Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?

https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2022/05/10/thinkpad-as-a-home-server/

by hddherman • 4 years ago

125 171 4 years ago

GianFabien• 4 years 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_explore2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I have a T430 with an external USB3 dual disk caddy, with 8TB disks, soon to upgrade to 16TB.

2000UltraDeluxe• 4 years 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_b2• 4 years 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.

currysausage2• 4 years 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_explore2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

An HP MicroServer uses laptop-class components in a different case.

znpy2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Why not, people use RPis as a home server.

lynguist• 4 years ago

RPis don’t have batteries that can wreak havoc.

BizarroLand2• 4 years ago

If you kludge together a battery backup out of a dodgy $15 USB powerbank you can still have the same issues, right?

ToolsDevler4• 4 years 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.

Multicomp2• 4 years 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?

ToolsDevler4• 4 years ago

If you can not remove it (or let it remove by a professional), do not use it for that purpose.

culopatin• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

You can leave the battery in, but remove the connection to motherboard.

ThatMedicIsASpy2• 4 years ago

Check the UEFI and disable it there.

barbs• 4 years ago

Interesting. Do you have any sources that say the battery is a fire hazard if plugged in 24/7?

doubled1122• 4 years ago

I'm curious too.

Every thread about always on laptops leads me to this question. People leave their laptops plugged in all the time.

I've run about 5 laptops 24x7 over the years for at least a year a piece. No issues.

I put an HP Envy onto a shelf in the garage, and the battery swelled enough to ruin the touchpad and case.

In all the laptops I have owned, the only problem battery was idle, unplugged and uncharged.

hulitu• 4 years ago

We have at work some HP laptops and got a strong recommandation from IT to not keep them plugged in all day due to the risk of swollen batteries.

ringworld• 4 years ago

Depends on the hardware - I run 2x Dell E6330 server-laptops and their BIOS has an option to change the charging configuration to "primarily always on AC" - some Latitudes are designed to run docked all the time as "business PCs".

While we're here, turn off TurboBoost in BIOS to keep them running cooler with the lid closed, I've found it really helps when tasks get a little bursty.

dlivingston• 4 years ago

Curious. My understanding is that, when connected to power, most modern devices bypass the battery entirely when it's above some threshold of charge state.

Jaruzel• 4 years ago

I have some old Dell laptops that most definitely don't do that. Left running on AC for several hours, the batteries get very warm due to the constant trickle charging.

NikolaNovak• 4 years ago

>The hardware and especially the battery are not designed to run under these conditions.

What does that mean?

My laptops run 24x7, not as server but as docked workstations. I have never considered that as a safety risk, and definitely have not considered it outside of norm. At work for a public sector client, we have two floors (few hundred?) laptops plugged in and running 24x7 (ask from IT department is to leave them on overnight for maintenance). Sanity or eco-friendliness aside, this is a first I heard that laptop cannot / should not be run around the clock plugged in...

ToolsDevler4• 4 years ago

So I try to address many questions here:

1) Source? Well, as it has been also written here, I hear that from every IT-Department I worked with at work. Also learned it once the hard way and got a swollen battery. It was an old old laptop (around 2003 IIRC) and old laptop batteries are an own story, but since people want to repurpose old hardware, I think this is a reasonable hint. Also Linus Tech Tips brought this up in one video.

Also, the newer your laptop the better it might handle it, but I wouldn't bet on it.

2) Why? From my understanding the constant on/off charging and heat development (also due to faster dust buildup. If the fan runs 24/7 it sucks a lot more dust into the case) is the problem. Especially if you run heavy tasks over a longer period, the hardware will heat up to a level that it is not designed to do.

I will grant that the lighter the load you put on that hardware, the less all this precautions matter. But my principle is, that if something is not designed (and likely not tested) for something, proceed with caution if you understand what you're doing, or leave it be. So if you want to host your static website on it, you might never ever be near any problems. But I still wouldn't recommend it.

BizarroLand2• 4 years ago

Lithium batteries have an approximate 10 year shelf life under optimal conditions. Possibly less when heated consistently by a laptop running 24/7.

If your laptop is already 6-8 years old then if you want to keep the battery in as a UPS system it may be worth considering purchasing a new replacement battery and installing that (if it has not already been replaced)

Most computers will only need a small screwdriver and 10 minutes of work to swap the battery, although you will want to check youtube/ifixit for your specific model first just to make sure the battery isn't glued in or otherwise difficult to remove and replace.

