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
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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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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(9 replies)
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 🤦♂️
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 ;) )
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(3 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
That is so awesome!
Cool. A friend had one in a fireplace that played a fire video in the evenings - with the crackling sounds too.
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. 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.
based and sustainability-pilled
I can even run the latest Stable diffusion models on my 8 year old GPU.
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(6 replies)
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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(2 replies)
My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.
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.
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.
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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(1 replies)
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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(1 replies)
My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.
those where the days :)
For years I had an Asus EEE PC as my home NAS.
Oh no! It's the EEE PC!
I have one that runs my bookwyrm, owncast, calibreweb, and matrix (WIP) instances.
Gotta love self-hosting federation c:
Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.
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
Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!
Shoutout to my 16 year old dell laptop running god knows what for all eternity
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 💀
Old laptops have little resell value. They work well as low powered hobby servers though.
Yup, I have an old broken laptop that runs Ubuntu Server and doesn't have a physical screen. I named it The Headless Machine (ha!)
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.
Duplicate
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.
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(2 replies)
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 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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