[HN Gopher] Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
___________________________________________________________________
Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
Author : hddherman
Score : 109 points
Date : 2022-05-10 09:44 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ounapuu.ee)
(TXT) w3m dump (ounapuu.ee)
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
|
| My take on this, the answer is yes, until a hardware part fails,
| and in 10 year old computers, they do.
|
| Then it gets tricky: laptops, especially 10 year old laptops can
| be very hard to fix.
| nelgaard wrote:
| The disk you can usually replace.
|
| Otherwise just restore the backup to a 5 year old laptop.
|
| If you laptop server can run for 5 or 10 years, there is a good
| chance that during that time, you spilled coffee in the
| keyboard of another laptop, making it a good candidate for the
| new server.
|
| I have a 12 year old laptop, that has been a server for 8
| years.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| No
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I don't understand the need to run home servers in 2022, at least
| not for most people and most problems.
|
| This is coming from someone who has been running a home server
| for decades, hosted everything from websites and email, photos,
| music and movies, and various cloud services like Nextcloud,
| Gitea, etc. As a learning experience, it's probably better than
| anything else, but for day to day work, it's simply not worth the
| trouble.
|
| NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure as a
| cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers, at least
| not if you have a "home budget" as well. We're talking redundant
| power, redundant internet, server grade hardware and spare parts,
| fire/flood protection, physical access control, dedicated
| security operations, and multi-geo redundancy means you get that
| across multiple data centers.
|
| I've long since abandoned the chores that come with hosting
| anything from home, and instead moved everything to the cloud. If
| i need privacy, Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) handles
| end-to-end encryption. Most other services have been migrated to
| cloud offerings, which in many cases are free, like GitHub or
| Bitbucket, and my (static) website runs on Azure for free.
|
| The best part is i'm actually saving money. Before i moved to the
| cloud, i was running a 4 bay NAS as well as a server running
| Proxmox, and power consumption was around 250W, and even with
| normal electricity prices here (EUR0.35/kwh normal, current
| around EUR0.75/kwh), it was costing me about EUR8.50 every month.
| That's without the hardware cost, which will easily cost as much
| over 5 years.
|
| For comparison, a "Microsoft Family365" subscription can be had
| for about EUR75/year (EUR6.25/month), and offers the above
| advantages on 6 accounts each given 1TB of storage, so if i was
| using OneDrive for file storage, i would be saving about EUR2
| every month on just electricity.
|
| Assuming the hardware costs as much as the electricity (EUR510
| over 5 years), you could also get a VPS in the cloud, and still
| host websites and more, and still save money.
|
| That being said, i do still have a small "home server", but it's
| main purpose is to act as a content cache for data stored in the
| cloud, to make it appear to be local when accessed from the LAN,
| as well as make backups (to another cloud) of my cloud data, but
| my firewall is now completely closed, and i sleep better at night
| :)
| moffkalast wrote:
| > hosted email
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't hosting your own mail these
| days nigh impossible because if you're not one of the major
| whitelisted providers everything you ever send will get thrown
| into spam, for obvious reasons?
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| It is doable, but certainly not something i would recommend.
| I quit doing it a decade or so ago.
|
| There are a bunch of hoops you need to run through to keep
| your server whitelisted, though having a static IP in a non-
| residential IP block helps a lot. Sadly, most people
| attempting to self host email will (static IP or not) have a
| residential IP, meaning you're almost certain to get
| blacklisted fairly quick. I'd much rather leave that to
| someone who knows what they're doing.
|
| I'm aware that people self host email for (supposed) privacy,
| but they somehow always seem to forget that most email
| threads have at least two parties, and despite all kinds of
| privacy measures, you cannot guarantee that your recipient is
| not using Google/Microsoft/Whatever, or they forward it to a
| person that is using one of those. In that light, your (clear
| text) emails are not really confidential.
|
| Instead, if you must use email for confidential information,
| use encryption, or better yet, use one of the multitudes of
| newer "more better" platforms for sending your information.
| Most new platforms have encryption baked in, though in most
| cases you're trusting the service provider to handle your
| keys correctly.
| Aachen wrote:
| (not sure who downvoted or why btw, even if I disagree on
| some points your comment is constructive and the
| conclusion, using something with more modern encryption,
| makes sense. If only people would comment when they
| downvote...)
|
| > have a residential IP, meaning you're almost certain to
| get blacklisted fairly quick.
|
| That's not how that works. Either they block residential
| IPs or they don't. It's not that they only notice you're
| hosting residentially by the distinctly green smell of your
| email and only then ban you.
|
| I've not had much trouble myself with this, only a handful
| of systems across more than a decade of use by multiple
| people. From a residential IP.
|
| > hoops you need to run through to keep your server
| whitelisted
|
| Aside from sending spam, how does it become un-whitelisted?
| (I'm assuming you're referring to "off blacklists" when you
| say whitelisted btw, as I've never seen a whitelist
| implementation).
| yokoprime wrote:
| I have 2 rPIs. Run pi-hole, controller sw for my access points,
| some torrent stuff, a "NAS" aka shared USB drives and
| homebridge.
|
| Not sure how I would do those in the cloud cheaper and as
| simply as this.
| pxtail wrote:
| > it's simply not worth the trouble
|
| This philosophy can be applied for everything and unfortunately
| - for me - it's incredibly poisonous, I was very passionate
| about programming, coding, about this unique property of it
| that one can bring to life some abstract idea, concept that was
| only existing as thoughts
|
| Unfortunately "not worth the trouble" mantra infected me and
| now I'm unable to do anything, most ideas are dismissed easily.
| Want to write some kind of software? Makes no sense, it's
| probably written already and if not then will be replicated in
| the blink of an eye by more resourceful entity if it's worth
| anything, probably even open-sourced Want to write novel? Makes
| no sense, authors with the help of GPT3 will churn out 20 times
| more, etc. etc.
| hddherman wrote:
| Sorry to hear about that.
|
| I agree that it's easy to dismiss a lot of ideas like this,
| and the fact that there's so many people out there working on
| all these ideas can seem a bit daunting.
|
| What has helped me is knowing that I am doing all of this for
| myself, and because it's fun and interesting to _me_. Yeah,
| sure, other solutions exist, but then I'd be trading more
| money for less fun, and that's not... fun.
|
| I hope that you can get your spark back. It all depends on
| external factors and life events as well and with those I
| cannot help, but don't lose hope.
| snerbles wrote:
| > What has helped me is knowing that I am doing all of this
| for myself, and because it's fun and interesting to _me_.
|
| Thank you for articulating it this way. It's too easy for
| nihilism to bleed over into hobbies and pastimes.
| pxtail wrote:
| Thank you for kind words man, I appreciate it a lot
| timonoko wrote:
| Typical use of home server is to lower expenses when abroad or
| in the wilderness. Nobody here pirates movies (of course), but
| for example watching Joe Rogan 3 hour Youtube-sessions on phone
| in Finnmark was quite impossible. You ordered your server to
| download it with youtube-dl and to decode the audio at 32
| kbits.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| > If i need privacy, Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/)
| handles end-to-end encryption.
|
| I don't think that's enough to qualify as a privacy measure.
| Those encrypted files will still be on your account paid
| through your credit card and authenticated by phone. They know
| when you connect and how much data you have, download and send.
