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Comment by kassner | Hacker News Reader

Warning: shameless plug ahead

Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade.

Laptops are also quite power efficient at idle, so in the long run they make more sense than a desktop. If you are just starting, they are a great first server.

(And no, laptops don’t have an inbuilt UPS. I recommend everyone to remove the battery before using it plugged 24x7)

1: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardwar...

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On topic, this is how I got into computing and Linux. I moved out as soon as I graduated high school and the only computer I had was an gen 1 mac mini and a tiny netbook with a blazing 1Ghz single core Intel atom (32bit). Even XP ran slow. Couldn't install vista nor the relatively new windows 7.

A friend told me about Linux. So I thought I had nothing to lose. What I didn't know is what I had to gain.

Ended up getting hooked. Grabbed computers out of the dumpster at my local community college and was able to piece together a few mildly decent machines. And even to this day I still recycle computers into random servers. Laptops and phones are usually great. They can't do everything but that's not the point. You'd be surprised what a 10 yo phone can still do.

I'm not trying to brag, but do want people to know that it's very possible to do a lot in absolutely nothing. I was living paycheck to paycheck at the time. It's not a situation I want anyone to go through, but there is a lot more free hardware out there than you think. People throw out a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that isn't even broken! Everything I learned on was at least 5 years old at the time. You don't need shiny things and truth is that you don't get a lot of advantages from them until you get past the noob stage. It's hard, but most things start hard. The most important part is just learning how to turn it into play.

Yep same. Amazing what you can pull out of the skip these days and run for nothing. I lifted a couple of dead Lenovo P720 workstations out and managed to get a working dual Xeon silver 32 core machine with 64Gb of ECC RAM.

Uses a bunch of power but two orders of magnitude less in cash than buying another ECC ram desktop over 3 years.

If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

  > If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

I think this is part of the magic sauce.

When you're poor you're probably less risky with expensive stuff and what's considered expensive is a low threshold.

But if it was a dumpster find... who cares?

Having been poor for most of my life, it's what you didn't pay for that keeps you afloat generally. If it blows up, I will move to the Lenovo M70s I found without a hard disk or RAM the other week. I put an 8 gig stick in it and it works so will get some more off ebay.

I have a fairly high end M4 Macbook Pro but prefer to live as if I don't most of the time. All of us can take a big fall in life so it makes sense to keep one foot in both worlds.

Yeah my partner laughs at how cheap I am a lot of the time. But also I just now like making stuff too. It is very rewarding and it's always a useful skill. Maybe AI will be able to repair everything but sometimes it's about logistics

Mine didn't because it meant she could spend more on shoes. Anyway she's gone now...

It's about making the most of opportunity, something which is all around us and needs to be utilised.

old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41150483

Where I live (250 apartment complex in Sweden) people throw old computers in the electronics trash room, I scavenge the room every day multiple times when I take my dog out for a walk like some character out of Mad Max. I mix and match components from various computers and drop debian on them then run docker containers for various purposes. I've given my parents, cousins and friends Frankenstein servers like this. You'd be amazed at what people throw away, not uncommon to find working laptops with no passwords that log straight into Windows filled with all kinds of family photos. Sometimes unlocked iPhones from 5 years ago. It's a sick world we live in. We deserve everything that's coming for us.

I'm not sure if that a sign of the coming apocalypse.

I hope it reflects the fact that most people don't have a great understanding of IT and cyber security rather than a sign of a sick world ;)

I'm posting right now from a 13 year old Acer laptop running Linux Mint XFCE. I always feel bad about throwing away old tech so when the time came to buy a new laptop I hooked this one up to my living room TV via HDMI, bought a $25 Logitech K400+ wireless keyboard/trackpad combo, and it's still trucking along just fine. Surfs the web, handles YouTube, Netflix with no problems, I occasionally pop open VS Code or Thunderbird to check into something work-related. Even runs a couple indie games on Steam with gamepad support.

