10 ms·
Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server
- 8K832d7tNmiQ 6y agoMy only main problem with this setup is that you are essentially limited with available mini PCI-E slot, since there's no additional sata port to add. You could probably find one with dvd-drive slot and swap it with HDD caddy.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agotldr: Install Gallium OS (AKA Ubuntu) and run arbitrary server
- teejmya 6y ago"[...]especially knowing it can run on batteries for 10 hours (allegedly), without having a UPS." In my experience of trying the same, this is a swollen Li-Ion battery waiting to happen.
- ianai 6y agoSo unplug it ever few days for an hour?
- pletnes 6y agoOr use a timer, 0.5 h every night?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoI don't know if it works on chromebook hardware, but some laptops let you manually control whether/when the battery is charging, ex. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48534/how-to-adjust-charging-thresholds-of-laptop-battery https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48534/how-to-adjust...
- lsiebert 6y agoGiven that the monitor is a big part of power draw, it will probably last longer than that with the lid closed. Of course if you lose power, you probably lose the wifi router it's connected to anyway.
- freeqaz 6y agoI bought a few cheapo UPS units one time. They're only 2-prong (no ground) and the capacity is low. But they were like $20 each with "refurbished" batteries from the vendor. All of my routers are 2-prong so I have one unit for every router/switch/AP in my house. Actually really helpful and if I was running a Chromebook for a server like this, I could keep my services accessible remotely even if a short power outage happened!
- jankotek 6y agoYep, it is fire hazard.
- mcguire 6y agoEverything with a lithium ion battery is a potential fire hazard.
- Uberphallus 6y agoThere are kernel modules to float charge at 80% (or any %) and not stress the battery.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoIs there a generic way to do it now, or is it still hardware-specific? (Last time I looked I was on a thinkpad and using tp_smapi)
- josefresco 6y agoI have a working Chromebook with a broken screen. Sure would be nice to put it to work! Loved that little machine when it was working, perfect for the kids and to take to client meetings (all day battery). It's now in storage, because paying to fix a screen on a $200-something computer doesn't make sense.
- nfriedly 6y agoWhen I end up with old hardware that I don't want to fix or re-purpose, I tend to put it on an ebay auction for $0.99 + shipping (or whatever), and hope that someone else can get some additional life out of it.
- josefresco 6y agoGood idea, although I'm not wild about selling a Chromebook I can't access but previously had signed into my Google accounts to some stranger.
- nfriedly 6y agoYeah, I suppose that's a reasonable concern in this case.
- toast0 6y agoCan you use an external display? Some chromebooks have hdmi out, and you might be able to use adapters for others?
- ufmace 6y agoYou should be able to de-authorize it from any working Google login on another device - the security page shows all of your other Google sessions, and you can kill any of them. It even nags you to kill ones that haven't been used in over a month or so. Seems to be even more effective than logging out on the device, though that's probably a good idea too if you can.
- qz2 6y agoI use a Lenovo M series Tiny for this. I have a fanless celeron unit running devuan.
- rektide 6y agoServeTheHome has been doing a ProjectMiniMicro on testing out different second hand ~1L sized mini-pcs. The series starts with a fairly unimpressive old Dell unit & some background. Matches a lot of what I've been doing at home. https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... I do like the idea of getting a free battery back-up &built-in crash cart for my server. On the other hand, a lot of these mini-pc's have much more powerful cores & more expandability, typically both an m.2 nvme slot and a 2.5" sata, two so-dimms, and a lot more video & usb out.
- qz2 6y agoI ran a thinkpad T61 as a server for a bit. It’s a decent solution and yes it has a built in UPS :) Really these big clusters rarely need to be run 24/7 so it’s more economical to run one node doing stuff that has to be on all the time. Everything else I run in virtualbox on my desktop which is a fairly hefty Ryzen which gets turned off when I don’t need it. I will replace my Lenovo M series with a VPS node when someone does one that Devuan works on.
- alistairSH 6y agoDo most of these Chromebooks have the SSD soldered onto the SoC? Or, are they replaceable? My use case would be similar to this, but also to serve as a lightweight local backup server (never accessed, unless laptop and iCloud backups fail). One 500gb SSD would be sufficient for my use.
- tyingq 6y agoYes, you're right, most of them do. Most of the Chromebox's don't though. They typically allow memory and disk upgrades, and they are quite cheap on the used market. The ASUS CN60 is popular. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Asus-Chromebox-CN60-Intel-Celeron-2955U-1-40GHz-2GB-RAM-16GB-SSD-Chrome-OS/133525586108?hash=item1f16bec0bc:g:ZVMAAOSwIAxfaLcR https://www.ebay.com/itm/Asus-Chromebox-CN60-Intel-Celeron-2... ($30, buy it now)
- NortySpock 6y agoYou could put the SSD in an external USB enclosure, I've had luck with that strategy for "spinning rust" external drives.