|
| As for the rest of your comment, I pretty much like having my
| own stuff and I dislike giving money to hostile corporations
| like Microsoft and Google.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Do you exclude NAS functionality? Because multiple TB of cloud
| storage are definitely not affordable.
|
| Similarly, yeah you could store movies in the cloud, but
| streaming those all the time is a huge waste of bandwidth and
| for many home internet connections quite high load.
|
| Oh, and I also want my smart home to continue working when
| there is no internet connection.
| bpye wrote:
| Not just that multi TB are not affordable, but also I can get
| >1Gbps throughout on my local network and essentially 0
| latency - whilst my internet connection is max 1Gbps and
| effectively a little less, with more significant latency.
|
| When using the file share for something like Lightroom it
| makes a significant difference.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| > NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure
| as a cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers..
|
| Err, yeah no. My home server is only serving lan clients and is
| not on the internet. Please, try to pwn it.
|
| :}
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure as
| a cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers
|
| Not really. Cloud providers make mistakes.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23915484
| Aachen wrote:
| Plus: bigcorp mistakes/hacks affect a million customers. You
| might have a less fancy door lock than the data center next
| door, or might have a 1024-bit RSA public ssh key still, but
| how likely is someone going to get into your email by
| cracking your lock or key specifically?
| Aachen wrote:
| FYI that wattage is quite a lot, if you get it cheaper by
| hosting it on someone else's server (aka cloud) then they've
| either got a more efficient server or they don't factor
| externalities into the price (at EUR.75/kWh it sounds like
| you're paying for Climeworks to compensate your CO2 emissions).
| GianFabien wrote:
| I'm using a 2006 vintage Compaq Presario as a home server running
| netBSD. The battery holds up for about 30 minutes, enough for an
| orderly shutdown. The LCD failed some time ago, so I simply
| removed it. Mostly I connect via sshd. Can connect a VGA LCD for
| rare low-level sysadmin work.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Is there any necessary reason to run a home server in 2022?
| jra_samba wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
| sbehere wrote:
| It depends on your use cases. For example,
|
| - I have a scanner that saves scans to a network share. Having
| a linux-based SMB server on the local network is convenient and
| privacy-friendly, especially when the disks are encrypted.
| Doubt you can get privacy like that with a cloud service to
| which your printer can connect.
|
| - If you follow the 3-2-1 style of backups, having a fileserver
| at home is convenient for a solid backup regime across all
| devices.
|
| - You can use a server for serving local media to watch on the
| TV or any other device
|
| - In some cases, you can use the same server for advanced
| security, privacy, ad-blocking, and combining multiple internet
| connections in order to gain fail-over redundancy and increased
| bandwidth.
|
| I am able to do all of the above with a really simple home
| server setup [1].
|
| [1]: https://sagar.se/blog/diy-multi-wan-linux-router/diy-
| multi-w...
| Aachen wrote:
| There is no necessary reason to be alive, yet here we are.
|
| I like hosting at home, gives me peace of mind because it's all
| mine and controlled by me. No latency across LAN and cheap
| storage (one could say it's at cost price) are other reported
| advantages.
|
| It's not necessary, sure I could host my email with google like
| the masses and it would be functionally the same, but it's my
| preference.
| Aachen wrote:
| Oddly specific title. Another 2012 laptop-at-home hoster
| reporting in, AMA I guess! I didn't have any thermal/fan issues
| the way OP described, but my laptop is also more powerful (Asus
| rather than a ThinkPad) so it was presumably just made to handle
| more heat.
|
| This was an upgrade in 2019 from an Asus EEE box which had
| similar power requirements, which was an upgrade in 2013 from a
| 2001 laptop.
|
| Whether this works for you all depends on your goals, or more and
| more often, what software you use to achieve these goals:
|
| - Compiling huge software suites like an OS or Firefox as a
| service is just too heavy.
|
| - Average company website, personal blog, torrent host, personal
| vpn server, Factorio server, mail server, git server (gitea), and
| more all at once? Perfectly fine, that's exactly what I do.
|
| - Single gitlab service? Oof, that's on the edge of minimum
| requirements https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html
| , but should work okay if you don't have too many users.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| There are better ways. They are also not that expensive for mini
| servers running a few services.
|
| Fujitsu Esprimo, Fujitsu Futro, Lenovo ThinkCentre, HP EliteDesk,
| HP ProDesk, ...
|
| Used and refurbished they can be found starting at around 40EUR
| depending on the configuration.
|
| 2012 is too old in my eyes (CPU performance per watt)
| [deleted]
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Recommend the esprimos. Fujitsu is very honest in their energy
| consumption white papers so you can know exactly what they'll
| draw.
|
| Also their mainboards - as far as I can tell - have always been
| atx wrt screw holes, so you can put them into larger cases.
| Problem then is that the psu is proprietary regarding both size
| and connector. They've been doing 12V only to the mainboard for
| a couple years now, and convert to other voltages on the
| mainboard. But replacement parts are cheap and plenty on eBay,
| so don't worry too much.
| meristohm wrote:
| While the performance/Watt is higher than modern hardware, what
| is the total resource-cost of buying a new mini-server? It
| might be relatively cheap money-wise, but we have yet to add in
| the long-term costs to all the gadgets we make. This old laptop
| is from 2013 and uses between 10-30W (highest when the screen
| is on).
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| You don't have to buy new, but maybe 2018ish is a sweet spot
| when it comes to price/performance in the used market. My
| Fujitsu esprimo has a 6th gen i5 and idles at 14W with one
| spinning disk, one SSD and one spun down disk, plus an
| additional nic.
| Fwirt wrote:
| Old laptops also make killer home routers. I recently replaced my
| consumer grade wireless router with an old Thinkpad in a router-
| on-a-stick configuration + PoE switch + dedicated access point
| and my home network is better for it in just about every way.
| Added bonus that it can run a simple webserver and run some light
| home automation tasks without breaking a sweat.
|
| Of course the downside is that you lose a nice web GUI for
| managing port forwarding and stuff, but if you're SSHing in to
| adjust iptables on your router you probably don't need the web
| interface all that much anyway.
|
| It's probably true that an off-the-shelf router uses less power,
| but if you already have an old laptop lying around, at what point
| do you break even on the electricity cost vs. buying more
| efficient hardware? Especially when the difference is on the
| order of a few watts.
| throw93232 wrote:
| As a router? How many gigabit ethernet ports can you put on
| such thing?
|
| Also on electricity you may break even in a year or two.
| piperswe wrote:
| A USB 2.0 ethernet port maxing out at a few hundred Mbps
| would suffice for WAN for most people, and the built-in
| gigabit port can be connected to a switch
| ta988 wrote:
| You could install OPNsense (or any other router OS out there)
| and get a webUI out of it. I wonder if OpenWRT works on x86
| LeSaucy wrote:
| A killer solution is to run OPNsense in a virtual machine,
| and then adjust the virtual<->physical NIC mappings when
| moving between hosts. Its super powerful and has plugins
| galore (haproxy, nginx proxy, dynamic dns updaters, openvpn
| etc). I run two VM's in high availablity mode and can take
| down any virtualization host without any downtime(important
| with WFH).
| ta988 wrote:
| Have you looked into OpenVSwitch? It may solve some of that
| too.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Plus built in UPS.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Anyone who feels the need for a home server, I would strongly
| advise using either a laptop or ARM SBC (eg. Raspberry pi).
|
| The main cost of your always on server will be power. And laptops
| are far lower power than desktops when idle.
|
| If you need anything specialist a laptop can't do, you're
| probably better renting a cloud server instead.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| except for storage.
|
| My home server is mainly my home NAS.
|
| It would be hard to put 12TB of mirrored storage in a laptop.
| jacknews wrote:
| I have a T430 with an external USB3 dual disk caddy, with 8TB
| disks, soon to upgrade to 16TB.
