I'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.
While there are laptops which accept 3 or even 4 SSD's, and which could do this task, those are very expensive, so few might have one handy.
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.
There are a lot of different devices that include ARM cores.
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.
Actually, I just put a used HP ProDesk 600 G3 Microtower (Pentium Gold G4560) into operation, and my energy meter shows 0.0W most of the time (which can't be true, but apparently it's something <1W) with Ubuntu + TLP installed and the HDD in standby.
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"
I use hd-idle for spinning down the HDD (sdb) because the shucked WD "White Label"/Ultrastar He10 apparently doesn't care for APM or Standby Timer settings set through TLP:
because udisks2 wakes up the drives every 10 minutes, no configuration possible. Also, smartd (from smartmontools) shouldn't wake the HDD if it's in standby, but it will reset hd-idle's standby timer, so I tell smartd to run every 24 hours instead of 30 minutes:
Probably best to measure power in the DC side of the power supply to be sure it's under a watt...
Measuring 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!
Actually, that's exactly what I did and the energy meter will gladly measure a 1W LED bulb. That's why I think consumption is <1W most of the time. At the end of the day, everything <5W or even <10W would be pretty great.
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.
Not sure what generation you're referring to, but my HP Microserver (Gen 8) has a 17W TDP Intel Xeon cpu (E1220v2 iirc) and an HP SmartArray controller, and HP iLO baseboard management controller.
I don't think that stuff qualifies as "laptop-class".
I love this. It's weird that we don'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?
I'm running an Asus N751JX with 16GB RAM. It works perfectly and is a great addition to my small Raspberry pi 3/4 army.
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.
I haven’t seen soldered batteries. You must be thinking of ram. Batteries could be hidden behind the bottom plate but are usually connected by a cable internally and that’s all you need to disconnect. That’s true even for macbooks, iPhones, etc.
Being uncharged is actually pretty tough on the battery, for safety and longevity they're best stores somewhere between 40%-60% charged (that's why they come that way from the factory).
Depends on the hardware - I run 2x Dell E6330 server-laptops and their BIOS has an option to change the charging configuration to "primarily always on AC" - some Latitudes are designed to run docked all the time as "business PCs".
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.
Curious. My understanding is that, when connected to power, most modern devices bypass the battery entirely when it's above some threshold of charge state.
I have some old Dell laptops that most definitely don't do that. Left running on AC for several hours, the batteries get very warm due to the constant trickle charging.
>>The hardware and especially the battery are not designed to run under these conditions.
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.
Lithium batteries have an approximate 10 year shelf life under optimal conditions. Possibly less when heated consistently by a laptop running 24/7.
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.
I ran laptops 24/7 on AC with the batteries acting as UPS for over 15 years. Granted, all of them had removable ones with 18650 cells, so no swelling.
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).
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 'I guess I just need to use Windows' box after I built my desktop as a Fedora KDE box.
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.
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/4t) and idles at 4W measured at the wall!
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...
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.
Be mindful of thermal throttling, though: the noise (in the living room?) can be a nuisance. I've bought an Intel NUC (https://henvic.dev/posts/homelab/) to use as a home server and kind of regret it. It's not a laptop, but has the small factor of one.
Yep, my old laptop worked great but boy did the fans get annoying in my office. Upgraded to a fanless raspberry pi setup and it’s both better performing AND completely silent.
I don't know about the NUCs specifically, but I thing there should be a YMMV disclaimer in this recommendation.
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.
I'm using an Acer laptop that must be 15 years old for pfsense, never misses a beat, built in UPS! I've got a second laptop, a MacBook air from 2012 running a bunch of containers for Plex, hassio, etc. Works fine. I've got it all in a 19" rack I built out of wood. World's cheapest homelab. Haven't changed it in years.
funny that i have been trying to get my solar inverter data into homeassistant and i have already burned through 3 Raspberry pi 3b+ for some reason. i do not know is it because of a bad rs-232 to usb cable or because i am using a mobile charger to run the pi itself. i have a 2b but the wifi signal isnt great on the usb dongle so for the time being nothing is working. i do not want to use a full desktop/laptop because of power considerations
People should really stop using SD cards for anything halfway important with Pi's. They are proven again and again to be just ticking time bombs. With new Pi being able to boot from USB just fine, get an SSD even if it costs more.
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's). It's hacky but cheaper than buying a new printer and the damn thing keeps on chugging as long as it's plugged in (the battery is long dead and lasts less than five minutes).
I have better than UPS. I have watchdog on my server. It is a reprogrammed wifi-plug, which turns power off&on if it cannot see the server, or does not get ping every 5 minutes.
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.
Ubiquiti sells a nice piece of hardware that is a WAN reboot plug. Unfortunately there is zero configurability in terms of how it determines if WAN is working or not. I haven't been able to find another purpose made piece of kit.
