It's the EEE PC!
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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.
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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?
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My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
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113 comments
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 ;) )