24 ms·

Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?

125 points by hddherman 4y ago

GianFabien 4y ago
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.
londons_explore 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I have a T430 with an external USB3 dual disk caddy, with 8TB disks, soon to upgrade to 16TB.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      My Synology NAS use an ARM: I chose badly: very few video format are supported..
      - adrian_b 4y ago
        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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    > 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.
- rjsw 4y ago
  An HP MicroServer uses laptop-class components in a different case.
  - znpy 4y ago
    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 4y ago
I'm using a Siemens Futro S300 from 2005 as home server. It has no UPS-like functionality, but is completely silent in operation.
natly 4y ago
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?
amelius 4y ago
Why not, people use RPis as a home server.
- lynguist 4y ago
  RPis don’t have batteries that can wreak havoc.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    If you kludge together a battery backup out of a dodgy $15 USB powerbank you can still have the same issues, right?
ToolsDevler 4y ago
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.
- Multicomp 4y ago
  > 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?
  - ToolsDevler 4y ago
    If you can not remove it (or let it remove by a professional), do not use it for that purpose.
  - culopatin 4y ago
    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.
  - abdusco 4y ago
    You can leave the battery in, but remove the connection to motherboard.
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
    Check the UEFI and disable it there.
- barbs 4y ago
  Interesting. Do you have any sources that say the battery is a fire hazard if plugged in 24/7?
  - 4y ago
Multicomp 4y ago
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 4y ago
laxis96 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.
Havoc 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - Havoc 4y ago
    Yeah it definitely can make sense if you have the gear anyway. Rocked a laptop server for years. Just saying its a decidedly suboptimal form factor for 24/7
henvic 4y ago
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/ 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.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  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.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  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.
rusteh1 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
hellweaver666 4y ago
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).
timonoko 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      That's scary but amazing. Did you do this and have any write ups about it? Sounds interesting!
      - timonoko 4y ago
        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 4y ago
scrapheap 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Same here. I’m writing this from a 2011 Thinkpad x220.
merpkz 4y ago
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.
D13Fd 4y ago
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.
8fingerlouie 4y ago
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/ 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 (€0.35/kwh normal, current around €0.75/kwh), it was costing me about €8.50 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 €75/year (€6.25/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 €2 every month on just electricity. Assuming the hardware costs as much as the electricity (€510 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 4y ago
  > 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?
nergal 4y ago
https://www.sweclockers.com/galleri/15194-laptop-server https://www.sweclockers.com/galleri/15194-laptop-server
znpy 4y ago
Actually thinkpads from that era can host 4 disks: there used to be special deives that would fit into the expresscard slot.
- netsharc 4y ago
  There's this Mini PCI-E to 4xSATA adapter: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32849323827.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32849323827.html , although who knows how the performance is.
- hddherman 4y ago
  Like the thinkmods adapter? https://thinkmods.store/products/expresscard-to-nvme-adapter https://thinkmods.store/products/expresscard-to-nvme-adapter
JamesBaxter 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Some parts of an HDD will burn out faster being power cycled frequently than just staying on and at a constant temperature.
squarefoot 4y ago
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/ http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/), etc.
- tredre3 4y ago
  > 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.
zikduruqe 4y ago
https://hackaday.com/2012/11/02/laptop-motherboard-reborn-as-a-low-wattage-server/ https://hackaday.com/2012/11/02/laptop-motherboard-reborn-as... I ran a Dell D630 for a number of years without issue.
- yokoprime 4y ago
  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.
donatj 4y ago
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.
- goodoldneon 4y ago
  What necessitates the transcoding? Is your TV unable to support some formats?
  - donatj 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Yea, I've seen some spotty support from Plex clients. Also with browsers: IIRC Chrome and Firefox don't support x265 but Safari does
- gh02t 4y ago
