If you want a poors man home server just repurpose old laptops. I do with a bunch of them and it's fine. I know laptops are not for that, but they wouldn't have any other use anyway, and it's like a server with an UPS built in.
Most tasks are running scrapers or data wrangling so I don't have to keep my desktop running.
I've been doing this for maybe close to two years, and for now it works. I wouldn't recommend for VMs though.
Also, your router needs an UPS too but it will be fine with a cheap one.
I was considering this but then I stumbled across some ~7 year old micro towers. Those little thin client boxes that were popular for a short time as a thing that can connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor to a corporate network.
Refurbished with a Windows license (if I ever want to use it) was less than a surplus laptop. Power usage seems acceptable but I'll compare with a Kill-A-Watt. I have one on the way and if it works out I'll grab a few more.
I do like the idea of a surplus laptop cluster, mostly because of the built in UPS factor but there's a lot of wasted hardware there, such as the monitor and keyboard. But I suppose that's kind of a feature too.
I have shower thoughts of some kind of custom bladecenter made of old laptops but that's a lot of work for probably zero benefit.
Another upside is laptop chips suck less power but still perform ok in most use cases, especially without a graphical load. The monitor and keyboard allow easy interfacing if needed plus ports are often convenient too. even just eSATA for more storage.
I run a uSFF HP box for my hypervisor and a low power J5005 core in my NAS and am more than happy with the performance let alone minimal power usage. Sure the J5005 system takes ages to update requiring a backup DC/PiHole setup on the HyperVisor but it just works at low cost.
To me the main problem would be the noise. I don't have a dedicated server room and even if me and my wife's bedroom + living room is quite big it'd still be annoying during the night. But I am quite fond of the idea to reuse old laptops regardless.
Can you post a link to those 7 year old micro towers, please?
Yeah noise is why I didn’t go with surplus servers, and the power requirements. Proper servers are actually pretty cheap, less than these tiny towers even. But the power and noise is just too much. Plus less horsepower is actually more interesting to me so my workloads have a hope of hitting scaling limitations.
They’re available in a bunch of configurations and on multiple sites so you can look around for a good deal that fits your needs. I found one with an SSD for additional power savings.
There are advantages to this, but do note that earlier core i* chips had earlier versions of QuickSync that work, it just wasn't as good as new versions (5th gen and newer).
Plex can use nVidia cards for hardware acceleration for encoding.
In regards of power efficiency I'd still be drooling over one of the Xeon D-1600 configurations but haven't found one that's not in a rack form factor yet.
As a router, it's quiet in a desktop environment, unless the CPU is fully loaded. For a bedroom, silent is better than quiet, which could justify investment in a fanless case for mini-ITX. These are not cheap, e.g. Streacom or Akasa.
Broadwell NUCs are available on eBay and Newegg has a matching Akasa Plato X case for $100. With an SSD, that has no moving parts. But only dual core, single NIC.
In most cases the beefiest air cooler + the lowest tolerable fan curve (meaning no overheating) will do the job just fine, especially if the CPU TDP is between 35-65W. Alternatively you can also limit the CPU power usage by disabling turbo or doing other tricks that forces it to run slower, but more efficiently.
Woah these are really cool. $$$ for what amounts to bling in my case but I might still be interested in something like this. The NUCs are great but I don't see many of them on the second hand market. At least not as many as these thin clients.
Different gear, but you’re starting to see HP t630 thin clients on the market for <$100. They are silent and have standard m2 interfaces for storage and sometimes come with a bunch of memory.
Noise can be lowered cheaply on adapted laptops with a little work. Re-paste, cut out the fan grill plastic, keep the HSF assembly clean and fluff-free, run the fans slower. Keep the unit elevated on feet.
Replace the fan with a Noctua-type quiet model bolted on. If the HSF needs that airflow directed, hack a simple shroud (or 3D print a replacement.)
I've been running a 2008 MacBook Pro as a server for 10 years. I've replaced the battery once, about 2 years ago, and one of the fans about six months ago. Other than that, it's been on the whole time.
What OS do/did you run on it? Thinking about repurposing an old 2011 Mac Mini as a server, it should still be more than capable, but since it stopped getting newer macOS versions a few years back it wouldn't get security updates, that kinda worries me.