I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive, sadly I live in a country that they don't ship to.

same here, using the old laptops until they are physically so damaged that they can't be used anymore and the cost to repair exceeds the cost to replace them. got one in it's last breaths. working fine mostly, but the keyboard is badly damaged, so needs an external keyboard to be useful. for work of course i need something stronger, but when i need to replace my work laptop my kids get an "upgrade" :-)

> I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive

It’s in my (long-term) TODO list to build my own enclosure for a Framework motherboard, to make a portable server to carry around during long trips. Something compact that carries the punch of an i7. One day…

Yes, but custom to my needs (disks and connections).

what are the specs ? I use a 10yo thinkpad with a core i3 and arch based desktop, sometimes the web is too heavy (discord or similar webapps) but it's mostly fine.

it's true that with a bit of education, you can get pretty far with old machines

CPU: Intel i7-3630QM (8) @ 3.400GHz

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M

Memory: 7818MiB

Those specs are showing their age for sure, but I run the TV at 1366x768, so they've been enough. The CPU has been an absolute champ. I'm sure running XFCE as the window manager has a lot to do with why it trucks along, XFCE is amazingly low footprint and snappy.

Thanks, I can see how an i7 with a discrete gpu could keep handling most things easily.

Speaking of laptop batteries as a UPS source, some laptops come with battery management features that keep the battery healthy even when plugged in full time, usually exposed as a setting in the BIOS/UEFI. I've found that business/enterprise type laptops like Thinkpads and Probooks have this as standard, for example Thinkpads from 2010 already had this, assuming you're lucky enough to find one with a usable battery of course.

Macbooks do this as well automatically if kept plugged in for a certain period of time.

Is there something for Linux/debian? I’m assuming this is part of the OS and wouldn’t work on a MacBook with Linux.

Look up tlp's charging thresholds. Just set mines up for debian

It's managed by the OS when it's awake, by the bios (or uefi or whatever) when it's sleeping.

Both methods work under Asahi Linux on the ARM macs.

The best bang for buck at the moment seems to be tiny mini micro machines https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

Typically available regularly via ebay (or similar) as businesses rotate them out for new hardware.

The other week I picked up an i5 9400T Lenovo m720q with 16GB of memory for £100 delivered.

They practically sip power, although that's less true now I've shoved a 10Gb dual SFP NIC in there.

Yep. I have bought 3 or 4 for different uses. So perfect as servers. I run plex and lots of docker containers. Development. Etc. all of those machines are so useful for console Linux and containers.

I have one like these, too as my home server, HP Elitedesk 800 G5 DM, to be explicit.

I can also recommend Lenovo ThinkCentre MiniPCs or similar brands. Those can often be found cheap when companies upgrade their Hardware. These machines are also power efficient when idling, use even less space than a laptop and the case fan is very quiet (which can be annoying with laptops under load).

I'm currently running Syncthing, Forgejo, Pihole, Grafana, a DB, Jellyfin, etc... on a M910 with an i5 (6th or 7th Gen) without problems.

Yeah I would recommend this too. I've only used Dell Optiplex Micro series, no issues so far. They use external PSU similar to those in laptops, which helps with power efficiency.

Something with 8th gen i5 can be had for about 100-150 USD from ebay, and that's more than powerful enough for nearly all self-hosting needs. Supports 32-64gb of RAM and two SSD.

I second this, I have a 4 node Proxmox cluster running on MFF Optiplexes and it's been great. 32gb of RAM in each and a second USB NIC (bonded with the built-in NIC) makes for a powerful little machine with low power draw in a convenient package.

The Optiplexes look nice, but I went with the Lenovo m720q's for the PCIe slot ... 10Gb dual SFP+ NICs are cheap as chips on eBay and when you can migrate VM's faster it's a nice quality of life improvement for migrating VM's between proxmox nodes.

> M910 with an i5

These are great and the M920q is also nice.