  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?
  - donatj 4y ago
    You are correct, I misremembered it being an Intel CPU
    - gh02t 4y ago
      Close enough, regardless of who made it it was a really interesting little oddity in the history of x86.
jasfi 4y ago
The biggest performance factor I've seen is sufficient SSD storage, even on older computers.
ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
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 40€ depending on the configuration. 2012 is too old in my eyes (CPU performance per watt)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- meristohm 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  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.
srmarm 4y ago
I use an old Wyse thin client that I picked up from ebay for ~£25. 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 4y ago
  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.
iancmceachern 4y ago
No
post_break 4y ago
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.
- rootsudo 4y ago
  I always liked this idea, but do you mean newer or older ones? M1 only or the older i3/i5 ones?
  - Joeri 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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
windowsrookie 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  > 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/ http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/
ur-whale 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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.
- hddherman 4y ago
  The ThinkPad T430 is quite repairable in that regard. I've replaced the screen in 20 minutes, replaced the CPU, all the SSD-s are easily accessible, and there's plenty of spare parts out there due to the fact that it's a model that was once popular and bought in bulk by many businesses. But yes, some models probably don't have the same level of second-hand parts market, making repair difficult.
nonameking2026 4y ago
depends on laptop - but yes.
mcovalt 4y ago
> 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.
- hddherman 4y ago
  I don't have any measurements other than the general observations that I shared in the post. It should work better than having it lie down on a wooden desk, for example, as that greatly limits the cooling potential. You only have a tiny gap where the air can move in. It might be that your fan might be old and worn out. As someone who uses older laptops and has given out T420/X230 type machines to family members, I've noticed that sometimes tilting the laptop under use results in vibrations coming from the fan, likely from it being worn out and the blades touching the heatsink and/or plastic.
humanistbot 4y ago
Aren't most of those laptops running CPUS that have massive unpatched security vulnerabilities?
- iotku 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
ineedasername 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker
salmo 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.
- hd4 4y ago
  How does that help someone who wants to stream to a network-enabled TV?
- bo0tzz 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
ivanmontillam 4y ago
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.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
Is there any necessary reason to run a home server in 2022?
- jra_samba 4y ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
- sbehere 4y ago
  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-wan-linux-router-part-2/ https://sagar.se/blog/diy-multi-wan-linux-router/diy-multi-w...
- Aachen 4y ago
  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.
jeffwask 4y ago
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.
Fwirt 4y ago
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.
- ta988 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Have you looked into OpenVSwitch? It may solve some of that too.
- Damogran6 4y ago
  Plus built in UPS.
- throw93232 4y ago
  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.
thenthenthen 4y ago
I used to host my blog from jailbroken iphone 4s via wifi, worked great, no issues with power outages also ;p
- hddherman 4y ago
  That sounds very janky, love it! Do you happen to have images or a blog post about that setup that you'd like to share?
  - thenthenthen 4y ago
    I do have a small write up somewhere... lemmi find it. Software was just some webserver installed via Cydia :) Upload files to it via ssh.
    - thenthenthen 4y ago
      Mmm it used to be featured here[0], but no longer, well fair enough. Maybe i’ll just plug it in again when I have time :) [0] https://homebrewserver.club/ https://homebrewserver.club/
BaudouinVH 4y ago
I'm currently running a yunohost install on 2007 EeePC 701. My only worry : the battery health.
Aachen 4y ago
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 https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html , but should work okay if you don't have too many users.
my69thaccount 4y ago
No ECC
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hellohowareu 4y ago
How about... Internet Service Provider pricing for home servers? Mine in Texas, USA charges about $72 per month to allow me to host my own server, and have 1 static IP. That would be in addition to my $60 residential connection-- for a total of $132. Pretty expensive for me-- $1,584 annually Anyone have a better (cheaper) solution? Granted, with DigitalOcean I pay about $10/month ($120/year) for a tiny server... if I ran my own, the server itself would be much cheaper for the quality (i.e. several GB of RAM & storage space). It's just that the internet service is much more expensive :(

