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Comment by geek_at | Hacker News Reader

This takes me back. My dad worked for IBM and had access to many broken thinkpads (mostly broken displays) so he would bring them home for me to tinker but in the end I installed debian on them, installed ISPconfig and rented out webspace from the laptops running under my bed.

Laptops are awesome for servers since they have built in UPS's and are not very power hungry

It was a fun experience and got me started on my road to becoming a MSP

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Yes! This was actually my first shot at home servers as well - same rationale and all. Old Pentium laptops seemed to get thrown out every few weeks, easily ran Windows Server 2003 (I hadn't seen the light yet), were reasonably easy to repair, used very little power, and were practically silent in operation.

Someday I'd like to chronicle how my homelab evolved, but at the end of the "laptops" generation and immediately prior to the "VMware on a desktop" generation, I had an old DEC (Intel), an AST, and a Gateway laptop, all running under my parents' couch.

Sounds like a post on it's own! Do you have a blog somewhere?

yes I even wrote about the laptop servers here https://blog.haschek.at/2015-my-company-just-turned-10.html

I liked this article, what a nice story :)

Did you get into your "hobby teaching" through your school sysadmin job?

funny enough yes I did. A school was looking for an IT admin and I got the job and after a year the headmaster asked me to teach too

Good read, thanks! I follow your RSS feed now.

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