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| With a 2012 gaming laptop then there is a chance it'll have
| dual SATA bays. If there's an M.2 slot as well, then it might
| be doable.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While there are laptops which accept 3 or even 4 SSD's, and
| which could do this task, those are very expensive, so few
| might have one handy.
|
| Older ARM SBC's had many limitations in the number of PCIe,
| SATA and USB 3 interfaces.
|
| Nevertheless, now a much better ARM CPU has become available
| for cheaper devices (i.e. in the $100 to $200 range), the
| Rockchip RK3588 (quadruple Cortex-A76 + quadruple Cortex-A55
| + triple Cortex-M0).
|
| For now, this is the only ARM CPU with a decent speed,
| comparable or better than the Intel Gemini Lake Refresh CPUs,
| except for the much more expensive NVIDIA Xavier or Orin, or
| the Qualcomm Snapdragon SBCs, which are much more expensive
| than Intel/AMD CPUs + motherboards, having similar features.
|
| There are at least 5 or 6 companies who have announced boards
| with RK3588, ranging in size from credit-card size, like
| Raspberry Pi, to the larger picoITX, and up to the miniITX
| form factor. Hopefully such boards will be available in the
| second half of 2022.
|
| Some of these boards have up to 4 SATA connectors, besides an
| M.2 NVME SSD slot, so they could be easily used as a NAS.
|
| According to the published reviews of such a board, the
| typical total power consumption (without SSDs/HDDs) is around
| 5 W, and the peak power, at maximum CPU utilization, around
| 13 W.
| renox wrote:
| My Synology NAS use an ARM: I chose badly: very few video
| format are supported..
| adrian_b wrote:
| There are a lot of different devices that include ARM
| cores.
|
| Some of them have actually been designed for TV set top
| boxes as their primary application, e.g. most of the
| models from Rockchip. These support a lot of video
| formats in hardware, even more than typical desktop GPUs
| from the same year. For example the Rockchip 3588,
| launched this year and used in many single-board
| computers that have just been announced, is one of the
| first devices providing a fast hardware AV1 decoder,
| besides decoders and encoders for all older codecs.
|
| However, some of these devices with ARM cores have
| vendor-provided video drivers only for Android, to be
| used in smart TVs, so it may happen that the device used
| in your Synology NAS actually supports in hardware more
| video formats than you can use, and you are limited by
| the available video driver, which is incomplete.
| currysausage wrote:
| Actually, I just put a used HP ProDesk 600 G3 Microtower
| (Pentium Gold G4560) into operation, and my energy meter shows
| 0.0W most of the time (which can't be true, but apparently it's
| something <1W) with Ubuntu + TLP installed and the HDD in
| standby.
|
| Here are my TLP settings: TLP_DEFAULT_MODE=BAT
| TLP_PERSISTENT_DEFAULT=1 # Change some BAT settings
| back to AC defaults CPU_MAX_PERF_ON_BAT=100
| CPU_BOOST_ON_BAT=1 CPU_HWP_DYN_BOOST_ON_BAT=1
| # Disable options that are undesirable for servers
| MAX_LOST_WORK_SECS_ON_BAT=0 WOL_DISABLE=0
| DISK_DEVICES="sda sdb" # Leave disk power management
| to hd-idle ('PM_ON=on' means PM off, obviously /s)
| AHCI_RUNTIME_PM_ON_BAT=on DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_BAT="keep
| keep" DISK_SPINDOWN_TIMEOUT_ON_BAT="keep keep"
|
| I use hd-idle for spinning down the HDD (sdb) because the
| shucked WD "White Label"/Ultrastar He10 apparently doesn't care
| for APM or Standby Timer settings set through TLP:
| echo 'HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i 0 -a sdb -i 1800 -l /var/log/hd-idle/hd-
| idle.log"' >> /etc/default/hd-idle systemctl enable hd-
| idle.service
|
| Besides that, I had to systemctl disable
| udisks2
|
| because udisks2 wakes up the drives every 10 minutes, no
| configuration possible. Also, smartd (from smartmontools)
| shouldn't wake the HDD if it's in standby, but it will reset
| hd-idle's standby timer, so I tell smartd to run every 24 hours
| instead of 30 minutes: echo 'smartd_opts="--
| interval=86400"' >> /etc/default/smartmontools
| londons_explore wrote:
| Probably best to measure power in the DC side of the power
| supply to be sure it's under a watt...
|
| Measuring AC power is very hard to do accurately - there
| could for example be something else in your town injecting a
| bit of power at some other frequency onto the AC power grid
| (for example 1000Hz), which your PSU ends up absorbing (due
| to filters in the input of the PSU). Regular power meters
| will usually only measure the 50/60Hz component of absorbed
| and reactive power, and can therefore over/under read.
|
| Still good to know some desktops are designed with power
| consumption in mind!
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > which can't be true
|
| Yep, but still not <1W. Even at 20% load the PSU have only
| 80-90%% efficiency.
|
| Just test with something with a low and known power usage,
| like a LED lamp or something.
| currysausage wrote:
| Actually, that's exactly what I did and the energy meter
| will gladly measure a 1W LED bulb. That's why I think
| consumption is <1W most of the time. At the end of the day,
| everything <5W or even <10W would be pretty great.
|
| BTW, there are very short bursts of 1W~10W every second.
| And FWIW, after ~24h, the energy meter shows 0.0117kWh.
| Obviously, these measurements are a far cry from lab
| precision, but they do give me some confidence that I won't
| really notice the server on my next energy bill.
| rjsw wrote:
| An HP MicroServer uses laptop-class components in a different
| case.
| znpy wrote:
| Not sure what generation you're referring to, but my HP
| Microserver (Gen 8) has a 17W TDP Intel Xeon cpu (E1220v2
| iirc) and an HP SmartArray controller, and HP iLO baseboard
| management controller.
|
| I don't think that stuff qualifies as "laptop-class".
| blueflow wrote:
| I'm using a Siemens Futro S300 from 2005 as home server. It has
| no UPS-like functionality, but is completely silent in operation.
| nergal wrote:
| https://www.sweclockers.com/galleri/15194-laptop-server
| znpy wrote:
| Actually thinkpads from that era can host 4 disks: there used to
| be special deives that would fit into the expresscard slot.
| hddherman wrote:
| Like the thinkmods adapter?
| https://thinkmods.store/products/expresscard-to-nvme-adapter
| hellweaver666 wrote:
| I have a 2010 Macbook Pro sitting on my network as an airprint
| server for my aging Dell Laser printer (purely because the
| drivers no longer work on modern OS's). It's hacky but cheaper
| than buying a new printer and the damn thing keeps on chugging as
| long as it's plugged in (the battery is long dead and lasts less
| than five minutes).
| natly wrote:
| I love this. It's weird that we don't consider the fact that
| computers becoming more powerful and home internet becoming
| faster as having an effect on personally managed servers being a
| more feasible option. How few of todays servers could replace the
| servers spotify used when they started up a decaded ago?