Just checked, it's actually a mid-2009 MBP and its running 10.11.6 - it's not had a security update since 2018, which yeah, that is a little worrying. Might wipe it and install Ubuntu if there's such a thing as Firewire800 drivers for it.
Well, used to be. As I understand it newer laptops are more and more often using pouch style batteries to keep things thinner by using any available space.
They're just general computing devices. With the right software (and/or some hardware) you can turn them into whatever you want. CCTV, web server, door/gate intercom, electric meter reader/submitter, NAS (maybe with multiple drives using a powered USB hub), Wifi AP, media center, desktop computer, etc
I run a Raspberry Pi 4b, recently upgraded from a 3b+, and I believe that a lot of personal computing could (and maybe should) be run on them. They're quiet, energy efficient, and you could probably run them on a battery if you needed it.
I wouldn't run VMs on it, but I do run docker on it, and that works just fine.
> I think the pi is not particularly power efficient.
While there might be efficiency gains available, RPIs use a very small amount of power compared to a laptop. Idling a RPI4 uses 2.8 watts[0], which not only rates favorably compared to most laptops, but is far below what my charging cell phone uses. Maxed out my RPI can only hit 15W, since that's the maximum power that my official USB C adapter can output.
Now that being said, it does depend on what kind of load you're expecting to handle. If you're constantly maxing out a RPI, it is probably more energy efficient to purchase a larger server than to just keep adding RPIs. But if you're staying well below the theoretical max of a RPI, it'll consume far less than a used laptop.
> I think the pi would benefit from a more robust filesytem layout such as an overlay filesystem to allow continuous writes to /var to go to ramdisk.
This is one of the biggest drawbacks of the RPI; microSD cards cannot handle a ton of writes without frying. I've settled on using log2ram to ensure that logs are only periodically flushed from RAM to the SD card, to extend the lifespan of my cards.
Watts per low traffic website it's very efficient. CPU is generally not pegged at 100%.
For watts per CPU cycle not as much, I agree. Say it takes 10W at full power (I've not measured). That makes it 1/10th of a normal CPU. But it's like 30-40 times slower.
what's uptime like on an Rpi? I want to start working on a home website and have an old rpi laying around. But I've read that their reliability isn't great since they use SD cards. Any advice?
What I've done with my RPi 4 is attach an external SSD to it and mount it to /home and /var. This reduces writes to the SD card dramatically. Lengthening the SD card's life. I have serious uptime on it, almost a year (since I got an RPi 4 basically). It only shutdown with power failures (only one, which was entirely my own fault) and system maintenance (OS upgrades and other tinkering).
I've also imaged a version of that SD card, so it would be easy to just swap out and probably get things running again without much hassle.
I'm sure there are more fancy solutions with overlayfs, making the SD card read-only except for upgrades. Though I couldn't find a nice resource on it at the time.
My Home Assistant is running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. It has been running on the same SD card for two years now, with a large sqlite database and with debug logging enabled for Z-Wave so a fair amount of writing to the card.
It has only been down when the power has been out, and so far no issues with the card. It is however an A1 or A2 class card (I forget which), so supposedly design with applications in mind.
It should also be noted that a lot of issues with the Pi is due to poor USB cables / power supplies. I had another Pi that kept crashing every few days, until I measured the USB "charger" cable I was using for it. Turns out it had a resistance of almost exactly 1 Ohm. So if the Pi drew say 1A, that would be 1V loss in the cable... After I swapped cables it has been rock solid. A key point here is that a lot of SD cards do not like losing power while being written to. Avoid that and a quality SD card should have a long life.
Just dont have heavy writes on sdcard. I use external hdd for it.
I have a running rpi for more than half a year. No issues whatsoever. But again - I have a very stable electricity and I dont remember last time it was cut not due to planned maintenance.
My rPi3, running Arch, has an up time of close to 3 years on the same SD card. It runs various Docker containers including 1 for MiniFlux. It's mostly idle but when I need it, it's been reliably there for me. Maybe, I've been lucky.
I don't have numbers, stats handy but in my couple of years experience with Rpis - both regulars and the smaller Ws - the SD cards fail well before the Rpis do.
Just because I already have it and it's low-powered. I prefer starting projects out with 0-cost methods, and I already have an rpi laying around somewhere
That is a good point. However one of my goals/constraints is that I want my home site to be able to connect to other personal devices, e.g. a NAS (another WIP project). My ideal vision is a simple site running on my network, backed up on some kind of cloud storage.
