Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
ounapuu.ee
ounapuu.ee
It runs CentOS 7, installed well before Red Hat did the CentOS Stream thing. It has a ZTE MF667 GSM USB modem I use to receive SMSes for 2FA that local banks still use.
It doesn't have any desktop environment, therefore I only use it via SSH. It updates its own IP address via a free subdomain on freedns.afraid.org using a cron job.
EDIT: Typo.
And the server can also restart wifi-router and cable modem if cannot ping the selfsame watchdog (and 8.8.8.8) at reasonable intervals.
Yes. They are watching each other. $ cat wifi-off
#! /usr/bin/python2
import parallel,time
p = parallel.Parallel() # open LPT1 or /dev/parport0
p.setData(0xFF)
$ cat wifi-on
#! /usr/bin/python2
import parallel,time
p = parallel.Parallel() # open LPT1 or /dev/parport0
p.setData(0x0)The easiest approach is to just use a commonly available relay modules used with Arduino or similar platforms/microcontrollers, as they already contain minimum or all protection mechanisms. So, the module will contain the reversed diode in parallel with the relay, while additional transistor and optocoupler will allow you a complete galvanic isolation of the controlling- from the and relay circuit.
YouTube has plenty of user-friendly resources with schematics and functional overviews, just search for "relay module" or "relay arduino".
Great overview though, thank you for posting that.
I'm always thinking I should buy an UPS but realistically I'd need it once every 5 years at best, and even then I'm usually lucky.
At one time it happened every day. This was because of open Telnet port. Crooks, mostly Russians, caused so many Telnet-open processes that machine choked up.
The server causes the Blue Led (aka "Sininen Ledi") to blink, so that I immediately know Watchdog is watching and gets nourishment. Sometimes I boot to some other distro and forget to turn off the Watchdog, which is annoying.
Fujitsu Esprimo, Fujitsu Futro, Lenovo ThinkCentre, HP EliteDesk, HP ProDesk, ...
Used and refurbished they can be found starting at around 40€ depending on the configuration.
2012 is too old in my eyes (CPU performance per watt)
Also their mainboards - as far as I can tell - have always been atx wrt screw holes, so you can put them into larger cases. Problem then is that the psu is proprietary regarding both size and connector. They've been doing 12V only to the mainboard for a couple years now, and convert to other voltages on the mainboard. But replacement parts are cheap and plenty on eBay, so don't worry too much.
But a heads up for everyone doing this. Please, please remove the laptop battery before running it 24/7. Otherwise this is a serious fire hazard. The hardware and especially the battery are not designed to run under these conditions.
What if the battery is soldered in place like many machines produced post 2014?
Every thread about always on laptops leads me to this question. People leave their laptops plugged in all the time.
I've run about 5 laptops 24x7 over the years for at least a year a piece. No issues.
I put an HP Envy onto a shelf in the garage, and the battery swelled enough to ruin the touchpad and case.
In all the laptops I have owned, the only problem battery was idle, unplugged and uncharged.
https://www.uschemicalstorage.com/how-to-store-lithium-batte...
While we're here, turn off TurboBoost in BIOS to keep them running cooler with the lid closed, I've found it really helps when tasks get a little bursty.
What does that mean?
My laptops run 24x7, not as server but as docked workstations. I have never considered that as a safety risk, and definitely have not considered it outside of norm. At work for a public sector client, we have two floors (few hundred?) laptops plugged in and running 24x7 (ask from IT department is to leave them on overnight for maintenance). Sanity or eco-friendliness aside, this is a first I heard that laptop cannot / should not be run around the clock plugged in...
1) Source? Well, as it has been also written here, I hear that from every IT-Department I worked with at work. Also learned it once the hard way and got a swollen battery. It was an old old laptop (around 2003 IIRC) and old laptop batteries are an own story, but since people want to repurpose old hardware, I think this is a reasonable hint. Also Linus Tech Tips brought this up in one video.
Also, the newer your laptop the better it might handle it, but I wouldn't bet on it.
2) Why? From my understanding the constant on/off charging and heat development (also due to faster dust buildup. If the fan runs 24/7 it sucks a lot more dust into the case) is the problem. Especially if you run heavy tasks over a longer period, the hardware will heat up to a level that it is not designed to do.
