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
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(4 replies)
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!
I'd also like to see what this looks like with a photo
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(8 replies)
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'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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(2 replies)
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!
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.
I can even run the latest Stable diffusion models on my 8 year old GPU.
based and sustainability-pilled
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(8 replies)
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.
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!
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(1 replies)
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!!!
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.
My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.
those where the days :)
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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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 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 π
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 love when people find useful tasks for older tech or extend the life of older tech. There is enough e-waste out there.
I have one that runs my bookwyrm, owncast, calibreweb, and matrix (WIP) instances.
Gotta love self-hosting federation c:
My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
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.
@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 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.
All day long. I ssh into mine & run docker. Works surprisingly well. Better than the $5/month droplet.
Duplicate
Shoutout to my 16 year old dell laptop running god knows what for all eternity
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