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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.
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It'll probably work. Biggest issue will be recovery after power failure as laptops generally stay off.
Next most likely is CPU fan failure, exacerbated if CPU usage causes the fans to run high and nobody is there to blow the dust out.
Other than that I've had multiple laptops that run as servers over the years and generally they're fine. Streaming audio for our community radio station, or shoved behind wall mounted TV's for updateable PowerPoint displays.
I am planning after installing Ubuntu server and get some setup done, to actually sit it out and understand how much the fan is going and how I expect this to be an issue. Since my backups are probably going to be once in a week or so, I do not expect the laptop to have a lot of work (for now is just for file backup, no other services in there except tailscale)
It's a laptop... One of the benefits is that it already has a battery, no?
If the laptop has a way to limit charging to, say, 70% in order to not turn into a spicy pillow, it would be viable. I have an older HP Elitebook 8440p laptop running as a server of sorts in my cluster, but the battery is no longer capable of holding a charge at all because it's always plugged in. I might get a Thinkpad to replace it as there are modifications for those to limit the battery charge level.
Firstly - I love the phrase "spicy pillow".
Secondly - It would probably depend on the laptop and its battery health. But also the OS can limit charging I believe? I haven't looked too far into how it works but I've got my laptop setup to only charge to 90% because I'm nearly always plugged in. I don't know if that relies on any hardware/firmware options though.
tlphas more features available for Thinkpads, specifically, so there's that. I'm thinking more of a laptop form factor but built as a portable server, with the battery specifically designed to be a secondary power source (like a UPS) instead of the primary power source.Of course something like that would be incredibly niche, so it makes sense that it's not really a thing.
Yeah I figure it's the sort of thing that requires some firmware support at least.
One thing I've always liked about using laptops as servers more than the battery has been the built-in display and keyboard. 😁
Good point, those are nice to have. Most of my cluster has vPro capabilities, so I can just log in remotely regardless of the OS's condition.