I will grant that the lighter the load you put on that hardware, the less all this precautions matter. But my principle is, that if something is not designed (and likely not tested) for something, proceed with caution if you understand what you're doing, or leave it be. So if you want to host your static website on it, you might never ever be near any problems. But I still wouldn't recommend it.
If your laptop is already 6-8 years old then if you want to keep the battery in as a UPS system it may be worth considering purchasing a new replacement battery and installing that (if it has not already been replaced)
Most computers will only need a small screwdriver and 10 minutes of work to swap the battery, although you will want to check youtube/ifixit for your specific model first just to make sure the battery isn't glued in or otherwise difficult to remove and replace.
The charging method has been standardized a long time ago - they are charged to ~96%, then cut off, if they fall below ~94% they are topped up again.
There is a significant loss of battery life if you do that for years. I used to unplug some of them and do 2-3 full discharge/charge cycles, that usually helped increase the battery life.
Some laptops use the battery as additional power when running at wattage beyond what the AC can provide.
If you want to be safe with your model, you can try removing the battery while the laptop is plugged in - it should not shut off, the circuit for charging the battery and powering the machine are separate.
I lost more batteries in storage - they still discharge, and even though the cells could be revived, the BMS won't let it recharge if it falls below a certain voltage, rendering them dead (unless you find it fun to restore them).
> Oh, you want to stream remotely from your home server? All you need is Apache and an IP Address.
Hey, you know what "Apache and an IP Address" won't do? Automatically re-encode my enormous remuxed Blu-ray rips at a lower bitrate so I can stream them over my comically limited upstream to a criminally throttled hotel wi-fi connection.
Apache will stream your stupid 75GB BluRay files without any need to re-encode, and you can watch it remotely so long as the client device can decode it, even across a 10kbit connection, so you go ahead and enjoy your wasted processor cycles and higher electric bill, oh, and watching your content at a lower bit rate and resolution. I'll just stream the large media as is at full quality without compromise.
You have to work really really very hard to get Apache not to just work, and it takes a slashdot-level event to get it to stop working.
Meanwhile, whatever thing you bought will be abandonware in less than 2 years. And chances are about equal your thing is just running a crappy wrapper and gui for Apache anyway. So the business end of your thing is probably free, yet you paid for it anyway.
Your "dump all your videos into a big directory and Ctrl-F the Apache directory index" workflow will necessarily limit you to watching on devices that can navigate to arbitrary URLs and play videos from them. This will, in most cases, limit you to a computer (built-in browsers in "smart" devices, be they TVs, consoles, or purpose-built streaming boxes, will often play videos only grudgingly), and I don't know about you, but I don't want to sit and watch TV episodes or an entire movie at my computer desk with its relatively tiny monitor and relatively shitty speakers. I want to watch them on my big TV with the fancy sound system in the living room. So what would you suggest for this use case? Connect my computer to the TV? OK, great, but the video card won't output surround sound over HDMI, so now I have to futz with a bunch of other connections if I want more than just stereo sound. And once that that's sorted, how am I supposed to pause the movie when I have to get up to piss, because the TV remote can't control my computer?
> Apache will stream your stupid 75GB BluRay files without any need to re-encode, so long as the client device can decode it, even across a 10kbit connection, so you go ahead and enjoy your wasted processor cycles and higher electric bill.
Again, missing the point. Yes, Apache will happily squirt those bytes at whatever requests them, but that will not produce an enjoyable user experience (i.e., one where I can WATCH THE FUCKING MOVIE) over a sufficiently slow connection, and I'm not going to re-encode every file I have at a low bitrate on the off chance I want to watch it away from home.
> Meanwhile, whatever thing you bought will be abandonware in less than 2 years. And chances are about equal your thing is just running a crappy wrapper and gui for Apache anyway.
My Apple TV HD in my bedroom is still receiving updates seven years after it was originally released. The Apple TV 4K in the living room is still receiving updates five years after it was originally released. I run Plex to stream my local media to local (and my own remote) clients, and it is still actively maintained after 14 years--and if if Plex, Inc. should go under, there are plenty of alternatives that won't necessitate me regressing back to a computer connected to the TV.
Gifted to my dad 5+ years ago, he refuses to replace.
Anecdote: He thought it would be a great idea to clean up certain ports when I gave the mini to him, sprayed WD40 liberally. Then it was all wet and I suggested he put it under (2 ft away) a 60W bulb overnight. He's, well, my dad... So he placed a 100W bulb right next to it and forgot about it for an evening. The backpanel was black plastic and it melted into the mainboard. This thing refused to die, and will probably outlive all of us. Anything Apple post 2012 is yet another story at least for me.
