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If you want a poors man home server just repurpose old laptops. I do with a bunch of them and it's fine. I know laptops are not for that, but they wouldn't have

If you want a poors man home server just repurpose old laptops. I do with a bunch of them and it's fine. I know laptops are not for that, but they wouldn't have any other use anyway, and it's like a server with an UPS built in. Most tasks are running scrapers or data wrangling so I don't have to keep my desktop running. I've been doing this for maybe close to two years, and for now it works. I wouldn't recommend for VMs though. Also, your router needs an UPS too but it will be fine with a cheap one.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
> I wouldn't recommend for VMs though. Why not? I have a laptop with a 4th gen i5 that has VT-x. I've upgraded it to 16 GB RAM and an SSD. For now, it's a Spotify connect player but I'm contemplating running a couple VMs on it too, like pi-hole and whatnot.
- iagovar 6y ago
  Well, but that's not that old. If you have that lying around then definitely.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    4th gen is 2013-2014, so up to 6-7 years old. Sure, that’s still reasonable, but it’s not young. I’m also using similar class hardware for my VM server at home. Works well enough for home workloads, and for everything else there’s the cloud on demand.
    - iagovar 6y ago
      I have an thinkpad x220 with some core-duo on it and 4GB Ram, can't remember, and it really was struggling with VMs. Didn't really cared much to check the specs. Just tried some debian VMs and it was less than satisfying.
drcongo 6y ago
I've been running a 2008 MacBook Pro as a server for 10 years. I've replaced the battery once, about 2 years ago, and one of the fans about six months ago. Other than that, it's been on the whole time.
- sgt 6y ago
  Using a MacBook Pro 2015 model as a server. Works great.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  What OS do/did you run on it? Thinking about repurposing an old 2011 Mac Mini as a server, it should still be more than capable, but since it stopped getting newer macOS versions a few years back it wouldn't get security updates, that kinda worries me.
  - drcongo 6y ago
    Just checked, it's actually a mid-2009 MBP and its running 10.11.6 - it's not had a security update since 2018, which yeah, that is a little worrying. Might wipe it and install Ubuntu if there's such a thing as Firewire800 drivers for it.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  10.6.8?
ashtonkem 6y ago
I run a Raspberry Pi 4b, recently upgraded from a 3b+, and I believe that a lot of personal computing could (and maybe should) be run on them. They're quiet, energy efficient, and you could probably run them on a battery if you needed it. I wouldn't run VMs on it, but I do run docker on it, and that works just fine.
- iagovar 6y ago
  But it's ARM and that poses some problems. For example, you can't put windows into it, and some of my apps are Windows. Also, RDP. I still hope for something so smooth in Linux, using console meanwhile.
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    It's not officially supported, but you can get windows to run on a Pi 4.
    - jmnicolas 6y ago
      If you're speaking about Windows IOT, it's clearly not production ready (and not compatible with the PI4 AFAIK). I did some tests on a RPI3 a year or 2 ago and showing some scrolling test in a UWP app was making the whole machine lag and be unresponsive.
  - Tiksi 6y ago
    In my experience XDMCP/X11 forwarding works reasonably well, as long as your network is fairly quick and reliable.
- silicon2401 6y ago
  what's uptime like on an Rpi? I want to start working on a home website and have an old rpi laying around. But I've read that their reliability isn't great since they use SD cards. Any advice?
  - mxuribe 6y ago
vmception 6y ago
Traders still seem to be the most gullible when it comes to buying unnecessary hardware. They really think their prosumer workstation is going to give them an advantage. I guess thats one silver lining about Robinhood’s proliferation, many people know its good enough. Gullible traders still misread options settlement UI but seems there is a selective evolution at play to make that less common too.
- therein 6y ago
  Given how unoptimized frontends for crypto exchanges tend to be and how rapidly the trading volume could spike in these markets, actually it might make a difference.
mettamage 6y ago
Haha, I started doing this yesterday. IMO it beats an RPI 4 [1], which I will repurpose as vpn and wifi extender. [1] Quite often, I couldn’t ssh into the pi for all kinds of reasons. With a laptop, I don’t have to worry about that.
- Cyphase 6y ago
  Why was it a problem with the Pi and not a laptop?
  - mettamage 6y ago
    A laptop has a screen, keyboard and trackpad. If there was a problem, I would just grab it.
    - Cyphase 6y ago
      Ah, I read your comment as meaning you had problems SSHing into the Pi, but not SSHing into the laptop. Got it.
  - 8K832d7tNmiQ 6y ago
    not only Pi, any arm-based SBC I bought always hang sometimes even with heatsink and fan applied to it.
rudiv 6y ago
Been running a 2010 MBP for the last few months hosting bitwarden, a samba file share, a DNS server, and a ton of other stuff. It's been pretty great so far, so much so that I dug out another old laptop and set it up as a pi-hole for a friend. Have you any suggestions for increasing the amount of storage one could address? I can't find any Thunderbolt 2 or FireWire enclosures so I'm sadly limited to the two USB3.0 ports. Right know my plan is to resort to putting a high-capacity 2.5" hdd inside the MBP and adding a usb hdd in addition to the one I already have. But that doesn't strike me as ideal for some reason.
