Funny, I had a similar idea this morning in the shower. I was thinking about how distributed digital infrastructure could be achieved in practice. Running some music streaming and photo server on an old laptop at home that I access via tailscale has proved surprisingly smooth. I feel there is some future in empowering users by giving them access to a cloud on hardware that is actually owned by the user. It would be a way to achieve absolute digital freedom, no lock-in and if done in a secure way privacy friendly. Hell it's the OG idea of the internet! The question is how to bring this to non-technical users. I know many people who are getting sick of paying each month both to Apple and Google for storing their ever growing pile of pictures. This solution of course does imply some sort of lock-in as your tied to a subscription and it's probably quite the hassle to get your laptop back. Also the fire hazard seems like a legit concern. I nevertheless do hear some music here.
Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
111–120 of 258 posts
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#112Collocating a bunch of lithium-ion heat pillows all in one place, what could go wrong!
Most laptops work perfectly fine with the battery removed and for those who cannot replacing it with a large capacitor is usually a solution.
Using a capacitor sounds interesting but also pretty tricky, have you done that yourself?
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#113> Your old laptop packs more CPU power, RAM, and storage than their entry-level offerings - and with us, you'll pay just €7/month for professional hosting This is basically the same price as the cheapest options on Hetzner: https://snipboard.io/C9epWo.jpg . Sure my old laptop does have more RAM and a bigger SSD, but I bet it's also less reliable than Hetzner's servers, and is likely to suddenly die some day. So is th…
> I bet it's also less reliable than Hetzner's servers, and is likely to suddenly die some day I’m a happy Hetzner customer but I have had servers that I rented from them die a couple of times. I rent physical servers from them that have been previously rented to other customers. At some point hard drives fail. However, I have solid backup setup in place (ZFS send and recv to other physical hosts in different physica…
> I rent physical servers from them that have been previously rented to other customers. At some point hard drives fail.
The comparison in this case is to Hetzner's VPS offerings, which are probably less powerful than the average "old laptop" but have a significant advantage in terms of hardware reliability. It's still possible for the host running the VPS to have problems which result in a crash or the VM equivalent of a hard power off but the VM hosts and their underlying storage should be redundant such that the virtual hardware never fails.
That's not to say rebooting from a crash-consistent state will always work, you should always keep backups even with a high-quality VPS host, but the odds of recovering cleanly from a hardware problem are orders of magnitude better than an old laptop. For the sort of hobby project or personal tinker box that would be reasonable to host on a random laptop shoved in a rack you probably wouldn't even notice the downtime until you saw the event notification email your provider sends you.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#114Any recommendations on inexpensive colo for personal projects/servers? A few years ago ran across a few links for places to host a box and I didn't save them, and have regretted it. ISTR one was basically just industrial office space that was running a lower-tier colo, and another was some guys in a metro area that got a rack in a data center and were spreading the cost around with other like-minded folks. At my work…
EC2 is pricey if it's all you're getting from AWS. If you have wierd requirements, colo may be a good option. Otherwise, just get a VPS or 3 and be done with it. You'll get a virtual KVM that lets you boot it off an ISO and set it up the way you want.
Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, ... are long established VPS players.
I'm cheap and buy VPSes off deals on lowendtalk.com. e.g. my backups are on a VPS with 3TB disk, 2GB RAM, 1 vCPU, USD7/mo. I suspect your USD80/mo budget would stretch to something amazing, by comparison.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#115I use www.vedos.cz vps hosting for 3$ a month. Prague (CZ - EU)
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't targeting big companies for sure, but maybe a small or medium-sized office could make use of this.
I don't see it. Hobby projects can use a VPN tunnel to make a data center from local equipment. Real projects that choose colocation have uptime requirements that simply can't be met by random consumer hardware. The venn diagrams don't intersect. There's no middle ground where you try to run a real business on old laptops. That's insane. You either keep things small/hobby and stay simple, or graduate to production-gr…
Initially I believe Google was known for getting unreliable hardware with good software to manage it (a single laptop probably won't cut it, but a bunch of laptops scattered around the globe could be interesting -- when you grow things fail all the time anyways).
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#117This 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…
> Website copyright is out of date by two years... Can you explain how a copyright can be "out of date by two years"? I always thought the copyright notice should reflect the year of creation, and that it's actually bad (from a legal POV) to always show the current year through scripting.
You are correct. (Had it verified years ago in Europe and the US).
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#118They remove the battery! That was my first question.
I have an old Lenovo laptop that works fine with the battery completely removed--but I have to disconnect the power and reconnect it before the soft power-on switch will work. I wonder how they handle powering on finicky laptops with those "soft" power buttons.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#119pages.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?
This particular project imply a financial commitment (it's not like you can walk to the data center right now with random assortment of laptops to be setup today without reserving a rack for a month or so), using a free hosting mean they didn't even spend the minimum.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#120This looks really cool.
I have never colo'd my laptop, but I do work off my Windows laptop from my Mac via Parsec (remote viewing software for gaming) and by flipping system settings so my Windows machine never turns off when connected to the power bank and lid is closed. There are obviously hiccups (if internet goes out, if Windows decides to restart from an update, etc.), but it mostly just works and I think I've only had 2 instances in the past 3 months where it's gone offline. I use Tailscale on top to provide a universal mouse server for my 3d mouse, and I'm able to magically CAD from my Mac.
Highly recommend if you need to use one OS/machine for some specific software (especially if it's beefy/heavy) but prefer using another as your daily driver.