this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

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 πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

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[–] I_Miss_Daniel 52 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

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

[–] tpihkal 11 points 2 years ago
[–] rockhandle 7 points 2 years ago

I salute your creativity haha

[–] Peereboominc 6 points 2 years ago

That is so awesome!

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[–] penguin_knight 45 points 2 years ago (15 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Do you have any photos of this?
Would love to see how this looks in practice!

[–] AkatsukiLevi 12 points 2 years ago

Up! Also would love to see how it looks

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You have a tutorial? That sounds awesome.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Ummm... I need to know more. Photos? This sounds interesting!

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 years ago (11 children)

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.

[–] phthalocyanin 15 points 2 years ago

based and sustainability-pilled

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

I can even run the latest Stable diffusion models on my 8 year old GPU.

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[–] RoyalEngineering 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Old laptops can are actually great serversβ€”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
[–] utopianfiat 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The battery is usually long gone by the time it becomes a server though.

Really old laptops have PCMCIA slots too that you can hook into newer interfaces. I used a PCMCIA eSATA card for a laptop NAS!

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[–] AcidOctopus 31 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] lemme_at_it 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

When you do, take a look at howtoforge.com.

Then throw on a bunch of containers from linuxserver.io

Quick & easy for testing & learning.

EDIT: fixed link formatting

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.
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[–] hurricane 18 points 2 years ago

Old laptops have little resell value. They work well as low powered hobby servers though.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I used to use my 10 year old old netbook (intel atom n270 2gb ram - ubuntu server) as a server for Plex, calibre, pihole, ssftp.

Now I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB Ram, as it consumes less electricity. Old laptops are consuming (except HDDs/SSDs) 10-30 watt. Raspberry Pi in indle consumes 2watt and when i am using it at mac power with an external hdd consumes 12watt.

[–] Tum 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

It's hard to get a hold of the raspberry pi model 4 where I am unfortunately. I had wanted to use it to host some hobby projects locally and maybe as a low powered game sever, though i doubt it could handle it. It might be a fun project to try run an older laptop off solar l, I must look into it anyone has tried that.

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[–] firewyre 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sure, I even have an old Samsung Galaxy S7 running sshd right now :)

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[–] Suavevillain 14 points 2 years ago

I love when people find useful tasks for older tech or extend the life of older tech. There is enough e-waste out there.

[–] Thade780 13 points 2 years ago

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

[–] cowmouse 12 points 2 years ago (10 children)

They're usually very inefficient energetically though

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[–] TeoTwawki 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

A busted up acer netbook on a shelf in my basement ran a Final Fantasy XI private server for several years till it died and I migrated to something sturdier.

Display was wrecked, keyboard destroyed, trackpad gone.. but a single usb port and a vga port still worked so I was able to install an OS. then I removed those and only ever remoted into it. I actually removed the busted display and keyboard to it'd vent heat better - it ran pretty hot and the ventilation on that thing was designed poorly. The reason the keyboard died was actually heat related, melting its underside and warping it.

FFXI Private servers will run on a 2 decades old potato, so this worked until it finally died despite some seriously pathetic specs.

(1gb ram upgraded to 2gb, 1 ghz intel atom single core cpu, yes really)

[–] ChillPill 11 points 2 years ago

I'm actually hosting things on my 2 year old gaming pc (which is no longer used for gaming) and using my 8 year old laptop daily... How the turn tables.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

@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 :)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

And a built in ups if your battery is still good

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

I have one that runs my bookwyrm, owncast, calibreweb, and matrix (WIP) instances.

Gotta love self-hosting federation c:

[–] lemme_at_it 8 points 2 years ago

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

[–] dustojnikhummer 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

One of my home servers is an X230

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

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

[–] Resonosity 7 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

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

those where the days :)

[–] Spesknight 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)
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[–] gerowen 7 points 2 years ago

My home server started as an HP Pavilion P6803w desktop PC. A decade later it has a better case, better power supply, more RAM, better CPU, more drives and runs Debian instead of Windows 7. The only original part is the motherboard.

[–] Aceticon 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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

[–] green_dragon 7 points 2 years ago

Oh no! It's the EEE PC!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

For a while I was using a 10 year old Mac Pro G5 as a home server. Conveniently it also doubled as a space heater in the winter.

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[–] yay 6 points 2 years ago

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 πŸ’€

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

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

[–] phx 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Shoutout to my 16 year old dell laptop running god knows what for all eternity

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