At 100 to 160 used these are a steal, just test the disks before you commit to long term projects with them (some have a fair bit of wear). Its newer cousins quickly climb in price to the $300+ range (still refurb/used)

The bleeding edge of this form factor is the Minisforum MS-01. At almost 500 bucks for the no ram/storage part it's a big performance jump for a large price jump. This isnt a terrible deal if you need dual SFP+ ports (and you might) and a free PCIE slot but it is a large price jump.

> M920q

I’m pissed at Lenovo for making the perfect machine for a home server, and then cheaping out by not adding the $0.50 M.2 connector on the back of the board. 2xM.2 + 1xSATA requires upgrading to “Tall” Intel NUCs if you want 3 discs.

If you want 2 m.2 slots you want the p330, same form factor as the m920q[1]

[1]https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/116583724775

Thank you! I thought only ThinkCentre were in the 1-liter form factor

> Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade.

My homelab servers have Athlon 200GE CPUs in them: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/athlon-200ge.c2073

They're x86 so most software works, AM4 socket so they can have the old motherboards I had in my PC previously, as well as the slower RAM from back then. At the same time they were dirt cheap on AliExpress, low TDP so I can passively cool them with heatsinks instead of fans and still powerful enough for self-hosting some software and using them as CI runners as well. Plus, because the whole setup is basically a regular PC with no niche components, the Linux distros I've tried on them also had no issues.

Honestly it's really cool that old components can still be of use for stuff like that.

I've got an old Mac-Mini 2012 laying around. It was a gift. I never wanted to switch to Mac on this solid, but not very powerful machine. Over xmas last year I booted the thing, and it was unbearable slow, even with the original version of the OS on it. After an macOS update, it was unusable. I put an SSD in (thanks YouTube for the guidance) and booted it with Debian and on top of that installed CasaOS (web-based home server OS/UI). Now I can access my music (thanks Navidrome) from on the road (thanks Wireguard). Docker is still a mystery to me, but I already learned a lot (mapping paths)

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo) which I wanted to give a similar fate, but unfortunately it idles at 18W on Debian.

I hope Asahi for Mac Mini M4 becomes a thing. That machine will be an amazing little server 10 years from now.

My domain has been running on a Mac Mini 2012 since new using Mac OS. Internet services are generally constrained by the available bandwidth and don't need much processing.

Yes but arguably anything below the equivalent of RAID6/RAIDZ2 puts you at a not inconsiderable risk of data loss. Most laptops cannot do parity of any sort because of a lack of SATA/M.2 ports so you will need new hardware if you want the resilience offered by RAID. Ideally you will want that twice on different machines if you go by the "backups in at least 2 different physical locations" rule.

Absolutely!

> if you want the resilience offered by RAID

IMHO, at that stage, you are knowledgeable enough to not listed to me anymore :P

My argument is more on the lines of using an old laptop as a gateway drug to the self-hosting world. Given enough time everyone will have a 42U rack in their basements.

> Most laptops cannot do parity of any sort because of a lack of SATA/M.2 ports

raid is NOT media or connection dependent and will happily do parity over mixed media and even remote blockdevs

To be honest I never understood the purpose of RAID for personal use cases. RAID is not a backup, so you need frequent, incremental backups anyway. It only makes sense for things where you need that 99.99% uptime. OK, maybe if you're hosting a service that many people depend on then I could see it (although I suspect downtime would still be dominated by other causes) but then I go over to r/DataHoarder and I see people using RAID for their media vaults which just blows my mind.

RAID is not backup, but in some circumstances it's better than a backup. If you don't have RAID and your disk dies you need to replace it ASAP and you've lost all changes since your last backup. If you have RAID you just replace the disk and suffer 0 data loss.

That being said, the reason why I'm afraid of not using RAID is data integrity. What happens when the single HDD/SSD in your system is near its end of life? Can it be trusted to fail cleanly or might it return corrupted data (which then propagates to your backup)? I don't know and I'd be happy to be convinced that it's never an issue nowadays. But I do know that with a btrfs or zfs RAID and the checksuming done by these file systems you don't have to trust the specific consumer-grade disk in some random laptop, but instead can rely on data integrity being ensured by the FS.

