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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Selfhosting on an old laptop (self.selfhosted)

submitted 2 years ago by bloodtide to c/selfhosted

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm currently running homebridge and pihole from an older Lenovo (i5, 256 SSD, 8GB ram) laptop (tweaked power settings to allow idle when closed) hardwired into a switch. I am currently running Ubuntu Server LTS, and have uptime ~2 weeks. I'm a little worried about reliability, I was originally using Ubuntu Desktop LTS, and I had an issue with the OS crashing after a 4 days of basically idle...

So my question is, is this a feasible solution? Should I pursue something like a SBC or migrate the machine to an old desktop instead? I don't mind working on the machine occasionally, performing maintenance etc but I don't want to have to troubleshoot the machine on a weekly basis.

I also would like to get into more self hosting, I find it to be super interesting and fun, does anyone have any projects they wouldn't mind recommending or sharing?

Thanks guys!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It really kind of depends on your luck with the hardware. I've used laptops as servers for durations of several months at various points in the past and had no particular problems, just make sure cooling is adequate.

You might consider setting up a Proxmox node if you're interested in virtualization at the machine level (i.e. having several virtual machines running on one physical machine, which can reduce maintenance headaches and make experimentation easier as VMs can be snapshotted, cloned, and easily replaced)

[–] bloodtide 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Oh wow Proxmox looks interesting, I like that it has a web interface. I am a little interested, mostly because pfsense needs to run within a VM, but I've never really done any virtualization on Ubuntu.

Is Proxmox similar to like an open-source version of Hyper-V?

[–] Duckman 1 points 2 years ago

More or less. I don’t think many people use Hyper-V as a type 1 hyper visor in their home labs (unless that’s what they’re using at work and trying to learn for there), but I could be wrong. I think the more common comparison would be ESXi.