My server is so old (2012) it has parallel port. If you connect all pins together it has enough power to operate 220V relay and thus modem and router can be turned on and off without any fancy hardware.
This is all you need to know. Connect all parport data pins together and connect it to suitable relay. Preferably 3-pin relay, so the Wifi-power-on is the default state.
$ 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)
If you are ever to pursue such a project, please pay close attention to proper electronic circuit design and safeguards when it comes to relays. Otherwise, you risk burning out the controlling pins or the whole system, due to reverse voltage (measured in hundreds) that is generated by the relay's coil when the relay is turned off.
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".
Happens twice a month, reasons vary. Mostly because Wifi is too congested in middle of Helsinki.
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.
You'd think so, but lately I've found it to be quite handy. Over the last couple of days, the UPS has notified me that the voltage coming from the wall is a bit off, oddly high (250-256V). netdata is nice and even graphs it out to me so I can pinpoint exactly when and how much the voltage deviated from normal.
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.
That's cool.
I used to have a raspberry pi hooked up to the reset switch pins via gpio on a mining rig in 2013. Back then, the mining software was all buggy and would crash the rig every couple of days.
When the pi couldn't ping the rig for 30 seconds, it rebooted it.
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'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/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/iotop on it's display as a nice indication that something was being worked on. Reusing old hardware is cool.
I ran a Debian web / webdav server for 12+ years on a 2007 Asus netbook. It worked flawlessly the whole time.
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.
I don't understand the need to run home servers in 2022, at least not for most people and most problems.
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?
It is doable, but certainly not something i would recommend. I quit doing it a decade or so ago.
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.
(not sure who downvoted or why btw, even if I disagree on some points your comment is constructive and the conclusion, using something with more modern encryption, makes sense. If only people would comment when they downvote...)
> 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.
Typical use of home server is to lower expenses when abroad or in the wilderness. Nobody here pirates movies (of course), but for example watching Joe Rogan 3 hour Youtube-sessions on phone in Finnmark was quite impossible. You ordered your server to download it with youtube-dl and to decode the audio at 32 kbits.
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.
> Unfortunately "not worth the trouble" mantra infected me and now I'm unable to do anything
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.
Do you exclude NAS functionality? Because multiple TB of cloud storage are definitely not affordable.
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.
Not just that multi TB are not affordable, but also I can get >1Gbps throughout on my local network and essentially 0 latency - whilst my internet connection is max 1Gbps and effectively a little less, with more significant latency.
When using the file share for something like Lightroom it makes a significant difference.
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.
Plus: bigcorp mistakes/hacks affect a million customers. You might have a less fancy door lock than the data center next door, or might have a 1024-bit RSA public ssh key still, but how likely is someone going to get into your email by cracking your lock or key specifically?
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.
And about redundancy ? geographical redundancy ? With (major) cloud providers, your data is stored in multiple geographically separate data centers, meaning even if a data center burns down, your data is still available, and redundancy hastily being restored.
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.
FYI that wattage is quite a lot, if you get it cheaper by hosting it on someone else's server (aka cloud) then they've either got a more efficient server or they don't factor externalities into the price (at €.75/kWh it sounds like you're paying for Climeworks to compensate your CO2 emissions).
> at €.75/kWh it sounds like you're paying for Climeworks to compensate your CO2 emissions
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.
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.
Thinkpads are my laptops of choice (writing this on my X240) but I'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't trust USB for disks) or swap etc, and the whole machine is not intended to be kept on 24/7 (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.
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.
> if something breaks there are no spare parts, no PSUs to repair or cards to add for more functionality (I simply don't trust USB for disks) or swap etc, and the whole machine is not intended to be kept on 24/7 (think about the fan wearing, not just the CPU).
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.
I ran a D620 24/7 as a server from 2010-ish to 2019. For some messed up reason i loaded it with Windows server 2008R2 or some crap like that. Never bothered to re-provision it. When I eventually replaced it with 2 rPIs, the closet where it lived dropped quite a bit in temperature.
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're doing with it.
Yep, a lot of my content at rest doesn't work with the individual Plex clients. What's supported by the Plex client directly varies by individual client. I have for instance quite a collection of old DivX and Xvid content and I don't think any of the clients support that natively.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadThe 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:
I use hd-idle for spinning down the HDD (sdb) because the shucked WD "White Label"/Ultrastar He10 apparently doesn't care for APM or Standby Timer settings set through TLP: Besides that, I had to because udisks2 wakes up the drives every 10 minutes, no configuration possible. Also, smartd (from smartmontools) shouldn't wake the HDD if it's in standby, but it will reset hd-idle's standby timer, so I tell smartd to run every 24 hours instead of 30 minutes:Measuring 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".
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7-sECF3Dw
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23915484
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.
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.
I ran a Dell D630 for a number of years without issue.