| jeffwask wrote:
| At one place I worked, a team built a selenium grid out of old
| laptops so I don't see why not.
|
| The only down side would be disk redundancy and such I would want
| in anything storing important data.
| amelius wrote:
| Why not, people use RPis as a home server.
| lynguist wrote:
| RPis don't have batteries that can wreak havoc.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If you kludge together a battery backup out of a dodgy $15
| USB powerbank you can still have the same issues, right?
| timonoko wrote:
| I have better than UPS. I have watchdog on my server. It is a
| reprogrammed wifi-plug, which turns power off&on if it cannot see
| the server, or does not get ping every 5 minutes.
|
| And the server can also restart wifi-router and cable modem if
| cannot ping the selfsame watchdog (and 8.8.8.8) at reasonable
| intervals. Yes. They are watching each other.
| jmacd wrote:
| Ubiquiti sells a nice piece of hardware that is a WAN reboot
| plug. Unfortunately there is zero configurability in terms of
| how it determines if WAN is working or not. I haven't been able
| to find another purpose made piece of kit.
| timonoko wrote:
| My server is so old (2012) it has parallel port. If you
| connect all pins together it has enough power to operate 220V
| relay and thus modem and router can be turned on and off
| without any fancy hardware.
| spicybright wrote:
| That's scary but amazing. Did you do this and have any
| write ups about it? Sounds interesting!
| timonoko wrote:
| This is all you need to know. Connect all parport data
| pins together and connect it to suitable relay.
| Preferably 3-pin relay, so the Wifi-power-on is the
| default state. $ cat wifi-off
| #! /usr/bin/python2 import parallel,time
| p = parallel.Parallel() # open LPT1 or /dev/parport0
| p.setData(0xFF) $ cat wifi-on
| #! /usr/bin/python2 import parallel,time
| p = parallel.Parallel() # open LPT1 or /dev/parport0
| p.setData(0x0)
| spicybright wrote:
| Wow, that makes complete sense. What an elegant hack!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Do you ever get any outages or was that just a fun project to
| set up?
|
| I'm always thinking I should buy an UPS but realistically I'd
| need it once every 5 years at best, and even then I'm usually
| lucky.
| timonoko wrote:
| Happens twice a month, reasons vary. Mostly because Wifi is
| too congested in middle of Helsinki.
|
| At one time it happened every day. This was because of open
| Telnet port. Crooks, mostly Russians, caused so many Telnet-
| open processes that machine choked up.
| hddherman wrote:
| You'd think so, but lately I've found it to be quite handy.
| Over the last couple of days, the UPS has notified me that
| the voltage coming from the wall is a bit off, oddly high
| (250-256V). netdata is nice and even graphs it out to me so I
| can pinpoint exactly when and how much the voltage deviated
| from normal.
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| That's cool. I used to have a raspberry pi hooked up to the
| reset switch pins via gpio on a mining rig in 2013. Back then,
| the mining software was all buggy and would crash the rig every
| couple of days. When the pi couldn't ping the rig for 30
| seconds, it rebooted it.
| timonoko wrote:
| This Watchdog (aka "Vahtikoira") is already on Github.
| https://github.com/timonoko/Tokmannin-ESP8266-Wifi-topseli/b...
|
| The server causes the Blue Led (aka "Sininen Ledi") to blink,
| so that I immediately know Watchdog is watching and gets
| nourishment. Sometimes I boot to some other distro and forget
| to turn off the Watchdog, which is annoying.
| ToolsDevler wrote:
| I'm running an Asus N751JX with 16GB RAM. It works perfectly and
| is a great addition to my small Raspberry pi 3/4 army.
|
| But a heads up for everyone doing this. Please, please remove the
| laptop battery before running it 24/7. Otherwise this is a
| serious fire hazard. The hardware and especially the battery are
| not designed to run under these conditions.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>The hardware and especially the battery are not designed to
| run under these conditions.
|
| What does that mean?
|
| My laptops run 24x7, not as server but as docked workstations.
| I have never considered that as a safety risk, and definitely
| have not considered it outside of norm. At work for a public
| sector client, we have two floors (few hundred?) laptops
| plugged in and running 24x7 (ask from IT department is to leave
| them on overnight for maintenance). Sanity or eco-friendliness
| aside, this is a first I heard that laptop cannot / should not
| be run around the clock plugged in...
| ToolsDevler wrote:
| So I try to address many questions here:
|
| 1) Source? Well, as it has been also written here, I hear that
| from every IT-Department I worked with at work. Also learned it
| once the hard way and got a swollen battery. It was an old old
| laptop (around 2003 IIRC) and old laptop batteries are an own
| story, but since people want to repurpose old hardware, I think
| this is a reasonable hint. Also Linus Tech Tips brought this up
| in one video.
|
| Also, the newer your laptop the better it might handle it, but
| I wouldn't bet on it.
|
| 2) Why? From my understanding the constant on/off charging and
| heat development (also due to faster dust buildup. If the fan
| runs 24/7 it sucks a lot more dust into the case) is the
| problem. Especially if you run heavy tasks over a longer
| period, the hardware will heat up to a level that it is not
| designed to do.
|
| I will grant that the lighter the load you put on that
| hardware, the less all this precautions matter. But my
| principle is, that if something is not designed (and likely not
| tested) for something, proceed with caution if you understand
| what you're doing, or leave it be. So if you want to host your
| static website on it, you might never ever be near any
| problems. But I still wouldn't recommend it.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Lithium batteries have an approximate 10 year shelf life
| under optimal conditions. Possibly less when heated
| consistently by a laptop running 24/7.
|
| If your laptop is already 6-8 years old then if you want to
| keep the battery in as a UPS system it may be worth
| considering purchasing a new replacement battery and
| installing that (if it has not already been replaced)
|
| Most computers will only need a small screwdriver and 10
| minutes of work to swap the battery, although you will want
| to check youtube/ifixit for your specific model first just to
| make sure the battery isn't glued in or otherwise difficult
| to remove and replace.
| Multicomp wrote:
| > Please, please remove the laptop battery before running it
| 24/7.
|
| What if the battery is soldered in place like many machines
| produced post 2014?
| abdusco wrote:
| You can leave the battery in, but remove the connection to
| motherboard.
| culopatin wrote:
| I haven't seen soldered batteries. You must be thinking of
| ram. Batteries could be hidden behind the bottom plate but
| are usually connected by a cable internally and that's all
| you need to disconnect. That's true even for macbooks,
| iPhones, etc.
| ToolsDevler wrote:
| If you can not remove it (or let it remove by a
| professional), do not use it for that purpose.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Check the UEFI and disable it there.
| barbs wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have any sources that say the battery is a
| fire hazard if plugged in 24/7?
| hulitu wrote:
| We have at work some HP laptops and got a strong
| recommandation from IT to not keep them plugged in all day
| due to the risk of swollen batteries.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I'm curious too.
|
| Every thread about always on laptops leads me to this
| question. People leave their laptops plugged in all the time.
|
| I've run about 5 laptops 24x7 over the years for at least a
| year a piece. No issues.
|
| I put an HP Envy onto a shelf in the garage, and the battery
| swelled enough to ruin the touchpad and case.
