Selfhosted

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)

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

Shoutout to my 16 year old dell laptop running god knows what for all eternity

One of my home servers is an X230

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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 :)

Yes! My old framework laptop motherboard runs all my home services without issue. Just the right amount of power for my use case and it sips power.

All day long. I ssh into mine & run docker. Works surprisingly well. Better than the $5/month droplet.

Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.

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.

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 It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.

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?

Yeah until it stopped working. The heat is the problem. It lasts for like 6 months of 24/7 usage.

End of life Chromebooks, baby!

I just use an old laptop as my main computer. Now I have a reason to keep it if I ever upgrade.

Thinkpad T430, i7 gen 1,16gb home server

Absolutely and you will feel right at home over here on our self-hosting community: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting

As a test machine, yes. As a production machine... Meh.

Little memory, slow and small disk...

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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.

Omg that’s a great idea I have an 8 thread 4 core from 2012 that was my main laptop 3 years ago.

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

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.

I think I'm going to have to buy a wattage meter plug-in to see what my laptops run at with nothing running, a single Docker image of nginx, and then an API image on top of that. I wonder what my RaspberryPi 4 is pulling with my docker images running on there.

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.

I used my wife's old laptop (a slow N3540) for samba, pihole, and qbittorrent server for a couple of years until recently I replaced with a used HP PC.

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.

Nope. I’m using a Dell Optiplex 990 that my uncle no longer wanted.