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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

They're usually very inefficient energetically though

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

those where the days :)

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

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

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.

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

Gotta love self-hosting federation c:

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Duplicate

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

Duplicate

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.

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.

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