- iagovar 6y ago
  2.5 SSD for frequent stuff and USB HDD, you have no more options.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Are you saying you can't use a hub? USB 3 is fast enough for a hard drive.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
Just be sure to check on them every once in awhile, lest the battery swell go unnoticed. https://old.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/ https://old.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/
- antisthenes 6y ago
  That's much less of a problem for laptops whose batteries are just 6-8 18650 cells in a plastic enclosure.
  - Tiksi 6y ago
    Well, used to be. As I understand it newer laptops are more and more often using pouch style batteries to keep things thinner by using any available space.
bserge 6y ago
Laptops are incredibly versatile haha. You can take the display and keybooard off for a smaller footprint and better cooling, too. Relatively recent smartphones also work great for a lot of stuff.
- solstice 6y ago
  Using smartphones is an interesting idea. Can you recommend any reading material on this?
  - bserge 6y ago
    They're just general computing devices. With the right software (and/or some hardware) you can turn them into whatever you want. CCTV, web server, door/gate intercom, electric meter reader/submitter, NAS (maybe with multiple drives using a powered USB hub), Wifi AP, media center, desktop computer, etc
cbanek 6y ago
Yeah I just repurposed a 2015 MBP as a desktop now that it is painfully heavier than my 2018 12" Macbook. I just found out that it could do 4K60 through the display port, and as a desktop machine it's great. Then the next level of slipping down the chain is the headless server or timelapse photo taker. :)
mulmen 6y ago
I was considering this but then I stumbled across some ~7 year old micro towers. Those little thin client boxes that were popular for a short time as a thing that can connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor to a corporate network. Refurbished with a Windows license (if I ever want to use it) was less than a surplus laptop. Power usage seems acceptable but I'll compare with a Kill-A-Watt. I have one on the way and if it works out I'll grab a few more. I do like the idea of a surplus laptop cluster, mostly because of the built in UPS factor but there's a lot of wasted hardware there, such as the monitor and keyboard. But I suppose that's kind of a feature too. I have shower thoughts of some kind of custom bladecenter made of old laptops but that's a lot of work for probably zero benefit.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  To me the main problem would be the noise. I don't have a dedicated server room and even if me and my wife's bedroom + living room is quite big it'd still be annoying during the night. But I am quite fond of the idea to reuse old laptops regardless. Can you post a link to those 7 year old micro towers, please?
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Yeah noise is why I didn’t go with surplus servers, and the power requirements. Proper servers are actually pretty cheap, less than these tiny towers even. But the power and noise is just too much. Plus less horsepower is actually more interesting to me so my workloads have a hope of hitting scaling limitations. The tiny tower I have on the way is one of these: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-tiny/m73/ https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-t... They’re available in a bunch of configurations and on multiple sites so you can look around for a good deal that fits your needs. I found one with an SSD for additional power savings.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      Thanks a lot, I will. In regards of power efficiency I'd still be drooling over one of the Xeon D-1600 configurations but haven't found one that's not in a rack form factor yet.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
This has served me well for a year ($80 Dell laptop w/ an i5 from Craigslist) but I did just splurge on a Synology NAS and an APC UPS because having multiple external hard drives plugged into the laptop was quite dicey. The laptop is still a Plex server but now I have peace of mind for the data.
Dylan16807 6y ago
As long as you don't want any 3.5 inch drives, sure. Otherwise you probably still want a way to power those.
paul_f 6y ago
I'm curious, with shared servers at Digital Ocean available for $5 or $10 per month, why run a home server anymore? What is the value to having it local?
- COGlory 6y ago
  Privacy, and learning to use enterprise equipment
- jonpurdy 6y ago
  I've been considering this calculation for a year or so now. I spend an average of $20/mo on small VMs for testing (including the occasional $1/hr VMs for a couple of hours for heavy loads). I thought I should replace my 2012 Mac Mini (HTPC) with a modern Hackintosh and 6c/12t or 8c/16t and do my testing workloads on that (or even just use my current 2c/4t for small workloads). But it's just so easy to spin up DO droplets within seconds and do so programmatically. Plus you can snapshot and create droplets from those, and turn on backups if you need to.
- onedr0p 6y ago
  If I were to translate my current cpu, ram and disk usage to the cloud it would well be over $5 or $10 a month. Probably more like $500

vladvasiliu 6y ago

> I wouldn't recommend for VMs though. Why not? I have a laptop with a 4th gen i5 that has VT-x. I've upgraded it to 16 GB RAM and an SSD. For now, it's a Spotify connect player but I'm contemplating running a couple VMs on it too, like pi-hole and whatnot.