You should not propagate changes to your backup in a way that overwrites previous versions. Otherwise a ransomware attack will also destroy your backup. Your server should be allowed to only append the data for new versions without deleting old versions.

Also, if you're paranoid avout drive behavior, run ZFS. It will detect such problems and surface it at the OS level (ref "Zebras All The Way Down" by Bryan Cantrill)

i use mirror raid on my desktop. the risk of a disk dying is just to high. i even made sure to buy disks from two different vendors to reduce the chance of them dying at the same time. for the laptop i run syncthing to keep the data in sync with the desktop and a remote server. if the laptop dies i'll only be a few minutes out. when travelling i sync to a USB drive frequently.

for the same reason i don't buy laptops with soldered SSD. if the laptop dies, chances are the SSD is still ok, and i can recover it easily.

Convenience. If you lose a disk you can just replace it and don't need to reinstall/restore the backup.

Also, because it's fun and probably many self-hosters had racked servers and plugged disks in noisy, cold big chambers and they want to live again the fun part of that.

RAID isn’t backup - but in my years running computers at my house I’ve been lucky enough to lose zero machines to theft, water damage, fire, etc. but I have had many hard drives fail.

Way more convenient to just swap out a drive then to swap out a drive and restore from backup.

Interesting, I've had the exact opposite experience. My oldest HDD from 2007 is still going strong. Haven't had even a single micro SD card fail in a RPI. I built some fancy backup infrastructure for myself based on a sharded hash addressed database but so far have only used the backups to recover from "Layer 8" issues :)

I had a look at my notes and so far the only unexpected downtime has been due to 1x CMOS battery running out after true power off, 1x VPS provider randomly powering off my reverse proxy, 2x me screwing around with link bonding (connections always started to fail a few hours later, in middle of night).

It's incredibly valuable. It makes redundancy really affordable.

This means nothing until the need to replace one drive arises, then it's not an if..

No downtime with raid 5, you can swap out one drive as needed while the rest runs just fine.

I like snapraid for media drives. As long as it’s something without lots of deletes and changes, I bet more space and can use mixed drives and get a bit of a backup too since it’s a manual sync to create or update the “parity”. And the added advantage that any drive taken out or they dies you still can read any if the content on the other drives at any time.

I'll check out snapraid, thanks.

The challenge is a "bit of a backup" is risky. There's no back up if it's only a single copy of something, or even a single copy of something.

3-2-1 backups are really in time teach everyone the lesson that you don't buy storage, you buy backups, some that are more quickly accessible than others.

The cost of "maximizing" space with the drives I have, for example, is relatively trivial and simpler, its in the hundreds of dollars now instead of thousands. The upside is huge.

Solely trusting third party services is risky, and locally holding your data can be relatively managed well.

Sure. I am just using it for my media server which I could “re-acquire” if I really needed too.

What I meant by “bit of backup” was you could actually restore files that were deleted since the last sync since it’s not always live like RAID and requires scheduled syncs to update the parity info. It’s a compromise I make as a home user for my media server.

Nodes don't need to store data, and they can be PXE booted if they have a little RAM, so they only need redundant devices for their system partitions if you want to boot them locally (how often will they really be rebooted, though?). A hard drive plus a flash / USB drive would be plenty.

Consumer NASes have been around for 20 years, now, though, so I think most people would just mount or map their storage.

Glad I am not alone in this. Old laptops are much better than Raspberry pies and often free and power efficient.

> free and power efficient

Free yes. Power efficient no. Unless you switch your laptops every two years, it's unlikely to be more efficient.

My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs. I have an Intel 10th-gen mini PC that idles at 5W with one SSD. 3W is not groundbreaking, but for a computer you paid $0, it would take many years to offset the $180 paid on a mini PC.

> My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs.

some benchmarks show the Raspberry Pi 4 idling below 3W and consuming a tad over 6W under sustained high load.

Power consumption is not an argument that's in favor of old laptops.

