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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

They're usually very inefficient energetically though

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.

@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 :)

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)

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.

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

Gotta love self-hosting federation c:

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

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

One of my home servers is an X230

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

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.

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.

Old smartphones too...

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

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

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

those where the days :)

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

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.

I have like 3 spare laptops, and another spare computer. I'm not running anything right now because this router doesn't support port forwarding no matter what I try (it's a firmware issue apparently), but they're always there for me when I need them.

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.

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 💀

My employer lets us keep our old work laptops when we upgrade so basically every two to three years I get a new home server. I remove the battery just to be safe

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

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.

I actually used to host a pretty sizable minecraft server on a laptop.

Actually worked pretty well, was able to support around 150 or so concurrent users, and this was back in the bukkit days.

Yup, I have an old broken laptop that runs Ubuntu Server and doesn't have a physical screen. I named it The Headless Machine (ha!)

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 thought about it, but the additional display, made me think about power saving, how to shut off screen, while keeping the headless service loaded? ... premature optimization?

I have an 8 core i7 Alienware 17r3 with 32GB RAM I use to host a pen-test lab. It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.

Yeah until it stopped working. The heat is the problem. It lasts for like 6 months of 24/7 usage.

I used my wife's old laptop (a slow N3540) for samba, pihole, and qbittorrent server for a couple of years until recently I replaced with a used HP PC.

Yes! My old framework laptop motherboard runs all my home services without issue. Just the right amount of power for my use case and it sips power.

Yes I did, but nowadays I have nothing to host things on. Alpine Linux is excellent to host Minecraft servers and the like.

I've never had an internet connection that allows normal server connections. I guess I could set it up with Cloudflare or something.

I've been more likely to use old laptops as thin clients... run Linux on my desktop, then connect to it with VNC so the laptop doesn't really have to do anything. Or set them up with a really lightweight Linux desktop like WindowMaker and use them to play music out in my studio.

Got a laptop with a busted up screen running Plex and it's pretty awesome! We don't need screens where we're going!

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

I just use an old laptop as my main computer. Now I have a reason to keep it if I ever upgrade.

End of life Chromebooks, baby!

I use an old pc i got from some dude, for 100 bucks

thrown in a few hard drives etc for some storage.

I feel personally attacked.

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.

Nope. I’m using a Dell Optiplex 990 that my uncle no longer wanted.

Until very recently I was running one of the old black polycarbonate MacBooks as a server. I replaced OSX with Ubuntu and it worked a charm.

I still have it and could still use it if I wanted to but retired it as I bought a dedicated server.

I think I'm going to have to buy a wattage meter plug-in to see what my laptops run at with nothing running, a single Docker image of nginx, and then an API image on top of that. I wonder what my RaspberryPi 4 is pulling with my docker images running on there.

As a test machine, yes. As a production machine... Meh.

Little memory, slow and small disk...

I give what few old laptops I have away to people who need better laptops. My servers are made of all the PC parts left over from upgrades.

this is the way

Looked into selling my old gaming laptop just recently, and it just doesn't seem like its worth selling them, if they are any older than 5 years, and not top spec. Making a server/node/test machine, might be the best option. Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.

I do this lol!

Omg that’s a great idea I have an 8 thread 4 core from 2012 that was my main laptop 3 years ago.

I took my first foray into media hosting by running subsonic on an old emachines laptop! ain't nothing wrong!

Not laptops specifically but I use old PCs to run stuff. It's the best way to do it!

I just stopped having one as my server. Using a Lenovo P330 Tiny that I got from my work. 10 years of laptop use before that.

Thinkpad T430, i7 gen 1,16gb home server

I have a 6-year-old gaming laptop with no battery in a damaged screen running my home security cameras

My websites tor service was hosted on an ancient laptop for the longest time, lol

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