|
| In all the laptops I have owned, the only problem battery was
| idle, unplugged and uncharged.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Being uncharged is actually pretty tough on the battery,
| for safety and longevity they're best stores somewhere
| between 40%-60% charged (that's why they come that way from
| the factory).
|
| https://www.uschemicalstorage.com/how-to-store-lithium-
| batte...
| ringworld wrote:
| Depends on the hardware - I run 2x Dell E6330 server-laptops
| and their BIOS has an option to change the charging
| configuration to "primarily always on AC" - some Latitudes are
| designed to run docked all the time as "business PCs".
|
| While we're here, turn off TurboBoost in BIOS to keep them
| running cooler with the lid closed, I've found it really helps
| when tasks get a little bursty.
| dlivingston wrote:
| Curious. My understanding is that, when connected to power,
| most modern devices bypass the battery entirely when it's above
| some threshold of charge state.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| I have some old Dell laptops that most definitely don't do
| that. Left running on AC for several hours, the batteries get
| very warm due to the constant trickle charging.
| jotm wrote:
| I ran laptops 24/7 on AC with the batteries acting as UPS for
| over 15 years. Granted, all of them had removable ones with
| 18650 cells, so no swelling.
|
| The charging method has been standardized a long time ago -
| they are charged to ~96%, then cut off, if they fall below ~94%
| they are topped up again.
|
| There is a significant loss of battery life if you do that for
| years. I used to unplug some of them and do 2-3 full
| discharge/charge cycles, that usually helped increase the
| battery life.
|
| Some laptops use the battery as additional power when running
| at wattage beyond what the AC can provide.
|
| If you want to be safe with your model, you can try removing
| the battery while the laptop is plugged in - it should not shut
| off, the circuit for charging the battery and powering the
| machine are separate.
|
| I lost more batteries in storage - they still discharge, and
| even though the cells could be revived, the BMS won't let it
| recharge if it falls below a certain voltage, rendering them
| dead (unless you find it fun to restore them).
| Multicomp wrote:
| I have a 2012 HP Elitebook 8560p I inherited from work decom that
| I used as my primary PC for about 4 years, and even now is my
| torrent client for public domain movies and is also my 'I guess I
| just need to use Windows' box after I built my desktop as a
| Fedora KDE box.
|
| It is heavy, built like a tank, and has all the ports I still
| expect laptops to have (VGA, cat5, USB A, Optical disk) even when
| those ports are woefully out of fashion. The only problem is it's
| all PCI 2 SATA bus so even the cheapest SSD maxes out the system
| bus. She's starting to feel like flying an Excelsior class
| starship in the TNG era.
|
| Today's laptops are sans optical disk drive, have lots more
| 'goodies' like IME and Computrace, have soldered ram (it about
| killed me to find a 360 degree hinge laptop 2 in 1 with AMD and
| unsoldered RAM, found one by HP eventually but still it shouldn't
| have been so hard), and generally are infected with phone-itis
| where everything has to be skinny, thin, light!! More than one
| micron thick? Old!
|
| But for all that, said laptop is not my home server, nor are one
| of my many salvaged 'just in case I need a home server' laptops
| sitting on my shelf in the computer lab.
|
| Instead I have a random cubicle farm Dell SFF PC that runs my
| home server, does fine until it randomly locks up, probably
| overheated Mobo like the OP has mentioned as probable symptoms,
| mostly because I don't want to play with the configs again! It's
| all undocumented and manually configured and I haven't put in the
| work to clean it up and put the configs into nixos or config
| management yet.
|
| The moral of the story is (I guess) to use config management else
| all of your computer hardware hoarding may be stymied.
| jimmydeans wrote:
| laxis96 wrote:
| Talking about low power, I am currently running a headless HP
| laptop which I recovered from a friend. This thing sports an
| i3-5005U CPU (2GHz 2c/4t) and idles at 4W measured at the wall!
|
| Well, it's not powerful by definition but it can easily handle
| file sharing and torrenting (for my library of Linux ISOs
| obviously) while staying powered on 24/7. The fan also turns off
| at idle so it's totally silent.
|
| What's funny is that this machine is currently resting on top of
| my decommissioned home server (Xeon E5-2697v2, 64GB RDIMMs,
| Supermicro X9) which idled around 100W...
| pikaynu wrote:
| I have an HP laptop with a 3rd gen i5, fairly low powered
| repurposed with Linux and Plex as a home server. I am using it as
| a media server, file storage with hard disks attached and also as
| the primary tailscale host to have a mesh of personal devices
| over the internet without a public IP.
| scrapheap wrote:
| I still use a laptop from 2012 as my main computer. It handles my
| day to day stuff fine, including running a couple of Vagrant VMs.
| flobosg wrote:
| Same here. I'm writing this from a 2011 Thinkpad x220.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Aren't most of those laptops running CPUS that have massive
| unpatched security vulnerabilities?
| iotku wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that the T430 got a bios update for Spectre,
| there's Intel microcode updates that can be loaded at boot, and
| other general mitigations for CPU vulnerabilities in the Linux
| kernel as well.
|
| Nothing's impossible, but it would have to be a pretty targeted
| attack to exploit the CPU.
|
| That said it's still a good idea keeping stuff behind a VPN if
| you don't need to share stuff publicly with the entire
| internet.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| _Massive_ is a pretty strong word. Unpatched vulnerabilities,
| perhaps, but AFAIK most of those are of the "you can
| potentially read memory if you already have local execution"
| sort, which is unlikely to matter for an internal server (i.e.
| not running untrusted code, or likely even being exposed to
| untrusted clients). Depends on your threat model, of course.
| [deleted]
| Havoc wrote:
| It works but I've found it to be suboptimal.
|
| By the time a laptop is ready to retire the battery is old and
| the fans clogged.
|
| So at a minimum you need to actively keep an eye on the battery
| for swelling etc
| Aachen wrote:
| New battery is a few tenners compared to a whole new server.
|
| Of course, if the competition is a VPS (if a few GB storage is
| all you need for example) then that will win any day.
| BaudouinVH wrote:
| I'm currently running a yunohost install on 2007 EeePC 701. My
| only worry : the battery health.
| donatj wrote:
| Until I wanted Plex to start transcoding video durring the
| pandemic, I happily used a Mac Mini from 2008 as my home server,
| which itself was an upgrade from the Intel Geode FitPC I had been
| using for years before that. Like most things, it depends on what
| you're doing with it.
| gh02t wrote:
| Oh man, Geode! That's a name I haven't heard in a really long
| time. That was AMD's attempt to keep the Cyrix IP alive, right?
| goodoldneon wrote:
| What necessitates the transcoding? Is your TV unable to support
| some formats?
| donatj wrote:
| Yep, a lot of my content at rest doesn't work with the
| individual Plex clients. What's supported by the Plex client
| directly varies by individual client. I have for instance
| quite a collection of old DivX and Xvid content and I don't
| think any of the clients support that natively.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| Yea, I've seen some spotty support from Plex clients. Also
| with browsers: IIRC Chrome and Firefox don't support x265
| but Safari does
| post_break wrote:
| I still believe the mac mini is the perfect home server. You can
| now get them with 10 gig internet. They sip power so a UPS can
| run them for ages, almost no heat, can transcode media for plex,
| cheap, tiny, etc. You can also use them connected to a TV for
| watching media that isn't easily accessed from a smart TV or
| media player. The only con is either MacOS, or linux support.
| Besides that they are incredible. If you need more horsepower
| sure, not perfect.