Edit: still running, windows 10, 2 monitors
Lowest spec with 10 gig ethernet starts 900€, not all what I would call cheap.
Also, the power consumption does not seem to be all that low:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897
According to apple they idle higher(?) than the 2014 model, though this value seems to have not changed all that much in a decade. For example, 11W idle was a popular pc build in 2011 already it seems that this is still a common value.
Of course the downside is that you lose a nice web GUI for managing port forwarding and stuff, but if you're SSHing in to adjust iptables on your router you probably don't need the web interface all that much anyway.
It's probably true that an off-the-shelf router uses less power, but if you already have an old laptop lying around, at what point do you break even on the electricity cost vs. buying more efficient hardware? Especially when the difference is on the order of a few watts.
Also on electricity you may break even in a year or two.
I'm always a bit surprised by that old machine. It has a slightly above mid-range GPU from that time period and the thing can still play newer games-- at 720p, with low to mid settings without much of an issue. It's certainly not setting any records but for a 10 year old machine... it just tells me that we reached a point some years ago where hardware capabilities were just fine for a wide range oF normal activities, and that unless someone is using a machine for gaming, large data sets, or compiling lots of code then they'd probably ne just fine with a reasonably spec'ed 10 year old system.
Most of the time that I'm called on to deal with a supposedly aging 3-year old computer for a family member that's slowed down a bit it has nothing to do with the hardware getting old. Most of the time it's accumulated crap running on startup combined with having purchased the computer that had the highest # attached to storage (ooh 2TB I'll never use!) instead of a snappy 512GB SSD.
This script produces a good assessment of Spectre problems for a wide variety of CPUs. I know that they are difficult to exploit, and the mitigations are disabled by many because of their performance impact.
It is heavy, built like a tank, and has all the ports I still expect laptops to have (VGA, cat5, USB A, Optical disk) even when those ports are woefully out of fashion. The only problem is it's all PCI 2 SATA bus so even the cheapest SSD maxes out the system bus. She's starting to feel like flying an Excelsior class starship in the TNG era.
Today's laptops are sans optical disk drive, have lots more 'goodies' like IME and Computrace, have soldered ram (it about killed me to find a 360 degree hinge laptop 2 in 1 with AMD and unsoldered RAM, found one by HP eventually but still it shouldn't have been so hard), and generally are infected with phone-itis where everything has to be skinny, thin, light!! More than one micron thick? Old!
But for all that, said laptop is not my home server, nor are one of my many salvaged 'just in case I need a home server' laptops sitting on my shelf in the computer lab.
Instead I have a random cubicle farm Dell SFF PC that runs my home server, does fine until it randomly locks up, probably overheated Mobo like the OP has mentioned as probable symptoms, mostly because I don't want to play with the configs again! It's all undocumented and manually configured and I haven't put in the work to clean it up and put the configs into nixos or config management yet.
The moral of the story is (I guess) to use config management else all of your computer hardware hoarding may be stymied.
The main cost of your always on server will be power. And laptops are far lower power than desktops when idle.
If you need anything specialist a laptop can't do, you're probably better renting a cloud server instead.
My home server is mainly my home NAS.
It would be hard to put 12TB of mirrored storage in a laptop.
Older ARM SBC's had many limitations in the number of PCIe, SATA and USB 3 interfaces.
Nevertheless, now a much better ARM CPU has become available for cheaper devices (i.e. in the $100 to $200 range), the Rockchip RK3588 (quadruple Cortex-A76 + quadruple Cortex-A55 + triple Cortex-M0).
For now, this is the only ARM CPU with a decent speed, comparable or better than the Intel Gemini Lake Refresh CPUs, except for the much more expensive NVIDIA Xavier or Orin, or the Qualcomm Snapdragon SBCs, which are much more expensive than Intel/AMD CPUs + motherboards, having similar features.
There are at least 5 or 6 companies who have announced boards with RK3588, ranging in size from credit-card size, like Raspberry Pi, to the larger picoITX, and up to the miniITX form factor. Hopefully such boards will be available in the second half of 2022.
Some of these boards have up to 4 SATA connectors, besides an M.2 NVME SSD slot, so they could be easily used as a NAS.