ToolsDevler4• 4 years ago

Not the video from LTT I ment, but another one where the heat -> swollen battery problem is mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7-sECF3Dw

jotm• 4 years ago

I ran laptops 24/7 on AC with the batteries acting as UPS for over 15 years. Granted, all of them had removable ones with 18650 cells, so no swelling.

The charging method has been standardized a long time ago - they are charged to ~96%, then cut off, if they fall below ~94% they are topped up again.

There is a significant loss of battery life if you do that for years. I used to unplug some of them and do 2-3 full discharge/charge cycles, that usually helped increase the battery life.

Some laptops use the battery as additional power when running at wattage beyond what the AC can provide.

If you want to be safe with your model, you can try removing the battery while the laptop is plugged in - it should not shut off, the circuit for charging the battery and powering the machine are separate.

I lost more batteries in storage - they still discharge, and even though the cells could be revived, the BMS won't let it recharge if it falls below a certain voltage, rendering them dead (unless you find it fun to restore them).

Multicomp2• 4 years 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.

laxis96• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Havoc2• 4 years 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

Aachen6• 4 years 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.

Havoc2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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/) 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

rusteh12• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

rusteh12• 4 years 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...

hellweaver666• 4 years 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).

timonoko6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

timonoko6• 4 years 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.

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

Do you ever get any outages or was that just a fun project to set up?

I'm always thinking I should buy an UPS but realistically I'd need it once every 5 years at best, and even then I'm usually lucky.

timonoko6• 4 years ago

Happens twice a month, reasons vary. Mostly because Wifi is too congested in middle of Helsinki.

At one time it happened every day. This was because of open Telnet port. Crooks, mostly Russians, caused so many Telnet-open processes that machine choked up.

hddherman6• 4 years ago

You'd think so, but lately I've found it to be quite handy. Over the last couple of days, the UPS has notified me that the voltage coming from the wall is a bit off, oddly high (250-256V). netdata is nice and even graphs it out to me so I can pinpoint exactly when and how much the voltage deviated from normal.

timonoko6• 4 years ago

This Watchdog (aka "Vahtikoira") is already on Github. https://github.com/timonoko/Tokmannin-ESP8266-Wifi-topseli/b...

The server causes the Blue Led (aka "Sininen Ledi") to blink, so that I immediately know Watchdog is watching and gets nourishment. Sometimes I boot to some other distro and forget to turn off the Watchdog, which is annoying.

idonotknowwhy• 4 years ago

That's cool. I used to have a raspberry pi hooked up to the reset switch pins via gpio on a mining rig in 2013. Back then, the mining software was all buggy and would crash the rig every couple of days. When the pi couldn't ping the rig for 30 seconds, it rebooted it.

scrapheap• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

merpkz• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

8fingerlouie7• 4 years 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/) 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 :)

moffkalast2• 4 years 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?

8fingerlouie7• 4 years ago

It is doable, but certainly not something i would recommend. I quit doing it a decade or so ago.

There are a bunch of hoops you need to run through to keep your server whitelisted, though having a static IP in a non-residential IP block helps a lot. Sadly, most people attempting to self host email will (static IP or not) have a residential IP, meaning you're almost certain to get blacklisted fairly quick. I'd much rather leave that to someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm aware that people self host email for (supposed) privacy, but they somehow always seem to forget that most email threads have at least two parties, and despite all kinds of privacy measures, you cannot guarantee that your recipient is not using Google/Microsoft/Whatever, or they forward it to a person that is using one of those. In that light, your (clear text) emails are not really confidential.

Instead, if you must use email for confidential information, use encryption, or better yet, use one of the multitudes of newer "more better" platforms for sending your information. Most new platforms have encryption baked in, though in most cases you're trusting the service provider to handle your keys correctly.

ulzeraj• 4 years ago

If i need privacy, Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) handles end-to-end encryption.

I don't think that's enough to qualify as a privacy measure. Those encrypted files will still be on your account paid through your credit card and authenticated by phone. They know when you connect and how much data you have, download and send.