| bpye wrote:
| Is there any way to attach 4-6 SATA drives over Thunderbolt?
| One of my main uses for a home server is as a file share, for
| both device backups but also for photos etc. I'm still running
| a Gen 8 HP MicroServer because nothing since has really come
| close in terms of cost and form factor.
| jkestner wrote:
| Many ways, but the way I do it is with a Drobo. Easy to
| maintain and upgrade.
| post_break wrote:
| That's a file server, maybe a Synology or a QNAP. There are
| some thunderbolt to PCI express boxes but it gets kind of
| hacky.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I always liked this idea, but do you mean newer or older ones?
| M1 only or the older i3/i5 ones?
| Joeri wrote:
| I wouldn't go back further than the 8th gen intel minis that
| the m1 replaced, just to get a bit of longevity out of them
| (including macos support) and the price for those is close
| enough to the refurbished m1 models that I don't think it's
| worth bothering about intel minis.
| pantulis wrote:
| My 2012 i7 Mac Mini is still alive and kicking for its
| intended use, which is basically media playing and launching
| Homekit automations. Lots of Youtube content these days, but
| it saw quite a few torrents and Soulseek downloads on its
| day. I cannot justify replacing it, even if it is running an
| unsupported OS.
| pseudostem wrote:
| 2006 or 2007 (I forget which exact year) Mac-mini-server
| guy checking in. Sorry, just felt like bragging about an
| old computer. It had spinning disks, replaced with 2 SSDs.
|
| Gifted to my dad 5+ years ago, he refuses to replace.
|
| Anecdote: He thought it would be a great idea to clean up
| certain ports when I gave the mini to him, sprayed WD40
| liberally. Then it was all wet and I suggested he put it
| under (2 ft away) a 60W bulb overnight. He's, well, my
| dad... So he placed a 100W bulb right next to it and forgot
| about it for an evening. The backpanel was black plastic
| and it melted into the mainboard. This thing refused to
| die, and will probably outlive all of us. Anything Apple
| post 2012 is yet another story at least for me.
|
| Edit: still running, windows 10, 2 monitors
| henvic wrote:
| Be mindful of thermal throttling, though: the noise (in the
| living room?) can be a nuisance. I've bought an Intel NUC
| (https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/) to use as a home server and
| kind of regret it. It's not a laptop, but has the small factor of
| one.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I don't know about the NUCs specifically, but I thing there
| should be a YMMV disclaimer in this recommendation.
|
| From what I've seen, these kinds of small PCs are basically a
| laptop-in-a-box, but usually pack a desktop-class CPU. Which
| means that the cooling system can sometimes have a hard time.
|
| I personally have an HP EliteDesk 800 mini, which I initially
| liked for its compact size while at the same time being able to
| have 2 NVME drives and one SATA. Boy do I hate it. Even at
| idle, the fan makes a terrible noise. Throw any kind of work at
| it for more that 10 seconds, and it starts to ramp up.
|
| My work probook from the same era has a joke for a cooler, yet
| it's still quieter most of the time. The CPU is noticeably
| slower (i5-8xxxU), though for running a random home server it's
| probably good enough.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| Yep, my old laptop worked great but boy did the fans get
| annoying in my office. Upgraded to a fanless raspberry pi setup
| and it's both better performing AND completely silent.
| my69thaccount wrote:
| No ECC
| carvking wrote:
| depends on laptop - but yes.
| srmarm wrote:
| I use an old Wyse thin client that I picked up from ebay for
| ~PS25. The built in hard drive was something silly like 32Gb so I
| just boot from an external SSD which gives me 1tb to play with.
|
| Low power, fanless and reliable.
|
| I have it running home assistant, nightly offsite backups from my
| co-located servers, some uptime monitoring and various other
| CRONy bits.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| My Wyse has served me well for years before I got a rack
| server, and even today it acts as my fallback server as well as
| a secondary file backup. I've modified the inside to fit a SATA
| SSD and have external HDDs connected over USB for file storage.
| salmo wrote:
| I slowly ran out of use cases for a "home server" as everything
| moved to "the cloud" (hand wave), streaming and Apple took most
| of it away. Keeping a static IP for mail and web got more
| expensive that Google Apps for Domains & Netlify.
|
| Now I just have a RockPro64 with a 256GB SSD I had lying around
| running InfluxDB and Grafana. You do need 4GB of RAM and a disk
| for this and the RockPro64 is better and more available than a
| 4GB Pi 4. Seriously love that thing.
|
| My Netgate router streams metrics to it. I have a Raspberry Pi
| running the Ubiquiti management software for my APs and
| monitoring my UPS with nut. Telegraf is easy to work with
| extending. I do need to scrape metrics from the Ubiquiti APs
| eventually.
|
| Every once in a while I mess with some other little ARM board and
| environmental sensors, but that's it.
|
| No fans. Less power than my kids' tablets. Just Ansible for
| config management and keeping them up to date.
| Maursault wrote:
| My media server since 2014 has been a 13" 2010 MacBook Pro
| running Snow Leopard with the built-in Apache server configured
| to show directory listings. Nothing else is needed... Apache
| automagically streams mp4s across the network to multiple users
| flawlessly. I never understood the point of installing a custom
| Linux media server with a slow funky eyecandy gui when _any OS +
| Apache is all that is needed._
| bo0tzz wrote:
| A simple setup like that works well for "just" media streaming,
| but quickly hits a wall if you want more features: stuff like
| library search, subtitles, chromecast streaming, etc.
| Maursault wrote:
| No, that's all redundant. Put all your mp4s in one folder.
| All of them. Your browser can search the page of directory
| listing that Apache generates. Subtitles are built into the
| codex, has nothing whatsoever to do with the server.
| Chromecast streaming? You're kidding me. Chromecast is and
| uses the same web technologies as a web server and a web
| browser. There is nothing novel there. And I already
| specified that _Apache streams_ to as many clients as can be
| thrown at the server simultaneously without any extra
| hardware or software. Oh, you want to stream remotely from
| your home server? All you need is Apache and an IP Address.
| Please stop giving Google money. Apache is free software.
| TurkTurkleton wrote:
| Yes, yes, we're all very impressed with your techno-
| asceticism, but also some of us just want shit that Just
| Works, has a remote control that isn't just a wireless
| keyboard and mouse, and doesn't require us to actively
| sysadmin our TVs.
|
| > Oh, you want to stream remotely from your home server?
| All you need is Apache and an IP Address.
|
| Hey, you know what "Apache and an IP Address" _won 't_ do?
| Automatically re-encode my enormous remuxed Blu-ray rips at
| a lower bitrate so I can stream them over my comically
| limited upstream to a criminally throttled hotel wi-fi
| connection.
| Maursault wrote:
| You're talking about something else with a remote
| control. When you're streaming, the device you're
| streaming to has control of the audio level, display
| ratio, and what you are watching, not the server. The
| remote device becomes the remote control. You're talking
| about a smart TV or a console system you attach to a TV.
| Streaming is a different thing.
|
| Apache will stream your stupid 75GB BluRay files without
| any need to re-encode, and you can watch it remotely so
| long as the client device can decode it, even across a
| 10kbit connection, so you go ahead and enjoy your wasted
| processor cycles and higher electric bill, oh, and
| watching your content at a lower bit rate and resolution.
| I'll just stream the large media as is at full quality
| without compromise.