According to the published reviews of such a board, the typical total power consumption (without SSDs/HDDs) is around 5 W, and the peak power, at maximum CPU utilization, around 13 W.
Some of them have actually been designed for TV set top boxes as their primary application, e.g. most of the models from Rockchip. These support a lot of video formats in hardware, even more than typical desktop GPUs from the same year. For example the Rockchip 3588, launched this year and used in many single-board computers that have just been announced, is one of the first devices providing a fast hardware AV1 decoder, besides decoders and encoders for all older codecs.
However, some of these devices with ARM cores have vendor-provided video drivers only for Android, to be used in smart TVs, so it may happen that the device used in your Synology NAS actually supports in hardware more video formats than you can use, and you are limited by the available video driver, which is incomplete.
Here are my TLP settings:
TLP_DEFAULT_MODE=BAT
TLP_PERSISTENT_DEFAULT=1
# Change some BAT settings back to AC defaults
CPU_MAX_PERF_ON_BAT=100
CPU_BOOST_ON_BAT=1
CPU_HWP_DYN_BOOST_ON_BAT=1
# Disable options that are undesirable for servers
MAX_LOST_WORK_SECS_ON_BAT=0
WOL_DISABLE=0
DISK_DEVICES="sda sdb"
# Leave disk power management to hd-idle ('PM_ON=on' means PM off, obviously /s)
AHCI_RUNTIME_PM_ON_BAT=on
DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_BAT="keep keep"
DISK_SPINDOWN_TIMEOUT_ON_BAT="keep keep"
echo 'HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i 0 -a sdb -i 1800 -l /var/log/hd-idle/hd-idle.log"' >> /etc/default/hd-idle
systemctl enable hd-idle.service
systemctl disable udisks2
echo 'smartd_opts="--interval=86400"' >> /etc/default/smartmontoolsMeasuring AC power is very hard to do accurately - there could for example be something else in your town injecting a bit of power at some other frequency onto the AC power grid (for example 1000Hz), which your PSU ends up absorbing (due to filters in the input of the PSU). Regular power meters will usually only measure the 50/60Hz component of absorbed and reactive power, and can therefore over/under read.
Still good to know some desktops are designed with power consumption in mind!
Yep, but still not <1W. Even at 20% load the PSU have only 80-90%% efficiency.
Just test with something with a low and known power usage, like a LED lamp or something.
BTW, there are very short bursts of 1W~10W every second. And FWIW, after ~24h, the energy meter shows 0.0117kWh. Obviously, these measurements are a far cry from lab precision, but they do give me some confidence that I won't really notice the server on my next energy bill.
I don't think that stuff qualifies as "laptop-class".
I only gave it up because I wanted something faster than the 100mbps ethernet and I had other computers lying around. Shortly thereafter, I wound up switching to a cloud provider.
Well, it's not powerful by definition but it can easily handle file sharing and torrenting (for my library of Linux ISOs obviously) while staying powered on 24/7. The fan also turns off at idle so it's totally silent.
What's funny is that this machine is currently resting on top of my decommissioned home server (Xeon E5-2697v2, 64GB RDIMMs, Supermicro X9) which idled around 100W...
By the time a laptop is ready to retire the battery is old and the fans clogged.
So at a minimum you need to actively keep an eye on the battery for swelling etc
Of course, if the competition is a VPS (if a few GB storage is all you need for example) then that will win any day.
Just saying its a decidedly suboptimal form factor for 24/7
Building a home server from scratch isn't that hard nor expensive; I made mine around a Atom Mini-ITX board that despite only 4GB RAM and fairly weak CPU does its job managing two ZFS mirrors under XigmaNAS (.org). On the ARM side, there are some other interesting products such as the Rock Pi 4 and associated Penta SATA Hat at radxa.com. I hope also someone will one day take on development of the Helios 64 platform at kobol.io. They ceased development last summer but the hardware, albeit not yet stable, was very promising.
Old laptops still have uses for media playing, test machines, or lab instrumentation though; a decent audio card can turn any old laptop into a low frequency spectrum analyzer through Jaaa (http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/), etc.
I've used x220 and x260 as home servers for years. In both cases the fan is turned off when the machine is idle (TPFanControl can even keep it off under light load). Both machines have two internal storage devices (mSATA + 2.5" and m.2 + 2.5" respectively). Both have gigabit Ethernet. Both can support external SATA storage (via ExpressCard and mini PCIe respectively). Both have battery drivers that allows them to be discharged periodically while being plugged in.