125 points by hddherman 4y ago

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.

londons_explore 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I have a T430 with an external USB3 dual disk caddy, with 8TB disks, soon to upgrade to 16TB.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    My Synology NAS use an ARM: I chose badly: very few video format are supported..
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  > 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.
rjsw 4y ago
An HP MicroServer uses laptop-class components in a different case.
- znpy 4y ago
  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 4y ago

I'm using a Siemens Futro S300 from 2005 as home server. It has no UPS-like functionality, but is completely silent in operation.

natly 4y ago

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?

amelius 4y ago

Why not, people use RPis as a home server.

lynguist 4y ago
RPis don’t have batteries that can wreak havoc.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  If you kludge together a battery backup out of a dodgy $15 USB powerbank you can still have the same issues, right?

ToolsDevler 4y ago

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.

Multicomp 4y ago
> 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?
- ToolsDevler 4y ago
  If you can not remove it (or let it remove by a professional), do not use it for that purpose.
- culopatin 4y ago
  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.
- abdusco 4y ago
  You can leave the battery in, but remove the connection to motherboard.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
  Check the UEFI and disable it there.
barbs 4y ago
Interesting. Do you have any sources that say the battery is a fire hazard if plugged in 24/7?
- 4y ago

Multicomp 4y ago

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 4y ago

laxis96 4y ago

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 4y ago

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.

Havoc 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Yeah it definitely can make sense if you have the gear anyway. Rocked a laptop server for years. Just saying its a decidedly suboptimal form factor for 24/7

henvic 4y ago

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/ 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.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
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.
vladvasiliu 4y ago
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.

rusteh1 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.

hellweaver666 4y ago

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).

timonoko 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    That's scary but amazing. Did you do this and have any write ups about it? Sounds interesting!
    - timonoko 4y ago
      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 4y ago

scrapheap 4y ago

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 4y ago
Same here. I’m writing this from a 2011 Thinkpad x220.

merpkz 4y ago

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.

D13Fd 4y ago

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.

8fingerlouie 4y ago

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/ 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 (€0.35/kwh normal, current around €0.75/kwh), it was costing me about €8.50 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 €75/year (€6.25/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 €2 every month on just electricity. Assuming the hardware costs as much as the electricity (€510 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 4y ago
> 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?

nergal 4y ago

https://www.sweclockers.com/galleri/15194-laptop-server https://www.sweclockers.com/galleri/15194-laptop-server

znpy 4y ago

Actually thinkpads from that era can host 4 disks: there used to be special deives that would fit into the expresscard slot.

netsharc 4y ago
There's this Mini PCI-E to 4xSATA adapter: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32849323827.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32849323827.html , although who knows how the performance is.
hddherman 4y ago
Like the thinkmods adapter? https://thinkmods.store/products/expresscard-to-nvme-adapter https://thinkmods.store/products/expresscard-to-nvme-adapter

JamesBaxter 4y ago

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 4y ago
Some parts of an HDD will burn out faster being power cycled frequently than just staying on and at a constant temperature.

squarefoot 4y ago

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/ http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/), etc.

tredre3 4y ago
> 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.

zikduruqe 4y ago

https://hackaday.com/2012/11/02/laptop-motherboard-reborn-as-a-low-wattage-server/ https://hackaday.com/2012/11/02/laptop-motherboard-reborn-as... I ran a Dell D630 for a number of years without issue.

yokoprime 4y ago
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.

donatj 4y ago

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.

goodoldneon 4y ago
What necessitates the transcoding? Is your TV unable to support some formats?
- donatj 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Yea, I've seen some spotty support from Plex clients. Also with browsers: IIRC Chrome and Firefox don't support x265 but Safari does
gh02t 4y ago
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?
- donatj 4y ago
  You are correct, I misremembered it being an Intel CPU
  - gh02t 4y ago
    Close enough, regardless of who made it it was a really interesting little oddity in the history of x86.

jasfi 4y ago

The biggest performance factor I've seen is sufficient SSD storage, even on older computers.

ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago

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 40€ depending on the configuration. 2012 is too old in my eyes (CPU performance per watt)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
meristohm 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
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.

srmarm 4y ago

I use an old Wyse thin client that I picked up from ebay for ~£25. 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 4y ago
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.

iancmceachern 4y ago

post_break 4y ago

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.

rootsudo 4y ago
I always liked this idea, but do you mean newer or older ones? M1 only or the older i3/i5 ones?
- Joeri 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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

windowsrookie 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
> 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/ http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/

ur-whale 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
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.
hddherman 4y ago
The ThinkPad T430 is quite repairable in that regard. I've replaced the screen in 20 minutes, replaced the CPU, all the SSD-s are easily accessible, and there's plenty of spare parts out there due to the fact that it's a model that was once popular and bought in bulk by many businesses. But yes, some models probably don't have the same level of second-hand parts market, making repair difficult.

nonameking2026 4y ago

depends on laptop - but yes.

mcovalt 4y ago

> 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.

hddherman 4y ago
I don't have any measurements other than the general observations that I shared in the post. It should work better than having it lie down on a wooden desk, for example, as that greatly limits the cooling potential. You only have a tiny gap where the air can move in. It might be that your fan might be old and worn out. As someone who uses older laptops and has given out T420/X230 type machines to family members, I've noticed that sometimes tilting the laptop under use results in vibrations coming from the fan, likely from it being worn out and the blades touching the heatsink and/or plastic.

humanistbot 4y ago

Aren't most of those laptops running CPUS that have massive unpatched security vulnerabilities?

iotku 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.

ineedasername 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker

salmo 4y ago

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 4y ago

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.

hd4 4y ago
How does that help someone who wants to stream to a network-enabled TV?
bo0tzz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.

ivanmontillam 4y ago

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.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

Is there any necessary reason to run a home server in 2022?

jra_samba 4y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
sbehere 4y ago
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-wan-linux-router-part-2/ https://sagar.se/blog/diy-multi-wan-linux-router/diy-multi-w...
Aachen 4y ago
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.

jeffwask 4y ago

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.

Fwirt 4y ago

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.

ta988 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Have you looked into OpenVSwitch? It may solve some of that too.
Damogran6 4y ago
Plus built in UPS.
throw93232 4y ago
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.

thenthenthen 4y ago

I used to host my blog from jailbroken iphone 4s via wifi, worked great, no issues with power outages also ;p

hddherman 4y ago
That sounds very janky, love it! Do you happen to have images or a blog post about that setup that you'd like to share?
- thenthenthen 4y ago
  I do have a small write up somewhere... lemmi find it. Software was just some webserver installed via Cydia :) Upload files to it via ssh.
  - thenthenthen 4y ago
    Mmm it used to be featured here[0], but no longer, well fair enough. Maybe i’ll just plug it in again when I have time :) [0] https://homebrewserver.club/ https://homebrewserver.club/

BaudouinVH 4y ago

I'm currently running a yunohost install on 2007 EeePC 701. My only worry : the battery health.

Aachen 4y ago

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 https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html , but should work okay if you don't have too many users.

my69thaccount 4y ago

No ECC

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hellohowareu 4y ago

How about... Internet Service Provider pricing for home servers? Mine in Texas, USA charges about $72 per month to allow me to host my own server, and have 1 static IP. That would be in addition to my $60 residential connection-- for a total of $132. Pretty expensive for me-- $1,584 annually Anyone have a better (cheaper) solution? Granted, with DigitalOcean I pay about $10/month ($120/year) for a tiny server... if I ran my own, the server itself would be much cheaper for the quality (i.e. several GB of RAM & storage space). It's just that the internet service is much more expensive :(