this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
53 points (96.5% liked)

Selfhosted

40359 readers
348 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Or is this a bad idea?

Reading through !selfhosted, I think I have found a new hobby. I have an old laptop HP ProBook 450 G5 4WU81ES.

16gb ram, solid CPU, shitty integrated gpu, and only 256gb ssd. Barely enough for system and some apps. Battery life maybe 30min unplugged so I take it as an UPS.

So the question again is, can I have permanently plugged external hdd to use as extension for this purpose?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People host stuff on Raspberry Pis, so why not a laptop. One limit you might have is USB speeds, especially if you want to add more drives.

[–] darkan15 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just so you know it is possible, you can probably disable sleep or other things the laptop does by default when you close the lid, so you can leave it running while the lid is closed.

Did this with my old Dell laptop (that is running Debian server now), and now I access it over ssh while the lid is closed and very rarely open the lid and do stuff on the actual device directly.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's a MacBook in the image, you can't do that on macOS. :^)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes you can: sudo pmset disablesleep 1

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ah, okay! I remember this being discussed when I saw this image posted for the first time, and that’s where I got that info from.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I took the screen off my old dell laptop and turned it into a mini blade server with built in UPS. It ran for years. I have no doubt the battery was knackered by the end.

The only reason I replaced it with a Mac Mini 2012 was because it didn’t support usb3 and 4K video saturated the usb bandwidth.

Now my 2012 runs Ubuntu server + docker for those interested :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sounds like it needs a Linux Upgrade. I run a MacBookpro with Ubuntu for one of my servers

[–] AbidanYre 2 points 1 year ago

Some laptops get pretty overheated when you do that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I know laptop itself is not a problem just wondering about stability of USB connected disk. Got some good replies already I will give it a shot

[–] rarkgrames 1 points 1 year ago

I don’t think it would be a problem. I have 4 usb drives hooked up to a Mac mini M1 that I use for coding and running Plex. Very rarely do I have any issues.