> tad over 6W

That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad. I used to self host on the RPi, but it was just not enough[1]. Laptops/mini-PCs will have a much better burstable-to-idle power ratio (6/3W vs 35/8W).

1: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2022/03/16/update-to-my-zfs-ba...

> That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad.

I don't have a dog in this race, but I recall that RPi's throttling issues when subjected to high loads were actually thermal throttling. Meaning, you picked up a naked board and started blasting benchmarks until it overheated.

You cannot make sweeping statements about RPi's throttling while leaving out the root cause.

amd64 processors will have lots of hardware acceleration built in. I couldn’t get past 20MB/s over SSH on the Pi4, vs 80MB/s on my i3. So while they can show similar geekbench results, the experience of using the Pi is a bit more frustrating than on paper.

RPi is amazing for IOT tasks cuz it’s pretty portable but not for running general purpose server tasks, you’d get better performance per watt with used gear

Say power costs 25¢/kWh. That's $2 per year per watt of standby power. Adjust to your local prices.

So that'd take 30 years to pay back. Or, with discounted cash flow applied... Probably never.

And: they have a crash cart (keyboard, mouse and display) and battery backup built-in. An old laptop is perfect for starting a homelab. The only major downside I can think of, and as another commenter already mentioned, is the limited storage (RAID) options.

A lot of older 17" laptops had dual HDD slots.

Or DVD drives in which you could add a disk caddy.

Ah yes, optical drives were very common for a while.

> I recommend everyone to remove the battery before using it plugged 24x7

I agree but not all laptops can run without battery being plugged in. I use a Acer E5 575 as a home-lab and it can’t run without battery being plugged in, but interestingly the laptop has decided to bypass the battery completely after it died. Operating Systems detect no battery but its there and without it the laptop won’t boot.

There would be some sort of internal ‘switch’ that can be bypassed I believe

Why do you recommend removing the battery? Risk of fire?

I would have thought any reasonably recent laptop would be fine to leave plugged in indefinitely. Not to mention many won't have an easily removable battery anyway

Not the guy you’re asking, but I’d say risk of fire, yes. The laptop will be safer without a battery than it is with one, regardless of safeguards.

I wish I took a picture of my MacBook pro mid-2015, which happens to be my home hosted stuff server, before I changed it's battery. As it was just sitting in a corner, almost forgotten, I noticed the problem when cleaning, one day, and it started wobbling when I moved the piece of furniture it was sitting on. Once I gave it to a guy who disposes of such things, he told me I was lucky it didn't explode.

As said by others, mostly the fire risk. They can catch on fire, although rare, and a bad contact or flaky power source could make it go into many charge/discharge cycles in a short period of time. Batteries also degrade faster if it is too warm, cheap laptops often have terrible thermals and you could also shove it in a closet. A combination of those will increase the fire risk.

Also when using an old laptop, the battery could be pretty beaten up (too many cycles or prolonged exposure to heat) or it could have been replaced by a cheap non-compliant alternative, making it harder to trust wrt fire risk. And if you have to buy a brand-new one to reduce that risk, it immediately changes all the economic incentives to use an old laptop (if you are gonna spend money, might as well buy something more suitable).

> many won't have an easily removable battery

That’s true, although I’d guess majority can still have the battery disconnected once you get access to the motherboard.

I use an old thinkpad with Linux. There you can set a charging stop at e.g. 85%. Then you don’t have a need to unplug the battery

As a counterpoint my Lenovo X1 that was fresh from the factory had a battery swell so bad it cracked the case. So I think the risk being addressed was that, unless you're looking at the device every single day, the battery poses a fire/explosion risk that isn't worth it to some people

I you are not afraid of shopping the used market, I'm currently building a Proxmox node with 3rd gen Threadripper 32Cores/64Threads, 256GB ram and 2x10G, 2x2,5G and a dedicated IPMI mgmnt 1G interface, 64 PCIe gen 4 lanes, all for less than 2k Euro.

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