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.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Yea, my laptop is definitely going to be a Framework partially for that reason. Being able to harvest the motherboard and throw it in a chassis easily is a great feature to reduce waste.
Wait you can do that???? I have one right now!!!
If the battery still works it's got a built-in UPS.
Although, isn't it a potential fire hazard? Having a lithium battery always at 100%?
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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.
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Absolutely and you will feel right at home over here on our self-hosting community: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting
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.
My old dell latitude handles plex with an old USB HDD well enough.
You just have to run a lean Linux OS to revive these old systems.
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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 It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.
I feel personally attacked.
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.
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End of life Chromebooks, baby!
I have 2 Chromebooks I want to do something with, but they’re double core machines with 16g Emmc. Not really juicy enough for a good server.
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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.
Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.
this is the way
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!)
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
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Yeah until it stopped working. The heat is the problem. It lasts for like 6 months of 24/7 usage.
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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!