Many laptops out there are indeed poor home servers, but the x2XX line certainly isn't.
This was an upgrade in 2019 from an Asus EEE box which had similar power requirements, which was an upgrade in 2013 from a 2001 laptop.
Whether this works for you all depends on your goals, or more and more often, what software you use to achieve these goals:
- Compiling huge software suites like an OS or Firefox as a service is just too heavy.
- Average company website, personal blog, torrent host, personal vpn server, Factorio server, mail server, git server (gitea), and more all at once? Perfectly fine, that's exactly what I do.
- Single gitlab service? Oof, that's on the edge of minimum requirements https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html , but should work okay if you don't have too many users.
From what I've seen, these kinds of small PCs are basically a laptop-in-a-box, but usually pack a desktop-class CPU. Which means that the cooling system can sometimes have a hard time.
I personally have an HP EliteDesk 800 mini, which I initially liked for its compact size while at the same time being able to have 2 NVME drives and one SATA. Boy do I hate it. Even at idle, the fan makes a terrible noise. Throw any kind of work at it for more that 10 seconds, and it starts to ramp up.
My work probook from the same era has a joke for a cooler, yet it's still quieter most of the time. The CPU is noticeably slower (i5-8xxxU), though for running a random home server it's probably good enough.
Now I just have a RockPro64 with a 256GB SSD I had lying around running InfluxDB and Grafana. You do need 4GB of RAM and a disk for this and the RockPro64 is better and more available than a 4GB Pi 4. Seriously love that thing.
My Netgate router streams metrics to it. I have a Raspberry Pi running the Ubiquiti management software for my APs and monitoring my UPS with nut. Telegraf is easy to work with extending. I do need to scrape metrics from the Ubiquiti APs eventually.
Every once in a while I mess with some other little ARM board and environmental sensors, but that's it.
No fans. Less power than my kids' tablets. Just Ansible for config management and keeping them up to date.
This is coming from someone who has been running a home server for decades, hosted everything from websites and email, photos, music and movies, and various cloud services like Nextcloud, Gitea, etc. As a learning experience, it's probably better than anything else, but for day to day work, it's simply not worth the trouble.
NOTHING you can dream up at home will be as safe and secure as a cloud offering from one of the major cloud providers, at least not if you have a "home budget" as well. We're talking redundant power, redundant internet, server grade hardware and spare parts, fire/flood protection, physical access control, dedicated security operations, and multi-geo redundancy means you get that across multiple data centers.
I've long since abandoned the chores that come with hosting anything from home, and instead moved everything to the cloud. If i need privacy, Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) handles end-to-end encryption. Most other services have been migrated to cloud offerings, which in many cases are free, like GitHub or Bitbucket, and my (static) website runs on Azure for free.
The best part is i'm actually saving money. Before i moved to the cloud, i was running a 4 bay NAS as well as a server running Proxmox, and power consumption was around 250W, and even with normal electricity prices here (€0.35/kwh normal, current around €0.75/kwh), it was costing me about €8.50 every month. That's without the hardware cost, which will easily cost as much over 5 years.
For comparison, a "Microsoft Family365" subscription can be had for about €75/year (€6.25/month), and offers the above advantages on 6 accounts each given 1TB of storage, so if i was using OneDrive for file storage, i would be saving about €2 every month on just electricity.
Assuming the hardware costs as much as the electricity (€510 over 5 years), you could also get a VPS in the cloud, and still host websites and more, and still save money.
That being said, i do still have a small "home server", but it's main purpose is to act as a content cache for data stored in the cloud, to make it appear to be local when accessed from the LAN, as well as make backups (to another cloud) of my cloud data, but my firewall is now completely closed, and i sleep better at night :)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't hosting your own mail these days nigh impossible because if you're not one of the major whitelisted providers everything you ever send will get thrown into spam, for obvious reasons?
There are a bunch of hoops you need to run through to keep your server whitelisted, though having a static IP in a non-residential IP block helps a lot. Sadly, most people attempting to self host email will (static IP or not) have a residential IP, meaning you're almost certain to get blacklisted fairly quick. I'd much rather leave that to someone who knows what they're doing.
I'm aware that people self host email for (supposed) privacy, but they somehow always seem to forget that most email threads have at least two parties, and despite all kinds of privacy measures, you cannot guarantee that your recipient is not using Google/Microsoft/Whatever, or they forward it to a person that is using one of those. In that light, your (clear text) emails are not really confidential.