|
| You have to work really really very hard to get Apache
| not to _just work,_ and it takes a slashdot-level event
| to get it to stop working.
|
| Meanwhile, whatever thing you bought will be abandonware
| in less than 2 years. And chances are about equal your
| thing is just running a crappy wrapper and gui for Apache
| anyway. So the business end of your thing is probably
| free, yet you paid for it anyway.
| TurkTurkleton wrote:
| I feel like you're intentionally missing the point.
|
| Your "dump all your videos into a big directory and
| Ctrl-F the Apache directory index" workflow will
| necessarily limit you to watching on devices that can
| navigate to arbitrary URLs and play videos from them.
| This will, in most cases, limit you to a computer (built-
| in browsers in "smart" devices, be they TVs, consoles, or
| purpose-built streaming boxes, will often play videos
| only grudgingly), and I don't know about you, but I don't
| want to sit and watch TV episodes or an entire movie at
| my computer desk with its relatively tiny monitor and
| relatively shitty speakers. I want to watch them on my
| big TV with the fancy sound system in the living room. So
| what would you suggest for this use case? Connect my
| computer to the TV? OK, great, but the video card won't
| output surround sound over HDMI, so now I have to futz
| with a bunch of other connections if I want more than
| just stereo sound. And once that that's sorted, how am I
| supposed to pause the movie when I have to get up to
| piss, because the TV remote can't control my computer?
|
| > Apache will stream your stupid 75GB BluRay files
| without any need to re-encode, so long as the client
| device can decode it, even across a 10kbit connection, so
| you go ahead and enjoy your wasted processor cycles and
| higher electric bill.
|
| Again, missing the point. Yes, Apache will happily squirt
| those bytes at whatever requests them, but that will not
| produce an enjoyable user experience (i.e., one where I
| can WATCH THE FUCKING MOVIE) over a sufficiently slow
| connection, and I'm not going to re-encode _every file I
| have_ at a low bitrate on the off chance I want to watch
| it away from home.
|
| > Meanwhile, whatever thing you bought will be
| abandonware in less than 2 years. And chances are about
| equal your thing is just running a crappy wrapper and gui
| for Apache anyway.
|
| My Apple TV HD in my bedroom is still receiving updates
| seven years after it was originally released. The Apple
| TV 4K in the living room is still receiving updates five
| years after it was originally released. I run Plex to
| stream my local media to local (and my own remote)
| clients, and it is still actively maintained after 14
| years--and if if Plex, Inc. should go under, there are
| plenty of alternatives that won't necessitate me
| regressing back to a computer connected to the TV.
| Maursault wrote:
| TurkTurkleton wrote:
| Dude. I get it. It's HTTP all the way down. I know that;
| I'm a professional software developer and have been Into
| Computers since I was old enough to read. That's also how
| I know that "just dump your video files into a directory
| and let Apache serve them and watch them on a computer"--
| or, yes, "just connect your computer with the directory
| full of video files directly to the TV"--is a shitty user
| experience, which is the point you seem bound and
| determined not to concede, since you are instead laser-
| focusing on the literal reading of statements like "I'm
| not going to re-encode every single video file I have on
| the off chance I want to watch them away from home"
| (obviously I meant I'm not going to do that AHEAD OF TIME
| versus letting my Plex server do it on-demand and stream
| it to me when I'm using a device not on my local
| network), or splitting hairs about binaural hearing and
| the utility of surround sound.
|
| In any case, I yield; you have Won the Conversation;
| congratulations. I'd give you a gold star, but I don't
| think HN allows emoji in comments.
| Maursault wrote:
| > It's HTTP all the way down.
|
| Well said, and succinctly.
|
| Whatever works for you. If you have some aversion to
| hotlinked directory listings and need to see a glitzed up
| array of tiny movie posters, go with God. I'm glad your
| stuff works, if it does, and I cry with you if it
| doesn't.
| turtlebits wrote:
| I just put all my media in S3. Local minio and cloud (w/
| presigned urls). Small web app to provide any organization
| required, with a URL handler to open VLC / music player app.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| I used to host my blog from jailbroken iphone 4s via wifi, worked
| great, no issues with power outages also ;p
| rusteh1 wrote:
| I'm using an Acer laptop that must be 15 years old for pfsense,
| never misses a beat, built in UPS! I've got a second laptop, a
| MacBook air from 2012 running a bunch of containers for Plex,
| hassio, etc. Works fine. I've got it all in a 19" rack I built
| out of wood. World's cheapest homelab. Haven't changed it in
| years.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| funny that i have been trying to get my solar inverter data
| into homeassistant and i have already burned through 3
| Raspberry pi 3b+ for some reason. i do not know is it because
| of a bad rs-232 to usb cable or because i am using a mobile
| charger to run the pi itself. i have a 2b but the wifi signal
| isnt great on the usb dongle so for the time being nothing is
| working. i do not want to use a full desktop/laptop because of
| power considerations
| rusteh1 wrote:
| Ha, I did have hassio running on a pi, but it killed the SD
| card twice. Apparently a common issue just due to to the
| volume of writes...
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| People should really stop using SD cards for anything
| halfway important with Pi's. They are proven again and
| again to be just ticking time bombs. With new Pi being able
| to boot from USB just fine, get an SSD even if it costs
| more.
| jasfi wrote:
| The biggest performance factor I've seen is sufficient SSD
| storage, even on older computers.
| merpkz wrote:
| I used to run my old laptop from ~2008 with intel P8600 CPU, 4GB
| RAM and two cheapest kingston 120GB SSDs in RAID0 for postgresql
| dev work. Main reason was that I didn't want to bog my main
| desktop when re-ingesting large data sets and then indexing or
| updating it. Worked very well even though it had SATA II, guess
| random I/O on SSD is no issue even for older hardware. Needless
| to say it beat my main desktops uptime because of having battery
| working as a great UPS. And it could always display htop/iotop on
| it's display as a nice indication that something was being worked
| on. Reusing old hardware is cool.
| JamesBaxter wrote:
| I've used laptops for this purpose in the past but I always
| disliked having my HDDs connected over USB. I was concerned that
| all my storage felt like it was active all the time even when not
| being accessed, I was always concerned my drives would burn out
| faster but I never had any data to back it up.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Some parts of an HDD will burn out faster being power cycled
| frequently than just staying on and at a constant temperature.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| https://hackaday.com/2012/11/02/laptop-motherboard-reborn-as...
|
| I ran a Dell D630 for a number of years without issue.
| yokoprime wrote:
| I ran a D620 24/7 as a server from 2010-ish to 2019. For some
| messed up reason i loaded it with Windows server 2008R2 or some
| crap like that. Never bothered to re-provision it. When I
| eventually replaced it with 2 rPIs, the closet where it lived
| dropped quite a bit in temperature.
| mcovalt wrote:
| > I was able to work around most of the cooling-related issues by
| mounting the laptop vertically...
|
| Have you happened to measure the thermal difference vertically
| mounting your laptop? I also vertically mounted my home server
| laptop for the same reasons, but noticed the fans seemed much
| louder so I returned it to be horizontal like normal. It's as if
| they were designed so that the horizontal surface acts to
| attenuate their high-frequency sounds. It's still annoying, but
| less so. I'm wondering if going vertical again, but throttling
| the CPU as you've done is the way to go.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I ran a Debian web / webdav server for 12+ years on a 2007 Asus
| netbook. It worked flawlessly the whole time.