iagovar 6y ago
Well, but that's not that old. If you have that lying around then definitely.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  4th gen is 2013-2014, so up to 6-7 years old. Sure, that’s still reasonable, but it’s not young. I’m also using similar class hardware for my VM server at home. Works well enough for home workloads, and for everything else there’s the cloud on demand.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    I have an thinkpad x220 with some core-duo on it and 4GB Ram, can't remember, and it really was struggling with VMs. Didn't really cared much to check the specs. Just tried some debian VMs and it was less than satisfying.

drcongo 6y ago

I've been running a 2008 MacBook Pro as a server for 10 years. I've replaced the battery once, about 2 years ago, and one of the fans about six months ago. Other than that, it's been on the whole time.

sgt 6y ago
Using a MacBook Pro 2015 model as a server. Works great.
dividedbyzero 6y ago
What OS do/did you run on it? Thinking about repurposing an old 2011 Mac Mini as a server, it should still be more than capable, but since it stopped getting newer macOS versions a few years back it wouldn't get security updates, that kinda worries me.
- drcongo 6y ago
  Just checked, it's actually a mid-2009 MBP and its running 10.11.6 - it's not had a security update since 2018, which yeah, that is a little worrying. Might wipe it and install Ubuntu if there's such a thing as Firewire800 drivers for it.
dillonmckay 6y ago
10.6.8?

ashtonkem 6y ago

I run a Raspberry Pi 4b, recently upgraded from a 3b+, and I believe that a lot of personal computing could (and maybe should) be run on them. They're quiet, energy efficient, and you could probably run them on a battery if you needed it. I wouldn't run VMs on it, but I do run docker on it, and that works just fine.

iagovar 6y ago
But it's ARM and that poses some problems. For example, you can't put windows into it, and some of my apps are Windows. Also, RDP. I still hope for something so smooth in Linux, using console meanwhile.
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  It's not officially supported, but you can get windows to run on a Pi 4.
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    If you're speaking about Windows IOT, it's clearly not production ready (and not compatible with the PI4 AFAIK). I did some tests on a RPI3 a year or 2 ago and showing some scrolling test in a UWP app was making the whole machine lag and be unresponsive.
- Tiksi 6y ago
  In my experience XDMCP/X11 forwarding works reasonably well, as long as your network is fairly quick and reliable.
silicon2401 6y ago
what's uptime like on an Rpi? I want to start working on a home website and have an old rpi laying around. But I've read that their reliability isn't great since they use SD cards. Any advice?
- mxuribe 6y ago

vmception 6y ago

Traders still seem to be the most gullible when it comes to buying unnecessary hardware. They really think their prosumer workstation is going to give them an advantage. I guess thats one silver lining about Robinhood’s proliferation, many people know its good enough. Gullible traders still misread options settlement UI but seems there is a selective evolution at play to make that less common too.

therein 6y ago
Given how unoptimized frontends for crypto exchanges tend to be and how rapidly the trading volume could spike in these markets, actually it might make a difference.

mettamage 6y ago

Haha, I started doing this yesterday. IMO it beats an RPI 4 [1], which I will repurpose as vpn and wifi extender. [1] Quite often, I couldn’t ssh into the pi for all kinds of reasons. With a laptop, I don’t have to worry about that.

Cyphase 6y ago
Why was it a problem with the Pi and not a laptop?
- mettamage 6y ago
  A laptop has a screen, keyboard and trackpad. If there was a problem, I would just grab it.
  - Cyphase 6y ago
    Ah, I read your comment as meaning you had problems SSHing into the Pi, but not SSHing into the laptop. Got it.
- 8K832d7tNmiQ 6y ago
  not only Pi, any arm-based SBC I bought always hang sometimes even with heatsink and fan applied to it.

rudiv 6y ago

Been running a 2010 MBP for the last few months hosting bitwarden, a samba file share, a DNS server, and a ton of other stuff. It's been pretty great so far, so much so that I dug out another old laptop and set it up as a pi-hole for a friend. Have you any suggestions for increasing the amount of storage one could address? I can't find any Thunderbolt 2 or FireWire enclosures so I'm sadly limited to the two USB3.0 ports. Right know my plan is to resort to putting a high-capacity 2.5" hdd inside the MBP and adding a usb hdd in addition to the one I already have. But that doesn't strike me as ideal for some reason.

