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Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

colaptop.pages.dev

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Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#101

Post by bigiain »

nrdvana wrote: post #88
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You don't have to keep copyrights up to date (and in fact you don't have to put them at all), 2) Every single startup i've seen on HN is sketchy af. Racking laptops in a cage at a Hetzner DC is probably the least sketchy product i've seen here. And honestly, not a terrible idea, I have old laptops that would work as a VPS. $7/month for somebody to host a public server for me, and not on my crappy residential isp?…

Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resources than the smallest VMs, but no remote management interface and can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.

> Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet

That gets you, what, 1 "vCPU" with maybe a gig of ram and a couple of dozen gig of disk.

If you (or a friend) work for a company of any size, there's probably a cupboard full of laptops that won't upgrade to Win11 sitting there doing nothing that you could get for free just by asking the right person. It'll have 4 or 8 cores, each of which is more powerful that the "vCPU" in that droplet. It'll have 8 or maybe 16gig of ram, and at least half a TB of disk and depending on that laptop quite likely to be able to be configured with half a TB of fast nVME storage and a few TB of slower spinning rust storage.

If you want 8vCPUs/cores, 16GB of ram, and 500GB of SSD, all of a sudden Digital Ocean looks more like $250/month.

If you are somewhere in that grey area where you need more than ivCPU and 1GB of memory, grabbing the laptop out of the cupboard that your PM or one of the admin staff upgraded from last year and shipping not off to a datacenter with your flavour of linux installed seems like it's worth considering.

Hell, get together with a friend and have two laptops hosted for 14Euro/month between you, and be each others "failing hardware" backup plan...

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#102

Post by bigiain »

simoncion wrote: post #95
nrdvana wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resources than the smallest VMs, but no remote management interface and can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.

> ...no remote management interface... I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. I also bet rachelbythebay has at least one article that talks about the topic. > ...can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic. 1) If your public server serves entirely or nearly-entirely static data, you're going to saturate your network before you saturate the CPU resources on that l…

>> ...no remote management interface...

> I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM.

From the https://www.colaptop.com landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#103

Post by kube-system »

dylan604 wrote: post #76
kube-system wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's most likely testing the waters for a real offering. It's not that weird. Many colo data centers already have policies about hosting laptops because it's already something that happens. It just isn't common and usually isn't for hosting servers.

If the battery in the laptop is still good, it comes with it's own UPS. My MBPs haven't had an ethernet port in a minute, so do you have to supply your own adapters as well??? You could fit ~15 MBPs on their edge in 9RUs. That'd be an interesting looking rack. Not quite a blade chassis. It'd be rather boring looking as there's no blinky-blinkies

If you got creative with cable management you might be able to double up front and rear. It would probably be a PITA to manage but you could probably get some halfway decent density

Looks like they were proposing supplying usb Ethernet adapters, which doesn’t seem crazy, they’re cheap.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#104

Post by [deleted] »

corvad wrote: post #20

This seems very sketchy. Give us your laptop and we promise we won't keep it... > © 2024 CoLaptop. All rights reserved. Website copyright is out of date by two years... And the website has been online since then. https://crt.sh/?q=colaptop.pages.dev > Thank you for your interest. Please submit the form below and we'll get back to you within 2 working days. > - Team @ CoLaptop.com Also colaptop.com is not even registe…

[deleted]

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#105

Post by justsomehnguy »

bigiain wrote: post #102
simoncion wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...no remote management interface... I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. I also bet rachelbythebay has at least one article that talks about the topic. > ...can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic. 1) If your public server serves entirely or nearly-entirely static data, you're going to saturate your network before you saturate the CPU resources on that l…

>> ...no remote management interface... > I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. From the https://www.colaptop.com landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."

You really don't know how much it costs, do you?

Check https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products these are the cheapest ones.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#106

Post by justsomehnguy »

dylan604 wrote: post #76
kube-system wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's most likely testing the waters for a real offering. It's not that weird. Many colo data centers already have policies about hosting laptops because it's already something that happens. It just isn't common and usually isn't for hosting servers.

If the battery in the laptop is still good, it comes with it's own UPS. My MBPs haven't had an ethernet port in a minute, so do you have to supply your own adapters as well??? You could fit ~15 MBPs on their edge in 9RUs. That'd be an interesting looking rack. Not quite a blade chassis. It'd be rather boring looking as there's no blinky-blinkies

> You could fit ~15 MBPs

15 MBP x €7 = €105 for 9RU with power and network. Not in a million years.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#107

Post by petterroea »

Old laptops are also notorious[1] for being fire bombs with bad batteries.

If I was a hetzner customer I'd be pissed if my server burned because someone's 2 minute battery life 10 year old school pc was hosted in the neighbouring rack.

Doesn't seem like a great business idea.

[1]: anecdotally, seems everyone has a laptop lying around with a cursed battery

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#108

Post by justsomehnguy »

faangguyindia wrote: post #99
opengrass wrote: post #4

pages.dev, you can't be serious.

i just don't understand, why it isn't acceptable to use pages.dev why we must all spend money on domain to show off our projects?

> all spend money

If your 'project' can't allocate $15 for a domain name then you have a bigger problem with your project. Especially if your project involves taking money from customers.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#109

Post by znnajdla »

I do this at my homelab and it’s a really fun thing to do. Collect old laptops and install Linux or Tart for macOS and suddenly you have a fleet of computing power equivalent to paying thousands to AWS. Building reliability and failover is actually a fun engineering problem, use CockroachDB and RustFS. Adding capacity is just about scouting for second hand ewaste.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#110

Post by subarctic »

petterroea wrote: post #107

Old laptops are also notorious[1] for being fire bombs with bad batteries. If I was a hetzner customer I'd be pissed if my server burned because someone's 2 minute battery life 10 year old school pc was hosted in the neighbouring rack. Doesn't seem like a great business idea. [1]: anecdotally, seems everyone has a laptop lying around with a cursed battery

That's what I was thinking too, don't data centers have policies about this stuff? I wonder who'd be liable if your laptop burst into flames
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