Instead, if you must use email for confidential information, use encryption, or better yet, use one of the multitudes of newer "more better" platforms for sending your information. Most new platforms have encryption baked in, though in most cases you're trusting the service provider to handle your keys correctly.
> have a residential IP, meaning you're almost certain to get blacklisted fairly quick.
That's not how that works. Either they block residential IPs or they don't. It's not that they only notice you're hosting residentially by the distinctly green smell of your email and only then ban you.
I've not had much trouble myself with this, only a handful of systems across more than a decade of use by multiple people. From a residential IP.
> hoops you need to run through to keep your server whitelisted
Aside from sending spam, how does it become un-whitelisted? (I'm assuming you're referring to "off blacklists" when you say whitelisted btw, as I've never seen a whitelist implementation).
I don't think that's enough to qualify as a privacy measure. Those encrypted files will still be on your account paid through your credit card and authenticated by phone. They know when you connect and how much data you have, download and send.
As for the rest of your comment, I pretty much like having my own stuff and I dislike giving money to hostile corporations like Microsoft and Google.
This philosophy can be applied for everything and unfortunately - for me - it's incredibly poisonous, I was very passionate about programming, coding, about this unique property of it that one can bring to life some abstract idea, concept that was only existing as thoughts
Unfortunately "not worth the trouble" mantra infected me and now I'm unable to do anything, most ideas are dismissed easily. Want to write some kind of software? Makes no sense, it's probably written already and if not then will be replicated in the blink of an eye by more resourceful entity if it's worth anything, probably even open-sourced Want to write novel? Makes no sense, authors with the help of GPT3 will churn out 20 times more, etc. etc.
I agree that it's easy to dismiss a lot of ideas like this, and the fact that there's so many people out there working on all these ideas can seem a bit daunting.
What has helped me is knowing that I am doing all of this for myself, and because it's fun and interesting to _me_. Yeah, sure, other solutions exist, but then I'd be trading more money for less fun, and that's not... fun.
I hope that you can get your spark back. It all depends on external factors and life events as well and with those I cannot help, but don't lose hope.
Thank you for articulating it this way. It's too easy for nihilism to bleed over into hobbies and pastimes.
I'm sorry for your loss.
Personally i was spending 1-2 hours every day making sure servers were running fine, drives were good, backups ran OK, software updates, and checking logs. None of those tasks interested me the least bit. I've run servers professionally for close to 2 decades, so i get enough of that at work, and considering that i can actually save money by letting someone else do it, it means that for me it was simply not worth it.
Instead, I use my "additional free time" to dive deeper into areas that actually interest me.
Similarly, yeah you could store movies in the cloud, but streaming those all the time is a huge waste of bandwidth and for many home internet connections quite high load.
Oh, and I also want my smart home to continue working when there is no internet connection.
When using the file share for something like Lightroom it makes a significant difference.
Depends on the situation.
If your needs are handling large amounts of photos/videos for work/hobbies, then a NAS probably makes sense, but if you're just hoarding a bunch of movies/tv-shows, does that really need RAID5/6 ? A single drive would probably be adequate, considering that you can probably "recreate" the contents.
Personally i use a content cache on my LAN that caches data for the cloud, meaning my data i available at LAN speeds on my LAN, but still stored in the cloud.
But my original comment was mostly about self hosting services.
Not really. Cloud providers make mistakes.
Everybody makes mistakes. You just need to take a quick glance over on r/datarecovery to see that it's not only Cloud providers.
Just because you keep your data in the cloud doesn't mean you shouldn't make backups. I make local backups as well as backups to another cloud, and data i really care about (mostly family photos) is archived on M-disc Blu-Ray media as well.
Not sure how I would do those in the cloud cheaper and as simply as this.
Err, yeah no. My home server is only serving lan clients and is not on the internet. Please, try to pwn it.
:}
How about malware protection ? Most (major) cloud providers offer n days of x versions (OneDrive is 30 days worth of unlimited versions), so if your files end up as encrypted garbage, you can simply roll back to an earlier version. Unless your home server is airgapped, that could still apply to you.
You're probably also lacking in redundancy with power and internet (though if only available on the LAN that's not a problem), as well as fire protection/prevention as well as flood protection.
It's due to the countrys backup power being based on natural gas, which costs about €2/m3 currently due to the Ukraine/Russia war. During february it hit €1.14/kwh.