As for the rest of your comment, I pretty much like having my own stuff and I dislike giving money to hostile corporations like Microsoft and Google.

timonoko6• 4 years ago

Typical use of home server is to lower expenses when abroad or in the wilderness. Nobody here pirates movies (of course), but for example watching Joe Rogan 3 hour Youtube-sessions on phone in Finnmark was quite impossible. You ordered your server to download it with youtube-dl and to decode the audio at 32 kbits.

pxtail2• 4 years ago

it's simply not worth the trouble

This philosophy can be applied for everything and unfortunately - for me - it's incredibly poisonous, I was very passionate about programming, coding, about this unique property of it that one can bring to life some abstract idea, concept that was only existing as thoughts

Unfortunately "not worth the trouble" mantra infected me and now I'm unable to do anything, most ideas are dismissed easily. Want to write some kind of software? Makes no sense, it's probably written already and if not then will be replicated in the blink of an eye by more resourceful entity if it's worth anything, probably even open-sourced Want to write novel? Makes no sense, authors with the help of GPT3 will churn out 20 times more, etc. etc.

hddherman6• 4 years ago

Sorry to hear about that.

I agree that it's easy to dismiss a lot of ideas like this, and the fact that there's so many people out there working on all these ideas can seem a bit daunting.

What has helped me is knowing that I am doing all of this for myself, and because it's fun and interesting to _me_. Yeah, sure, other solutions exist, but then I'd be trading more money for less fun, and that's not... fun.

I hope that you can get your spark back. It all depends on external factors and life events as well and with those I cannot help, but don't lose hope.

8fingerlouie7• 4 years ago

Unfortunately "not worth the trouble" mantra infected me and now I'm unable to do anything

I'm sorry for your loss.

Personally i was spending 1-2 hours every day making sure servers were running fine, drives were good, backups ran OK, software updates, and checking logs. None of those tasks interested me the least bit. I've run servers professionally for close to 2 decades, so i get enough of that at work, and considering that i can actually save money by letting someone else do it, it means that for me it was simply not worth it.

Instead, I use my "additional free time" to dive deeper into areas that actually interest me.

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

Do you exclude NAS functionality? Because multiple TB of cloud storage are definitely not affordable.

Similarly, yeah you could store movies in the cloud, but streaming those all the time is a huge waste of bandwidth and for many home internet connections quite high load.

Oh, and I also want my smart home to continue working when there is no internet connection.

bpye2• 4 years ago

Not just that multi TB are not affordable, but also I can get >1Gbps throughout on my local network and essentially 0 latency - whilst my internet connection is max 1Gbps and effectively a little less, with more significant latency.

When using the file share for something like Lightroom it makes a significant difference.

8fingerlouie7• 4 years ago

Do you exclude NAS functionality?

Depends on the situation.

If your needs are handling large amounts of photos/videos for work/hobbies, then a NAS probably makes sense, but if you're just hoarding a bunch of movies/tv-shows, does that really need RAID5/6 ? A single drive would probably be adequate, considering that you can probably "recreate" the contents.

Personally i use a content cache on my LAN that caches data for the cloud, meaning my data i available at LAN speeds on my LAN, but still stored in the cloud.

But my original comment was mostly about self hosting services.

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure as a cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers

Not really. Cloud providers make mistakes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23915484

Aachen6• 4 years ago

Plus: bigcorp mistakes/hacks affect a million customers. You might have a less fancy door lock than the data center next door, or might have a 1024-bit RSA public ssh key still, but how likely is someone going to get into your email by cracking your lock or key specifically?

8fingerlouie7• 4 years ago

Not really. Cloud providers make mistakes.

Everybody makes mistakes. You just need to take a quick glance over on r/datarecovery to see that it's not only Cloud providers.

Just because you keep your data in the cloud doesn't mean you shouldn't make backups. I make local backups as well as backups to another cloud, and data i really care about (mostly family photos) is archived on M-disc Blu-Ray media as well.

yokoprime2• 4 years ago

I have 2 rPIs. Run pi-hole, controller sw for my access points, some torrent stuff, a "NAS" aka shared USB drives and homebridge.

Not sure how I would do those in the cloud cheaper and as simply as this.

cyberpunk• 4 years ago

NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure as a cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers..

Err, yeah no. My home server is only serving lan clients and is not on the internet. Please, try to pwn it.

8fingerlouie7• 4 years ago

And about redundancy ? geographical redundancy ? With (major) cloud providers, your data is stored in multiple geographically separate data centers, meaning even if a data center burns down, your data is still available, and redundancy hastily being restored.

How about malware protection ? Most (major) cloud providers offer n days of x versions (OneDrive is 30 days worth of unlimited versions), so if your files end up as encrypted garbage, you can simply roll back to an earlier version. Unless your home server is airgapped, that could still apply to you.

You're probably also lacking in redundancy with power and internet (though if only available on the LAN that's not a problem), as well as fire protection/prevention as well as flood protection.