- roland35 6y agoMy raspberry pi 4 has been running as a home server and gitlab runner under my tv stand for a few months now and works great! I just need to set up a backup scheme at some point since the whole thing runs on an sd card. It seems easier than ever to repurpose old hardware for home servers with docker and all the great projects out there!
- m-p-3 6y agoMy main gripe about the Raspberry Pi is the SD card unreliability. I know you can boot from USB now but I wish there was a way to integrate an SSD directly on the board (something in the m.2 2242 form.factor) to make it more resilient and also faster. I'll probably go with a small NUC or something like that instead, especially if there's some AMD Ryzen systems coming out in that form factor.
- dheera 6y agoThat, and also I really want a protected power input jack that isn't a USB jack. Like a good locking 2-pin Molex Micro-Fit connector, or 2-pin JST-EH, XT30, or some other low profile locking or tight-fitting connector would be great. I'm tired of having to power the Pi over the expansion header while people keep saying "don't do that because you bypass the power protection" well no shit but there isn't any other option if I don't want to use USB.
- totalZero 6y agoJust out of curiosity, why not use the USB?
- dheera 6y agoUnreliable for moving robots, not locking, easy to snap off the board, PITA to strip USB-C cables, break out the +5V/GND wires to splice to a DC-DC converter (and the breakout boards take much more space than just a proper power jack). 95% of the time I power Pi with DC-DCs, not from a wall source. (But even for a wall source, it's way way way easier to find 5V3A, 5V5A, even 5V10A adapters that give you nice, easy to use +5V/GND terminals or wires than it is to find a USB wall wart that can deliver enough current for the Pi 4.) In general, I want a power connector for power when integrating the Pi into a larger device.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoOne reason to do this is because, fan-less intel Celeron Chromebooks are the most accessible x86 Single Board Computer(SBC) currently available. If you have a x86 specific workflow, then there are not much choices out there at such low power/price scale e.g. I used one for running a Chromium puppeteer task, as Chromium was nearly unusable in similar or better specced ARM SBCs running Linux. But that's a one-off example, for almost every headless application an ARM SBC like Raspberry Pi makes more sense.
- freeqaz 6y agoIs that because Chromium isn't as optimized for ARM as it is for x86? Or is it just because the ARM SBCs are lower speed cores? Curious to know more specifically
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoI believe believe both to be the reason, but I'm of opinion that optimization issue for ARM contributes more to this problem than lack of power. Chromebooks ditching ARM seems to add credibility to my suspicion, in spite of ARM chromebooks being more favourable to run Android apps.
- ac29 6y agoOne thing to keep in mind: support for running generic Linux on anything past Braswell (so, 2016 or so) in a Chromebook is pretty much impossible - the replacement firmware doesnt exist, or has major issues like not supporting suspend/resume. Most Apollo Lake and newer Chromebooks support running Debian in a VM inside ChromeOS though - there is quite a bit you can do this way.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoThat's a shame, anyways Crostini has improved a lot, I tested the same workflow mentioned in parent and had no specific issues. But there's no USB-passthrough yet and so using Bluetooth or other USB dependent hardware isn't possible in Crostini yet.
- Animats 6y agoI use Asus EeePC subnotebooks for that. They're about US$30-$50 on eBay, and there are models with 64-bit CPUs. I run the CPU and disk test, wipe the disk, and install XUbuntu. A few script mods make the device stay on when the lid is closed, but the screen turns off. It's more convenient than packaging up a Raspberry PI. You get keyboard, screen, disk, power supply, and battery, plus some USB ports, in one compact unit.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoBut doesn't that use way more power than a pi? And weren't they also slow AF? I remember I had a celeron notebook from 2011 and it was slow back then even with an SSD. I gave up on the idea that it would be an efficient always-on server.
- freeqaz 6y agoProbably slower too. Depending on the model of CPU. Those early 32-bit Atoms were soooooo slow!
- throwaway894345 6y agoOh man, I forgot about EeePCs... I had one of those in ~2010. 32-bit with 1GB of ram and a single 1GHz CPU IIRC. 10" display. Good times.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoDon't forget the extra USB ports and SD card slot. Some Chromebooks and the older RPis have only two USB ports. If you run NetBSD, you will not have to disable anything for the device to stay on when the lid is closed.
