Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> Downsize - I know it’s hard to talk about, but if your quad CPU, 2TB RAM monster can’t run because it’s too expensive and you need the money, get something smaller that’s better suited for your workloads.

A lot of homelabs start with free discarded enterprise gear from work, which turns out to be both power-hungry and loud.

I ended up buying Atom servers for awhile, and modding them to be even quieter.

Then, recently, I offloaded all 24/7 stuff to cloud servers/services.

View on HN

I run all my stuff off a 15+ year old laptop someone threw out.

Start there. :-)

Slightly newer one here (Lenovo T470). The battery still works so it’s got a built in UPS. KVM comes with it too!

All it does is scrape jobs really. I was running it on a VPS but that requires a modicum more effort to keep secure. This thing is a rotting unpatched Debian 11 and is behind a NAT with no service ports exposed on public interface.

This was something I considered very recently (when I realized my only remaining VGA monitor didn't support the oddball frequency put out by an old Supermicro server on which I was still running something important).

Some pros of laptop servers:

* Quiet.

* Low-ish power consumption.

* Doesn't take up much space.

* Built-in secure console.

* Built-in UPS.

Some cons:

* Limited in what drives you can put in it. Some laptops only support one drive, so you can't even do RAID mirroring. A real server will usually let you put at least a few high-capacity 3.5" drives in it, on SATA or better.

* Many laptops will overheat if run with the lid closed.

* If you get a burglary, a laptop is very likely to be stolen. (In a rack in a city apartment, I bolted down the servers with security head screws, and there was no way they were taking the whole cabinet, with a huge APC UPS anchoring it down.)

I use a few old laptops like this, but I opted to remove the batteries due to the risk of spicy pillow.

The benefits of the "built in UPS" didn't seem worth it to me because if my power is out, my internet is down anyway, and I don't run anything that needs that much uptime anyway.

Hard shutdowns can cause data corruption. So, it doesn't need to be about server uptime as much as just not having a program's database get destroyed because the power went out for 10 seconds.

What about laptops with broken screens? Solves the overheat issue and potential robbers too, more likely.

Been using old laptops since HS. Remove the suspend on lid close and throw that thing in a closet.

You can always find free/cheap laptops.

Same here - $5 a month for a vps with public IP is a bargain. I could even use it to tunnel larger transfers, like accessing my local media server behind a NAT. That said, it's definitely not as cool as running loud, beefy servers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com