Anyone else use their crappy old laptops to host servers? lol
Anyone else use their crappy old laptops to host servers? lol
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 🤦♂️
9Conclusion: I now have a laptop and a RPI running 24/7 🤦♂️
Sounds like a win to me. lol
2My 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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I turned my ten year old Toshiba i7 with a cracked LCD into a virtual fish tank after the last fish died.
7ATBGE!
2I salute your creativity haha
1Cool. A friend had one in a fireplace that played a fire video in the evenings - with the crackling sounds too.
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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
5Do you have any photos of this?
Would love to see how this looks in practice!3Up! Also would love to see how it looks
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You have a tutorial? That sounds awesome.
2This article talks about turning a laptop into a rack mounted computer. Each computer will be different recreating something like this based off what ports it has and where.
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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
3The battery is usually long gone by the time it becomes a server though.
Really old laptops have PCMCIA slots too that you can hook into newer interfaces. I used a PCMCIA eSATA card for a laptop NAS!
1The battery is usually long gone by the time it becomes a server though.
Absolutely. I still have my laptop from high school, and it's battery has been long gone. The screen is on its last legs.
Maybe it will be a server one day, but for now it's my DnD laptop. Sucks a bit when somebody bumps the power cord and the battlemap turns off. But it's still limping by.
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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.
2based and sustainability-pilled
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Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!
1I used to use my 10 year old old netbook (intel atom n270 2gb ram - ubuntu server) as a server for Plex, calibre, pihole, ssftp.
Now I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB Ram, as it consumes less electricity. Old laptops are consuming (except HDDs/SSDs) 10-30 watt. Raspberry Pi in indle consumes 2watt and when i am using it at mac power with an external hdd consumes 12watt.
1No, 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.
1U a good person.
0Unless her house burned down due to the battery in the old laptop...
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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.
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