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

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.