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Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?

125 点作者 hddherman大约 3 年前

46 条评论

ivanmontillam大约 3 年前
Yes, it is viable, I have a Lenovo 3000 N100 (2007) still running as a VPN Server, while I am overseas since 3 years ago. A non-tech person living in that house turns it on for me every once in a while, as I have not configured any Wake-on-LAN or similar. The only new internal parts are the 2Gb of RAM sticks and SSD.<p>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.<p>It doesn&#x27;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.<p>EDIT: Typo.
timonoko大约 3 年前
I have better than UPS. I have watchdog on my server. It is a reprogrammed wifi-plug, which turns power off&amp;on if it cannot see the server, or does not get ping every 5 minutes.<p>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.<p><pre><code> Yes. They are watching each other.</code></pre>
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ThatMedicIsASpy大约 3 年前
There are better ways. They are also not that expensive for mini servers running a few services.<p>Fujitsu Esprimo, Fujitsu Futro, Lenovo ThinkCentre, HP EliteDesk, HP ProDesk, ...<p>Used and refurbished they can be found starting at around 40€ depending on the configuration.<p>2012 is too old in my eyes (CPU performance per watt)
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ToolsDevler大约 3 年前
I&#x27;m running an Asus N751JX with 16GB RAM. It works perfectly and is a great addition to my small Raspberry pi 3&#x2F;4 army.<p>But a heads up for everyone doing this. Please, please remove the laptop battery before running it 24&#x2F;7. Otherwise this is a serious fire hazard. The hardware and especially the battery are not designed to run under these conditions.
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Maursault大约 3 年前
My media server since 2014 has been a 13&quot; 2010 MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard with the built-in Apache server configured to show directory listings. Nothing else is needed... Apache automagically streams mp4s across the network to multiple users flawlessly. I never understood the point of installing a custom Linux media server with a slow funky eyecandy gui when <i>any OS + Apache is all that is needed.</i>
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GianFabien大约 3 年前
I&#x27;m using a 2006 vintage Compaq Presario as a home server running netBSD. The battery holds up for about 30 minutes, enough for an orderly shutdown. The LCD failed some time ago, so I simply removed it. Mostly I connect via sshd. Can connect a VGA LCD for rare low-level sysadmin work.
post_break大约 3 年前
I still believe the mac mini is the perfect home server. You can now get them with 10 gig internet. They sip power so a UPS can run them for ages, almost no heat, can transcode media for plex, cheap, tiny, etc. You can also use them connected to a TV for watching media that isn&#x27;t easily accessed from a smart TV or media player. The only con is either MacOS, or linux support. Besides that they are incredible. If you need more horsepower sure, not perfect.
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Fwirt大约 3 年前
Old laptops also make killer home routers. I recently replaced my consumer grade wireless router with an old Thinkpad in a router-on-a-stick configuration + PoE switch + dedicated access point and my home network is better for it in just about every way. Added bonus that it can run a simple webserver and run some light home automation tasks without breaking a sweat.<p>Of course the downside is that you lose a nice web GUI for managing port forwarding and stuff, but if you&#x27;re SSHing in to adjust iptables on your router you probably don&#x27;t need the web interface all that much anyway.<p>It&#x27;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.
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ineedasername大约 3 年前
I have a similarly spec&#x27;ed mini ITX desktop from the same proc generation-- it&#x27;s an i3 instead of an i5 mobile proc but roughly the same capabilities. I&#x27;m sure it sips a bit more power than the laptop but it works fine as a home server.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d probably ne just fine with a reasonably spec&#x27;ed 10 year old system.<p>Most of the time that I&#x27;m called on to deal with a supposedly aging 3-year old computer for a family member that&#x27;s slowed down a bit it has nothing to do with the hardware getting old. Most of the time it&#x27;s accumulated crap running on startup combined with having purchased the computer that had the highest # attached to storage (ooh 2TB I&#x27;ll never use!) instead of a snappy 512GB SSD.
