I thought about it, but the additional display, made me think about power saving, how to shut off screen, while keeping the headless service loaded? ... premature optimization?
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
@rockhandle That's how I started. Proxmox on a 9 year old laptop with LXC and VMs. Even now that laptop runs proxmox with pfsense and pihole VMs and is serving as my home router :)
As a test machine, yes. As a production machine... Meh.
Little memory, slow and small disk...
3 x laptops for a high availability Openshift deployment!
when I first explored the world of kubernetes my nodes consisted of discarded laptops I've dubbed "half-tops," or truly "headless" servers. it was a beautiful abomination.
when I first explored the world of kubernetes my nodes consisted of discarded "half-tops," or truly "headless" servers. it was a beautiful abomination.
I feel personally attacked.
I use an old pc i got from some dude, for 100 bucks
thrown in a few hard drives etc for some storage.
Yup, laptop for testing, old gaming PC for production.
Yup, I have an old broken laptop that runs Ubuntu Server and doesn't have a physical screen. I named it The Headless Machine (ha!)
Absolutely and you will feel right at home over here on our self-hosting community: https://slrpnk.net/c/selfhosting
Shoutout to my 16 year old dell laptop running god knows what for all eternity
Got a laptop with a busted up screen running Plex and it's pretty awesome! We don't need screens where we're going!
Looked into selling my old gaming laptop just recently, and it just doesn't seem like its worth selling them, if they are any older than 5 years, and not top spec. Making a server/node/test machine, might be the best option. Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
what do you mean comfortable? It's basically designed for it.
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Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
You probably already looked into it, but just in case: Depending on the model of the laptop, the battery might be removable using simple tools and without having to deal with adhesives.
I have an 8 core i7 Alienware 17r3 with 32GB RAM I use to host a pen-test lab. It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.
Naaaaah... I haven't blown up my pc after it did its service.... Naaaaaaaaah...
I just use an old laptop as my main computer. Now I have a reason to keep it if I ever upgrade.
Thinkpad T430, i7 gen 1,16gb home server
I think I'm going to have to buy a wattage meter plug-in to see what my laptops run at with nothing running, a single Docker image of nginx, and then an API image on top of that. I wonder what my RaspberryPi 4 is pulling with my docker images running on there.
this is the way
I have like 3 spare laptops, and another spare computer. I'm not running anything right now because this router doesn't support port forwarding no matter what I try (it's a firmware issue apparently), but they're always there for me when I need them.
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I used to but the fan eventually broke. It works if I flip it upsidedown so the vents face upwards but the CPU is still hitting 90 degrees idle 💀
For a while I was using a 10 year old Mac Pro G5 as a home server. Conveniently it also doubled as a space heater in the winter.
It also has 2 Ethernet ports so it can ~~double~~ triple as a cheese grater. :D
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I love when people find useful tasks for older tech or extend the life of older tech. There is enough e-waste out there.
I took my first foray into media hosting by running subsonic on an old emachines laptop! ain't nothing wrong!
I've never had an internet connection that allows normal server connections. I guess I could set it up with Cloudflare or something.
I've been more likely to use old laptops as thin clients... run Linux on my desktop, then connect to it with VNC so the laptop doesn't really have to do anything. Or set them up with a really lightweight Linux desktop like WindowMaker and use them to play music out in my studio.