Selfhosted

Yeah, using a 9 year old work laptop as my home server. Then with the surging energy prices last year I decided to switch out that laptop with a raspberry pi 4 as server.

Conclusion: I now have a laptop and a RPI running 24/7 🤦‍♂️

i disaseemble all my laptops so they are just a motherboard, screw them into sheets of MDF, place vertically, and use them as servers.

NAS, pihole, plex, etc

I'm patiently waiting for someone (anyone) I know to decide to throw out an old laptop.

Gonna bite their hand off for it, install Linux and proceed to fuck around and find out.

I turned my ten year old Toshiba i7 with a cracked LCD into a virtual fish tank after the last fish died.

My laptop for home use is almost 15 years old. My desktop is almost 11 years old. My work laptop is 8 years old. Here they are talking about more modern and powerful equipment, defining them as obsolete. I don't know, maybe we should start questioning if these consumption dynamics are a bit harmful.

Do you mean a server with a built-in UPS, monitor, keyboard AND mouse? Hell yeah! My old Samsung Laptop has been running my game servers for quite a while now, and I have an old Asus running PiHole and Headcale. Works great!

They're usually very inefficient energetically though

My first NAS was an old IBM X40 and two USB3-Disks.

those where the days :)

@rockhandle That's how I started. Proxmox on a 9 year old laptop with LXC and VMs. Even now that laptop runs proxmox with pfsense and pihole VMs and is serving as my home router :)

My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.

All day long. I ssh into mine & run docker. Works surprisingly well. Better than the $5/month droplet.

yep!

I used to run an old Dell R610. Used a decent amount of power.

Switched to an old 4th gen quadcore i7 laptop.

Been running great, uses less power, has a built in display and keyboard.

Linux base, Docker Env for most everything else.

Old laptops can are actually great servers—hear me out:

• Built in KVM
• Low power consumption
• Battery = UPS for power blips
• SSD (sometimes)
• Wifi + Ethernet = Redundant NICs
• Quiet (sometimes)
• Small form factor

The big issue with laptops tends to be cooling, but something with a decent CPU and enough RAM can still do a good job since in many cases you're not tapping the graphics chip/core, which is often the biggest source of heat.

That said, for small personal services even an 8GB Pi4 can do a pretty decent job.

For years I had an Asus EEE PC as my home NAS.

Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!

Absolutely and you will feel right at home over here on our self-hosting community: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting

At work we had lots of old laptops, poor battery life, small hard drives, etc. I cleaned them up and installed pfsense on them and gave them to colleagues as home firewall/kid web filters. Others we popped xp on them and set up mame / emulator to give to their kids.

Yup! Usually running some local/dev docker containers for work, so I don't slow down the laptop I'm actually using with background stuff. They get hot, and I keep them in places where they get hot, but they haven't died from the heat yet.

I use old Lenovo tiny units... Can pick them up cheap when businesses upgrade, chuck in a bit extra ram, a new SSD, add it to my proxmox cluster... Then look for excuses to use it so I can justify having yet another one

Yes! My old framework laptop motherboard runs all my home services without issue. Just the right amount of power for my use case and it sips power.

when I first explored the world of kubernetes my nodes consisted of discarded laptops I've dubbed "half-tops," or truly "headless" servers. it was a beautiful abomination.

Many years ago I used old desktop PCs. But nowadays VPS have become so cheap that it's just not worth the hastle, in my opinion.

As a test machine, yes. As a production machine... Meh.

Little memory, slow and small disk...

I have an 8 core i7 Alienware 17r3 with 32GB RAM I use to host a pen-test lab. It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.

Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.

My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.

I used to but the fan eventually broke. It works if I flip it upsidedown so the vents face upwards but the CPU is still hitting 90 degrees idle 💀

No, I use the old desktops for that.

Old laptops usually seem to go to other people:

• My first one I gave one to a girl who's house burned down in my street.
• The second one went to my ex who is on really hard financial times and the old Macbook she got from another good soul died on her.
• The third one I traded in with my mom who really wanted a light one, and in exchange she contributed to...
• My fourth one that had more power for compiling things in my studies. This one I still have and use occasionally.