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Multicomp大约 3 年前
I have a 2012 HP Elitebook 8560p I inherited from work decom that I used as my primary PC for about 4 years, and even now is my torrent client for public domain movies and is also my &#x27;I guess I just need to use Windows&#x27; box after I built my desktop as a Fedora KDE box.<p>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&#x27;s all PCI 2 SATA bus so even the cheapest SSD maxes out the system bus. She&#x27;s starting to feel like flying an Excelsior class starship in the TNG era.<p>Today&#x27;s laptops are sans optical disk drive, have lots more &#x27;goodies&#x27; 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&#x27;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!<p>But for all that, said laptop is not my home server, nor are one of my many salvaged &#x27;just in case I need a home server&#x27; laptops sitting on my shelf in the computer lab.<p>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&#x27;t want to play with the configs again! It&#x27;s all undocumented and manually configured and I haven&#x27;t put in the work to clean it up and put the configs into nixos or config management yet.<p>The moral of the story is (I guess) to use config management else all of your computer hardware hoarding may be stymied.
natly大约 3 年前
I love this. It&#x27;s weird that we don&#x27;t consider the fact that computers becoming more powerful and home internet becoming faster as having an effect on personally managed servers being a more feasible option. How few of todays servers could replace the servers spotify used when they started up a decaded ago?
londons_explore大约 3 年前
Anyone who feels the need for a home server, I would strongly advise using either a laptop or ARM SBC (eg. Raspberry pi).<p>The main cost of your always on server will be power. And laptops are far lower power than desktops when idle.<p>If you need anything specialist a laptop can&#x27;t do, you&#x27;re probably better renting a cloud server instead.
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thenthenthen大约 3 年前
I used to host my blog from jailbroken iphone 4s via wifi, worked great, no issues with power outages also ;p
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pikaynu大约 3 年前
I have an HP laptop with a 3rd gen i5, fairly low powered repurposed with Linux and Plex as a home server. I am using it as a media server, file storage with hard disks attached and also as the primary tailscale host to have a mesh of personal devices over the internet without a public IP.
D13Fd大约 3 年前
I ran a Debian web &#x2F; webdav server for 12+ years on a 2007 Asus netbook. It worked flawlessly the whole time.<p>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.
jasfi大约 3 年前
The biggest performance factor I&#x27;ve seen is sufficient SSD storage, even on older computers.
laxis96大约 3 年前
Talking about low power, I am currently running a headless HP laptop which I recovered from a friend. This thing sports an i3-5005U CPU (2GHz 2c&#x2F;4t) and idles at 4W measured at the wall!<p>Well, it&#x27;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&#x2F;7. The fan also turns off at idle so it&#x27;s totally silent.<p>What&#x27;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...
Havoc大约 3 年前
It works but I’ve found it to be suboptimal.<p>By the time a laptop is ready to retire the battery is old and the fans clogged.<p>So at a minimum you need to actively keep an eye on the battery for swelling etc
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squarefoot大约 3 年前
Thinkpads are my laptops of choice (writing this on my X240) but I&#x27;d never use any any laptop as a home server: if something breaks there are no spare parts, no PSUs to repair or cards to add for more functionality (I simply don&#x27;t trust USB for disks) or swap etc, and the whole machine is not intended to be kept on 24&#x2F;7 (think about the fan wearing, not just the CPU). I could only understand if one need to serve files in a emergency situation, and I did exactly that many years ago when we had to service a server which died without notice at one workplace where downtimes were not an option, so I copied all their documents on my mini laptop -Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7010, a netbook sized marvel well before the word netbook was invented- which became the file server with Samba for almost two full days until the server came up and I restored their modified files back.<p>Building a home server from scratch isn&#x27;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.<p>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 (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org&#x2F;linuxaudio&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org&#x2F;linuxaudio&#x2F;</a>), etc.