Aachen6• 4 years ago

FYI that wattage is quite a lot, if you get it cheaper by hosting it on someone else's server (aka cloud) then they've either got a more efficient server or they don't factor externalities into the price (at €.75/kWh it sounds like you're paying for Climeworks to compensate your CO2 emissions).

8fingerlouie7• 4 years ago

at €.75/kWh it sounds like you're paying for Climeworks to compensate your CO2 emissions

It's due to the countrys backup power being based on natural gas, which costs about €2/m3 currently due to the Ukraine/Russia war. During february it hit €1.14/kwh.

Prices are dropping though, with about 85% of our power currently coming from renewable sources.

nergal• 4 years ago

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

znpy2• 4 years ago

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

hddherman6• 4 years ago

Like the thinkmods adapter? https://thinkmods.store/products/expresscard-to-nvme-adapter

netsharc• 4 years ago

There's this Mini PCI-E to 4xSATA adapter: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32849323827.html , although who knows how the performance is.

JamesBaxter• 4 years 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.

doubled1122• 4 years ago

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

squarefoot• 4 years 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/), etc.

tredre3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

https://hackaday.com/2012/11/02/laptop-motherboard-reborn-as...

I ran a Dell D630 for a number of years without issue.

yokoprime2• 4 years 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.

donatj3• 4 years 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.

goodoldneon2• 4 years ago

What necessitates the transcoding? Is your TV unable to support some formats?

donatj3• 4 years 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.

gh02t2• 4 years 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?

donatj3• 4 years ago

You are correct, I misremembered it being an Intel CPU

jasfi• 4 years ago

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

ThatMedicIsASpy2• 4 years 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)

meristohm• 4 years 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).

iforgotpassword2• 4 years 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.

iforgotpassword2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

digitallyfree2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

post_break2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I always liked this idea, but do you mean newer or older ones? M1 only or the older i3/i5 ones?

Joeri• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

bpye2• 4 years ago

Is there any way to attach 4-6 SATA drives over Thunderbolt? One of my main uses for a home server is as a file share, for both device backups but also for photos etc. I’m still running a Gen 8 HP MicroServer because nothing since has really come close in terms of cost and form factor.

jkestner• 4 years ago

Many ways, but the way I do it is with a Drobo. Easy to maintain and upgrade.

post_break2• 4 years ago

That's a file server, maybe a Synology or a QNAP. There are some thunderbolt to PCI express boxes but it gets kind of hacky.

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

cheap, tiny, etc

Lowest spec with 10 gig ethernet starts 900€, not all what I would call cheap.

Also, the power consumption does not seem to be all that low:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897

According to apple they idle higher(?) than the 2014 model, though this value seems to have not changed all that much in a decade. For example, 11W idle was a popular pc build in 2011 already it seems that this is still a common value.

windowsrookie2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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).

digitallyfree2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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/

windowsrookie2• 4 years ago

http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/

With that patch. Runs fantastic just like it would had Apple allowed it.

oops, my MacBook Pro is an early 2008. I listed a 2007 model for sale on eBay this morning and just mixed them up. Sometimes my brain is on autopilot.

[Edit] I will add that 2007 models support Mac OS 10.11 and every app I use except for Firefox still supports 10.11. (chrome still supports 10.11 tho)

ur-whale• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

hddherman6• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

depends on laptop - but yes.

mcovalt• 4 years 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.

hddherman6• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

iotku• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

salmo• 4 years 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.

Maursault3• 4 years 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.

bo0tzz• 4 years 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.

Maursault3• 4 years 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.

turtlebits• 4 years ago

I just put all my media in S3. Local minio and cloud (w/ presigned urls). Small web app to provide any organization required, with a URL handler to open VLC / music player app.

hd4• 4 years ago

How does that help someone who wants to stream to a network-enabled TV?

ivanmontillam• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

jra_samba• 4 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

sbehere• 4 years 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-w...

Aachen6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

ta9882• 4 years 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• 4 years 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).

Damogran6• 4 years ago

Plus built in UPS.

throw93232• 4 years 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.

piperswe• 4 years ago

A USB 2.0 ethernet port maxing out at a few hundred Mbps would suffice for WAN for most people, and the built-in gigabit port can be connected to a switch

thenthenthen3• 4 years ago

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

hddherman6• 4 years 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?

thenthenthen3• 4 years 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.

BaudouinVH• 4 years ago

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

Aachen6• 4 years 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 , but should work okay if you don't have too many users.

my69thaccount• 4 years ago

No ECC

hellohowareu• 4 years 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 :(

Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?

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