Any suggestions? Though I'm a software engineer, I've worked mostly in app dev rather than infrastructure setup. This project is a way for me to learn more about the latter. The rpi is the easiest and cheapest option, but I have wondered if it wouldn't make more sense to use AWS or something like that. I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks a month, but more than that and I'd rather wait until I've learned a bit and know what my specific needs are. I've also considered an actual computer, but figure it's a waste of power when my initial work will probably just be figuring out the server config, HTML pages, etc.
>That is a good point. However one of my goals/constraints is that I want my home site to be able to connect to other personal devices, e.g. a NAS (another WIP project). My ideal vision is a simple site running on my network, backed up on some kind of cloud storage.
You could host everything on your home network but there are a couple of things you should probably know before you start: 1) Some ISP do not give you static IP, meaning its extra work
2) Security - Ideally your home network has some kind of segregation, you keep your trusted devices on one, IoT or not patchable on another for example, with firewall blocking connections from dirty network to clean one. Having externally facing website potentially having direct access to personal devices and services might be an issue from security point of view.
You can sign up on AWS/Azure or any other cloud provider for free and get free credits, which might be enough for you to learn. Feel free to ask further questions if you need to
Why not? I have a laptop with a 4th gen i5 that has VT-x. I've upgraded it to 16 GB RAM and an SSD. For now, it's a Spotify connect player but I'm contemplating running a couple VMs on it too, like pi-hole and whatnot.
Sure, that’s still reasonable, but it’s not young.
I’m also using similar class hardware for my VM server at home. Works well enough for home workloads, and for everything else there’s the cloud on demand.
I have an thinkpad x220 with some core-duo on it and 4GB Ram, can't remember, and it really was struggling with VMs. Didn't really cared much to check the specs. Just tried some debian VMs and it was less than satisfying.
Been running a 2010 MBP for the last few months hosting bitwarden, a samba file share, a DNS server, and a ton of other stuff. It's been pretty great so far, so much so that I dug out another old laptop and set it up as a pi-hole for a friend.
Have you any suggestions for increasing the amount of storage one could address? I can't find any Thunderbolt 2 or FireWire enclosures so I'm sadly limited to the two USB3.0 ports. Right know my plan is to resort to putting a high-capacity 2.5" hdd inside the MBP and adding a usb hdd in addition to the one I already have. But that doesn't strike me as ideal for some reason.
Yeah I just repurposed a 2015 MBP as a desktop now that it is painfully heavier than my 2018 12" Macbook. I just found out that it could do 4K60 through the display port, and as a desktop machine it's great.
Then the next level of slipping down the chain is the headless server or timelapse photo taker. :)
This has served me well for a year ($80 Dell laptop w/ an i5 from Craigslist) but I did just splurge on a Synology NAS and an APC UPS because having multiple external hard drives plugged into the laptop was quite dicey. The laptop is still a Plex server but now I have peace of mind for the data.
I'm curious, with shared servers at Digital Ocean available for $5 or $10 per month, why run a home server anymore? What is the value to having it local?
I've been considering this calculation for a year or so now. I spend an average of $20/mo on small VMs for testing (including the occasional $1/hr VMs for a couple of hours for heavy loads).
I thought I should replace my 2012 Mac Mini (HTPC) with a modern Hackintosh and 6c/12t or 8c/16t and do my testing workloads on that (or even just use my current 2c/4t for small workloads). But it's just so easy to spin up DO droplets within seconds and do so programmatically. Plus you can snapshot and create droplets from those, and turn on backups if you need to.
Traders still seem to be the most gullible when it comes to buying unnecessary hardware.
They really think their prosumer workstation is going to give them an advantage.
I guess thats one silver lining about Robinhood’s proliferation, many people know its good enough. Gullible traders still misread options settlement UI but seems there is a selective evolution at play to make that less common too.
Given how unoptimized frontends for crypto exchanges tend to be and how rapidly the trading volume could spike in these markets, actually it might make a difference.
Most tasks are running scrapers or data wrangling so I don't have to keep my desktop running.
I've been doing this for maybe close to two years, and for now it works. I wouldn't recommend for VMs though.
Also, your router needs an UPS too but it will be fine with a cheap one.