My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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As a test machine, yes. As a production machine... Meh.
Little memory, slow and small disk...
Even my 10 year old laptops can have ssd. Depending on the laptop and budget could be a better fit for a lot of people.
RAM and disk space are the cheapest and easiest things to upgrade.
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I feel personally attacked.
All day long. I ssh into mine & run docker. Works surprisingly well. Better than the $5/month droplet.
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 It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.
Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.
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!)
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
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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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.
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.
Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
what do you mean comfortable? It's basically designed for it.
Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
You probably already looked into it, but just in case: Depending on the model of the laptop, the battery might be removable using simple tools and without having to deal with adhesives.
Yes I did, but nowadays I have nothing to host things on. Alpine Linux is excellent to host Minecraft servers and the like.
End of life Chromebooks, baby!
I have 2 Chromebooks I want to do something with, but they’re double core machines with 16g Emmc. Not really juicy enough for a good server.
Kinda depends. I have one that makes an excellent Plex server with an external USB drive for the media. It's ancient, got it for nothing from an school that was going to throw it out, it's got Intel QuickSync so it transcodes media in hardware. I even got the 2TB USB drive for nothing, friend didn't need it any more and was going to throw it out, now it serves him media with the Plex server I built. Did the same with another Chromebook for Pi Hole. Now thinking about a slightly beefier one for Home Assistant. Might set up a Lemmy instance on another one, just for the fuck of it.
Absolutely and you will feel right at home over here on our self-hosting community: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting
I've never had an internet connection that allows normal server connections. I guess I could set it up with Cloudflare or something.
I've been more likely to use old laptops as thin clients... run Linux on my desktop, then connect to it with VNC so the laptop doesn't really have to do anything. Or set them up with a really lightweight Linux desktop like WindowMaker and use them to play music out in my studio.
I took my first foray into media hosting by running subsonic on an old emachines laptop! ain't nothing wrong!
Omg that’s a great idea I have an 8 thread 4 core from 2012 that was my main laptop 3 years ago.
this is the way