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Aachen大约 3 年前
Oddly specific title. Another 2012 laptop-at-home hoster reporting in, AMA I guess! I didn&#x27;t have any thermal&#x2F;fan issues the way OP described, but my laptop is also more powerful (Asus rather than a ThinkPad) so it was presumably just made to handle more heat.<p>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.<p>Whether this works for you all depends on your goals, or more and more often, what software you use to achieve these goals:<p>- Compiling huge software suites like an OS or Firefox as a service is just too heavy.<p>- 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&#x27;s exactly what I do.<p>- Single gitlab service? Oof, that&#x27;s on the edge of minimum requirements <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;install&#x2F;requirements.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;install&#x2F;requirements.html</a> , but should work okay if you don&#x27;t have too many users.
henvic大约 3 年前
Be mindful of thermal throttling, though: the noise (in the living room?) can be a nuisance. I&#x27;ve bought an Intel NUC (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;henvic.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;homelab&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;henvic.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;homelab&#x2F;</a>) to use as a home server and kind of regret it. It&#x27;s not a laptop, but has the small factor of one.
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scrapheap大约 3 年前
I still use a laptop from 2012 as my main computer. It handles my day to day stuff fine, including running a couple of Vagrant VMs.
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rusteh1大约 3 年前
I&#x27;m using an Acer laptop that must be 15 years old for pfsense, never misses a beat, built in UPS! I&#x27;ve got a second laptop, a MacBook air from 2012 running a bunch of containers for Plex, hassio, etc. Works fine. I&#x27;ve got it all in a 19&quot; rack I built out of wood. World&#x27;s cheapest homelab. Haven&#x27;t changed it in years.
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salmo大约 3 年前
I slowly ran out of use cases for a &quot;home server&quot; as everything moved to &quot;the cloud&quot; (hand wave), streaming and Apple took most of it away. Keeping a static IP for mail and web got more expensive that Google Apps for Domains &amp; Netlify.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Every once in a while I mess with some other little ARM board and environmental sensors, but that&#x27;s it.<p>No fans. Less power than my kids&#x27; tablets. Just Ansible for config management and keeping them up to date.
donatj大约 3 年前
Until I wanted Plex to start transcoding video durring the pandemic, I happily used a Mac Mini from 2008 as my home server, which itself was an upgrade from the Intel Geode FitPC I had been using for years before that. Like most things, it depends on what you&#x27;re doing with it.
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8fingerlouie大约 3 年前
I don&#x27;t understand the need to run home servers in 2022, at least not for most people and most problems.<p>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&#x27;s probably better than anything else, but for day to day work, it&#x27;s simply not worth the trouble.<p>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 &quot;home budget&quot; as well. We&#x27;re talking redundant power, redundant internet, server grade hardware and spare parts, fire&#x2F;flood protection, physical access control, dedicated security operations, and multi-geo redundancy means you get that across multiple data centers.<p>I&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptomator.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptomator.org&#x2F;</a>) 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.<p>The best part is i&#x27;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&#x2F;kwh normal, current around €0.75&#x2F;kwh), it was costing me about €8.50 every month. That&#x27;s without the hardware cost, which will easily cost as much over 5 years.<p>For comparison, a &quot;Microsoft Family365&quot; subscription can be had for about €75&#x2F;year (€6.25&#x2F;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.<p>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.<p>That being said, i do still have a small &quot;home server&quot;, but it&#x27;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 :)
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merpkz大约 3 年前
I used to run my old laptop from ~2008 with intel P8600 CPU, 4GB RAM and two cheapest kingston 120GB SSDs in RAID0 for postgresql dev work. Main reason was that I didn&#x27;t want to bog my main desktop when re-ingesting large data sets and then indexing or updating it. Worked very well even though it had SATA II, guess random I&#x2F;O on SSD is no issue even for older hardware. Needless to say it beat my main desktops uptime because of having battery working as a great UPS. And it could always display htop&#x2F;iotop on it&#x27;s display as a nice indication that something was being worked on. Reusing old hardware is cool.