|
| I only gave it up because I wanted something faster than the
| 100mbps ethernet and I had other computers lying around. Shortly
| thereafter, I wound up switching to a cloud provider.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| I've been using a 2007 17" MacBook Pro as my main machine at my
| desk for the last couple weeks. Honestly it's great. The 17"
| screen is still bright and high enough resolution for me
| (1920x1200), the CPU is perfectly fine for web browsing and some
| light VS Code (2.5GHZ Core 2 Duo). I have Mac OS 10.13 on it
| which is still supported and receiving updates by every App I
| use. The keyboard on these old MacBook Pros is fantastic as well.
|
| I even loaded up Final Cut and dropped in some 1080p h.264
| footage and it edits it just fine.
|
| I think the one good thing about Intel's CPU monopoly for all
| those years is that these old machines are still powerful enough
| today. That is likely going to change now that CPUs are getting
| significant performance boost every year again. A dual core CPU
| that is usable today I suspect will be unbearably slow for the
| web in ~5 years.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Same here, but with a 2009 17". And I run Zorin OS (Linux) on
| it just out of simplicity and overhead since I'm not really
| using it graphically. It was my main work machine for years and
| still plugs along just fine.
| jason0597 wrote:
| > A dual core CPU that is usable today I suspect will be
| unbearably slow for the web in ~5 years.
|
| I will go out and say that it's not CPUs which are ageing
| poorly, it's the web that is getting too bloated for everyone.
| Hacker news is the signature example of how much utility you
| can get out of simple HTML/CSS. I really see little need for
| the behemoths that are Facebook's and Twitter's modern
| interfaces (which in turn make old laptops feel slow, even when
| they're not).
| digitallyfree wrote:
| Most of those web devs have fast workstations and fiber, so
| the sites feel responsive to them in testing. It's easy (but
| incorrect) to assume that your site will run well for
| everyone if it runs well in your environment.
| extra88 wrote:
| > 2007 17" MacBook Pro
|
| >I have Mac OS 10.13
|
| How? Apple officially supports macOS High Sierra (10.13) on Mid
| 2010 or newer MacBook Pros. Even this patcher [0] to install it
| on older machines only supports 2008 and newer Macs.
|
| [0] http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/
| windowsrookie wrote:
| http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/
|
| With that patch. Runs fantastic just like it would had Apple
| allowed it.
|
| oops, my MacBook Pro is an early 2008. I listed a 2007 model
| for sale on eBay this morning and just mixed them up.
| Sometimes my brain is on autopilot.
|
| [Edit] I will add that 2007 models support Mac OS 10.11 and
| every app I use except for Firefox still supports 10.11.
| (chrome still supports 10.11 tho)
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Yes, it is viable, I have a Lenovo 3000 N100 (2007) still running
| as a VPN Server, while I am overseas since 3 years ago. A non-
| tech person living in that house turns it on for me every once in
| a while, as I have not configured any Wake-on-LAN or similar. The
| only new internal parts are the 2Gb of RAM sticks and SSD.
|
| It runs CentOS 7, installed well before Red Hat did the CentOS
| Stream thing. It has a ZTE MF667 GSM USB modem I use to receive
| SMSes for 2FA that local banks still use.
|
| It doesn't have any desktop environment, therefore I only use it
| via SSH. It updates its own IP address via a free subdomain on
| freedns.afraid.org using a cron job.
|
| EDIT: Typo.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I have a similarly spec'ed mini ITX desktop from the same proc
| generation-- it's an i3 instead of an i5 mobile proc but roughly
| the same capabilities. I'm sure it sips a bit more power than the
| laptop but it works fine as a home server.
|
| I'm always a bit surprised by that old machine. It has a slightly
| above mid-range GPU from that time period and the thing can still
| play newer games-- at 720p, with low to mid settings without much
| of an issue. It's certainly not setting any records but for a 10
| year old machine... it just tells me that we reached a point some
| years ago where hardware capabilities were just fine for a wide
| range oF normal activities, and that unless someone is using a
| machine for gaming, large data sets, or compiling lots of code
| then they'd probably ne just fine with a reasonably spec'ed 10
| year old system.
|
| Most of the time that I'm called on to deal with a supposedly
| aging 3-year old computer for a family member that's slowed down
| a bit it has nothing to do with the hardware getting old. Most of
| the time it's accumulated crap running on startup combined with
| having purchased the computer that had the highest # attached to
| storage (ooh 2TB I'll never use!) instead of a snappy 512GB SSD.
| chasil wrote:
| OpenBSD will disable all but the first thread on any Intel
| processor by default. I'm assuming that an Intel i5-3320M (2
| cores 4 threads) is too old to have microcode updates
| addressing the Spectre exploits (Meltdown, Foreshadow, Fallout,
| Zombieload, RIDL etc.), and disabling SMT/HT might be the most
| secure thing to do by default.
|
| This script produces a good assessment of Spectre problems for
| a wide variety of CPUs. I know that they are difficult to
| exploit, and the mitigations are disabled by many because of
| their performance impact.
|
| https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker
| squarefoot wrote:
| Thinkpads are my laptops of choice (writing this on my X240) but
| I'd never use any any laptop as a home server: if something
| breaks there are no spare parts, no PSUs to repair or cards to
| add for more functionality (I simply don't trust USB for disks)
| or swap etc, and the whole machine is not intended to be kept on
| 24/7 (think about the fan wearing, not just the CPU). I could
| only understand if one need to serve files in a emergency
| situation, and I did exactly that many years ago when we had to
| service a server which died without notice at one workplace where
| downtimes were not an option, so I copied all their documents on
| my mini laptop -Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7010, a netbook sized
| marvel well before the word netbook was invented- which became
| the file server with Samba for almost two full days until the
| server came up and I restored their modified files back.
|
| Building a home server from scratch isn't that hard nor
| expensive; I made mine around a Atom Mini-ITX board that despite
| only 4GB RAM and fairly weak CPU does its job managing two ZFS
| mirrors under XigmaNAS (.org). On the ARM side, there are some
| other interesting products such as the Rock Pi 4 and associated
| Penta SATA Hat at radxa.com. I hope also someone will one day
| take on development of the Helios 64 platform at kobol.io. They
| ceased development last summer but the hardware, albeit not yet
| stable, was very promising.
|
| Old laptops still have uses for media playing, test machines, or
| lab instrumentation though; a decent audio card can turn any old
| laptop into a low frequency spectrum analyzer through Jaaa
| (http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/), etc.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > if something breaks there are no spare parts, no PSUs to
| repair or cards to add for more functionality (I simply don't
| trust USB for disks) or swap etc, and the whole machine is not
| intended to be kept on 24/7 (think about the fan wearing, not
| just the CPU).
|
| I've used x220 and x260 as home servers for years. In both
| cases the fan is turned off when the machine is idle
| (TPFanControl can even keep it off under light load). Both
| machines have two internal storage devices (mSATA + 2.5" and
| m.2 + 2.5" respectively). Both have gigabit Ethernet. Both can
| support external SATA storage (via ExpressCard and mini PCIe
| respectively). Both have battery drivers that allows them to be
| discharged periodically while being plugged in.
|
| Many laptops out there are indeed poor home servers, but the
| x2XX line certainly isn't.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-10 23:02 UTC)