iagovar 6y ago
2.5 SSD for frequent stuff and USB HDD, you have no more options.
Dylan16807 6y ago
Are you saying you can't use a hub? USB 3 is fast enough for a hard drive.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

Just be sure to check on them every once in awhile, lest the battery swell go unnoticed. https://old.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/ https://old.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/

antisthenes 6y ago
That's much less of a problem for laptops whose batteries are just 6-8 18650 cells in a plastic enclosure.
- Tiksi 6y ago
  Well, used to be. As I understand it newer laptops are more and more often using pouch style batteries to keep things thinner by using any available space.

bserge 6y ago

Laptops are incredibly versatile haha. You can take the display and keybooard off for a smaller footprint and better cooling, too. Relatively recent smartphones also work great for a lot of stuff.

solstice 6y ago
Using smartphones is an interesting idea. Can you recommend any reading material on this?
- bserge 6y ago
  They're just general computing devices. With the right software (and/or some hardware) you can turn them into whatever you want. CCTV, web server, door/gate intercom, electric meter reader/submitter, NAS (maybe with multiple drives using a powered USB hub), Wifi AP, media center, desktop computer, etc

cbanek 6y ago

Yeah I just repurposed a 2015 MBP as a desktop now that it is painfully heavier than my 2018 12" Macbook. I just found out that it could do 4K60 through the display port, and as a desktop machine it's great. Then the next level of slipping down the chain is the headless server or timelapse photo taker. :)

mulmen 6y ago

I was considering this but then I stumbled across some ~7 year old micro towers. Those little thin client boxes that were popular for a short time as a thing that can connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor to a corporate network. Refurbished with a Windows license (if I ever want to use it) was less than a surplus laptop. Power usage seems acceptable but I'll compare with a Kill-A-Watt. I have one on the way and if it works out I'll grab a few more. I do like the idea of a surplus laptop cluster, mostly because of the built in UPS factor but there's a lot of wasted hardware there, such as the monitor and keyboard. But I suppose that's kind of a feature too. I have shower thoughts of some kind of custom bladecenter made of old laptops but that's a lot of work for probably zero benefit.

pdimitar 6y ago
To me the main problem would be the noise. I don't have a dedicated server room and even if me and my wife's bedroom + living room is quite big it'd still be annoying during the night. But I am quite fond of the idea to reuse old laptops regardless. Can you post a link to those 7 year old micro towers, please?
- mulmen 6y ago
  Yeah noise is why I didn’t go with surplus servers, and the power requirements. Proper servers are actually pretty cheap, less than these tiny towers even. But the power and noise is just too much. Plus less horsepower is actually more interesting to me so my workloads have a hope of hitting scaling limitations. The tiny tower I have on the way is one of these: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-tiny/m73/ https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-t... They’re available in a bunch of configurations and on multiple sites so you can look around for a good deal that fits your needs. I found one with an SSD for additional power savings.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Thanks a lot, I will. In regards of power efficiency I'd still be drooling over one of the Xeon D-1600 configurations but haven't found one that's not in a rack form factor yet.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

This has served me well for a year ($80 Dell laptop w/ an i5 from Craigslist) but I did just splurge on a Synology NAS and an APC UPS because having multiple external hard drives plugged into the laptop was quite dicey. The laptop is still a Plex server but now I have peace of mind for the data.

Dylan16807 6y ago

As long as you don't want any 3.5 inch drives, sure. Otherwise you probably still want a way to power those.

paul_f 6y ago

I'm curious, with shared servers at Digital Ocean available for $5 or $10 per month, why run a home server anymore? What is the value to having it local?

COGlory 6y ago
Privacy, and learning to use enterprise equipment
jonpurdy 6y ago
I've been considering this calculation for a year or so now. I spend an average of $20/mo on small VMs for testing (including the occasional $1/hr VMs for a couple of hours for heavy loads). I thought I should replace my 2012 Mac Mini (HTPC) with a modern Hackintosh and 6c/12t or 8c/16t and do my testing workloads on that (or even just use my current 2c/4t for small workloads). But it's just so easy to spin up DO droplets within seconds and do so programmatically. Plus you can snapshot and create droplets from those, and turn on backups if you need to.
onedr0p 6y ago
If I were to translate my current cpu, ram and disk usage to the cloud it would well be over $5 or $10 a month. Probably more like $500