Prices are dropping though, with about 85% of our power currently coming from renewable sources.
Mine in Texas, USA charges about $72 per month to allow me to host my own server, and have 1 static IP. That would be in addition to my $60 residential connection-- for a total of $132. Pretty expensive for me-- $1,584 annually
Anyone have a better (cheaper) solution?
Granted, with DigitalOcean I pay about $10/month ($120/year) for a tiny server... if I ran my own, the server itself would be much cheaper for the quality (i.e. several GB of RAM & storage space). It's just that the internet service is much more expensive :(
Have you happened to measure the thermal difference vertically mounting your laptop? I also vertically mounted my home server laptop for the same reasons, but noticed the fans seemed much louder so I returned it to be horizontal like normal. It's as if they were designed so that the horizontal surface acts to attenuate their high-frequency sounds. It's still annoying, but less so. I'm wondering if going vertical again, but throttling the CPU as you've done is the way to go.
It might be that your fan might be old and worn out. As someone who uses older laptops and has given out T420/X230 type machines to family members, I've noticed that sometimes tilting the laptop under use results in vibrations coming from the fan, likely from it being worn out and the blades touching the heatsink and/or plastic.
My take on this, the answer is yes, until a hardware part fails, and in 10 year old computers, they do.
Then it gets tricky: laptops, especially 10 year old laptops can be very hard to fix.
Otherwise just restore the backup to a 5 year old laptop.
If you laptop server can run for 5 or 10 years, there is a good chance that during that time, you spilled coffee in the keyboard of another laptop, making it a good candidate for the new server.
I have a 12 year old laptop, that has been a server for 8 years.
But yes, some models probably don't have the same level of second-hand parts market, making repair difficult.
Low power, fanless and reliable.
I have it running home assistant, nightly offsite backups from my co-located servers, some uptime monitoring and various other CRONy bits.
I ran a Dell D630 for a number of years without issue.
I even loaded up Final Cut and dropped in some 1080p h.264 footage and it edits it just fine.
I think the one good thing about Intel's CPU monopoly for all those years is that these old machines are still powerful enough today. That is likely going to change now that CPUs are getting significant performance boost every year again. A dual core CPU that is usable today I suspect will be unbearably slow for the web in ~5 years.
I will go out and say that it's not CPUs which are ageing poorly, it's the web that is getting too bloated for everyone. Hacker news is the signature example of how much utility you can get out of simple HTML/CSS. I really see little need for the behemoths that are Facebook's and Twitter's modern interfaces (which in turn make old laptops feel slow, even when they're not).
>I have Mac OS 10.13
How? Apple officially supports macOS High Sierra (10.13) on Mid 2010 or newer MacBook Pros. Even this patcher [0] to install it on older machines only supports 2008 and newer Macs.
With that patch. Runs fantastic just like it would had Apple allowed it.
oops, my MacBook Pro is an early 2008. I listed a 2007 model for sale on eBay this morning and just mixed them up. Sometimes my brain is on autopilot.
[Edit] I will add that 2007 models support Mac OS 10.11 and every app I use except for Firefox still supports 10.11. (chrome still supports 10.11 tho)
The only down side would be disk redundancy and such I would want in anything storing important data.
Nothing's impossible, but it would have to be a pretty targeted attack to exploit the CPU.
That said it's still a good idea keeping stuff behind a VPN if you don't need to share stuff publicly with the entire internet.
- I have a scanner that saves scans to a network share. Having a linux-based SMB server on the local network is convenient and privacy-friendly, especially when the disks are encrypted. Doubt you can get privacy like that with a cloud service to which your printer can connect.
- If you follow the 3-2-1 style of backups, having a fileserver at home is convenient for a solid backup regime across all devices.
- You can use a server for serving local media to watch on the TV or any other device
- In some cases, you can use the same server for advanced security, privacy, ad-blocking, and combining multiple internet connections in order to gain fail-over redundancy and increased bandwidth.
I am able to do all of the above with a really simple home server setup [1].
[1]: https://sagar.se/blog/diy-multi-wan-linux-router/diy-multi-w...
I like hosting at home, gives me peace of mind because it's all mine and controlled by me. No latency across LAN and cheap storage (one could say it's at cost price) are other reported advantages.
It's not necessary, sure I could host my email with google like the masses and it would be functionally the same, but it's my preference.