- rootsudo 6y agoI disagree, a 10yr old laptop, that was designed to be bargain bin parts, for a now dead niche of netbooks, that has 10yr old parts can't compete with a pi4 for $30 ($50 nicely equipped w/ case and SD card) or a pi nano. It's not even close. The LCD, battery and I/O keyboard/mouse/usb are nice but, no hdmi, just VGA... It makes sense if it's Free but even then, the pi simplifies this so much and then you have no moving parts.
- mrsaint 6y agoI have an ancient Thinkpad X200s with a cracked screen. For years it's been my favorite go-to home server running Linux + Docker. :P
- ianhowson 6y agoSeconding this. X200/210/220 are dirt cheap, come with modern CPUs, cooling fans (!), quality Ethernet ports and run x86-64 containers unmodified. You can cram 16GB of RAM and SATA SSDs into an X220. Much less hassle and similar price to an RPi.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoWhere the hell is a X200 is similarly priced to a RPi?! In my neck o the woods(Austria) a X200 series is around 150-200 Euros. Add 16GB of Ram and an SSD an you're looking at at least 250 Euros instead of just 40 for a PI.
- ianhowson 6y agoMy beef with the Pi is that it's not just EUR40 for the device; you also need to add on: - power supply - quality SD card - heatsinks - a case and then deal with - non-x86 - thermal issues - SD cards - the CPU is too tiny to do anything useful anyway Sorry to hear that X2x0 is expensive where you live. I find that the small additional investment over the RPi is worthwhile.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoYou forgot to add the extra power consumption of a laptop vs a pi. It adds up.
- NortySpock 6y agoCurious what workloads you're intending to run on the RPI that you find the CPU is tiny. Granted, the RPi2 had a slow CPU, but I am finding the RPi4 is snappy enough for "serve a website out of a docker container" workloads. I am hitting SD card I/O limits faster than I hit CPU limits.
- superkuh 6y agoThis list isn't so much repurposing a chromebook for a home server as setting up a complex work environment on a chromebook. I hope it doesn't discourage people from just running a simple webserver on their extra computers. It's pretty much just 'apt-get install nginx' and a port forward on your router for ubuntu-flavors, isn't it? All that extra software setup for managing container and databases for monitoring and visually displaying logs, the extra software for dealing with the bandwidth that comes with containers, etc, doesn't have meaning or use in this context. He doesn't even actually mention which webserver he uses. It's all meta and no server.
- Theodores 6y agoHarsh but fair. If he had explained that he wanted to get more experience playing with Docker and other fancy toys then he could have won you over. Getting Docker to work on a 2Gb/16Gb Celeron Chromebook with a cheap USB stick is a fair technical challenge. But you are right though. You can apt-get install nginx on Gallium to run many things. Fair use cases include an OwnCloud, a media server, a home security gizmo using the microphone and camera, a personal website and much else that could be done. It would be great to run these things and it be next to no power with a refurbished/recycled machine. Or you could run Virtualbox to host another flavour of Linux so you can host Docker and use that to test your installation, no actual apps or real work done at all.
- Johnny555 6y agoIt's pretty much just 'apt-get install nginx' and a port forward on your router Isn't this what leads to home networks being cracked and added to botnets (or your webcams broadcast to the public)? If you aren't willing to commit to good sysadmin practices like doing regular patches and segmenting off the public webserver from the rest of your network, you're pretty much guaranteeing that you're going to get hacked some day. Auto updates can help, but if you're not actively monitoring, some day an update is going to fail to apply due to a package conflict and you're going to remain unpatched. If all you need is a simple webserver, you're better off letting someone else host it.
- superkuh 6y ago
- brnt 6y agoI did this with an old phone with broken screen! Put in an SD card and it runs Resilio Sync (you could also run Syncthing). Works very well, and it sips power.
- sergeykish 6y agoI use netbook as wifi router [1] / storage (sshfs, samba). To disable sleep on lid close [2] /etc/systemd/logind.conf HandleLidSwitch=ignore Never thought of it as UPS, probably can implement graceful shutdown on low battery level [3] [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/software_access_point https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/software_access_point [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management#ACPI_events https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management#ACPI_e... [3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/laptop#Hibernate_on_low_battery_level https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/laptop#Hibernate_on_low...
- tootie 6y agoMy old chromebook is being repurposed as a chromebook. My daughter's school has asked kids to bring computers to class this year. Mostly for Google classroom usage between remote and in person days. We still have the 11" Acer I got her 5 years ago for $170 and it still runs ok. I taped over the cracks in the case and now she has a great tabeltop device and if she loses it, I don't care.