hellohowareu大约 3 年前
How about... Internet Service Provider pricing for home servers?<p>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<p>Anyone have a better (cheaper) solution?<p>Granted, with DigitalOcean I pay about $10&#x2F;month ($120&#x2F;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 &amp; storage space). It&#x27;s just that the internet service is much more expensive :(
mcovalt大约 3 年前
&gt; I was able to work around most of the cooling-related issues by mounting the laptop vertically...<p>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&#x27;s as if they were designed so that the horizontal surface acts to attenuate their high-frequency sounds. It&#x27;s still annoying, but less so. I&#x27;m wondering if going vertical again, but throttling the CPU as you&#x27;ve done is the way to go.
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ur-whale大约 3 年前
&gt; Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?<p>My take on this, the answer is yes, until a hardware part fails, and in 10 year old computers, they do.<p>Then it gets tricky: laptops, especially 10 year old laptops can be very hard to fix.
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nergal大约 3 年前
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sweclockers.com&#x2F;galleri&#x2F;15194-laptop-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sweclockers.com&#x2F;galleri&#x2F;15194-laptop-server</a>
hellweaver666大约 3 年前
I have a 2010 Macbook Pro sitting on my network as an airprint server for my aging Dell Laser printer (purely because the drivers no longer work on modern OS&#x27;s). It&#x27;s hacky but cheaper than buying a new printer and the damn thing keeps on chugging as long as it&#x27;s plugged in (the battery is long dead and lasts less than five minutes).
znpy大约 3 年前
Actually thinkpads from that era can host 4 disks: there used to be special deives that would fit into the expresscard slot.
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srmarm大约 3 年前
I use an old Wyse thin client that I picked up from ebay for ~£25. The built in hard drive was something silly like 32Gb so I just boot from an external SSD which gives me 1tb to play with.<p>Low power, fanless and reliable.<p>I have it running home assistant, nightly offsite backups from my co-located servers, some uptime monitoring and various other CRONy bits.
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amelius大约 3 年前
Why not, people use RPis as a home server.
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JamesBaxter大约 3 年前
I’ve used laptops for this purpose in the past but I always disliked having my HDDs connected over USB. I was concerned that all my storage felt like it was active all the time even when not being accessed, I was always concerned my drives would burn out faster but I never had any data to back it up.
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zikduruqe大约 3 年前
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;02&#x2F;laptop-motherboard-reborn-as-a-low-wattage-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;02&#x2F;laptop-motherboard-reborn-as...</a><p>I ran a Dell D630 for a number of years without issue.
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windowsrookie大约 3 年前
I&#x27;ve been using a 2007 17&quot; MacBook Pro as my main machine at my desk for the last couple weeks. Honestly it&#x27;s great. The 17&quot; screen is still bright and high enough resolution for me (1920x1200), the CPU is perfectly fine for web browsing and some light VS Code (2.5GHZ Core 2 Duo). I have Mac OS 10.13 on it which is still supported and receiving updates by every App I use. The keyboard on these old MacBook Pros is fantastic as well.<p>I even loaded up Final Cut and dropped in some 1080p h.264 footage and it edits it just fine.<p>I think the one good thing about Intel&#x27;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.
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jeffwask大约 3 年前
At one place I worked, a team built a selenium grid out of old laptops so I don&#x27;t see why not.<p>The only down side would be disk redundancy and such I would want in anything storing important data.
blueflow大约 3 年前
I&#x27;m using a Siemens Futro S300 from 2005 as home server. It has no UPS-like functionality, but is completely silent in operation.
BaudouinVH大约 3 年前
I&#x27;m currently running a yunohost install on 2007 EeePC 701. My only worry : the battery health.
humanistbot大约 3 年前
Aren&#x27;t most of those laptops running CPUS that have massive unpatched security vulnerabilities?
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pipeline_peak大约 3 年前
Is there any necessary reason to run a home server in 2022?
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carvking大约 3 年前
depends on laptop - but yes.
my69thaccount大约 3 年前
No ECC
iancmceachern大约 3 年前
No