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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

#131

Post by precommunicator »

yabones wrote: post #31

The folks that run the colo I keep our servers in would beat me to death with a shoe if I did either of these things: - Mount something in a rack not firmly attached to brackets or a shelf - Install anything with a battery larger than you'd find in a RAID card Not to mention all the other ways this is sub-par in terms of airflow, density, serviceability, out-of-band management, etc. I get the allure of it, but I woul…

They say:

> We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#133

Post by trklausss »

What's the difference between this and 1. setting my laptop at home and 2. connect it through Tailscale?

I lose ownership of my laptop, you install whatever software you want on it (with the security risks that it conveys) and in turn "you let me connect to my computer"?

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#134

Post by jve »

trklausss wrote: post #133

What's the difference between this and 1. setting my laptop at home and 2. connect it through Tailscale? I lose ownership of my laptop, you install whatever software you want on it (with the security risks that it conveys) and in turn "you let me connect to my computer"?

Well connectivity (speed) and energy stability may be 2 of them (your internet may go down along with electricity).

Or look at it another way: you wanted to buy/rent a server you intended to put in datacenter anyway. Now you can do the same with laptop.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#136

Post by yonatan8070 »

beAbU wrote: post #135

€7/month is mad considering the hardware is my own.

Is it? It doesn't sound outragous to me, given that they provide you with however much power you need, ans also networking and people to maintain the facility.

I asked ChatGPT to estimate how much darwing 15W continuously in Amsterdam would cost you per month, and it came up with a range of 2.58€-3.41€ per month. So that's potentially more than half of their fee.

If your laptop is particularly power efficient, you'd also be subsidizing higher-powered laptops. As far as I see there's nothing preventing you from sending a 400W gaming laptop and mining crypto or running an LLM agent 24/7.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#137

Post by yonatan8070 »

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…

It looks like since you posted your comment, the pages.dev link redirects to colaptop.com, and the copyright notice has been updated to 2026.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#138

Post by radu_floricica »

The advantage of a laptop is exactly that you can easily host it at home, and own everything. I have one - with an UPS also holding the router and fiber optic and an external HDD. I'm actually working right now to version 2.0 which is a beefed up version - still used laptop (found a great deal on a lenovo P1), but slightly more expensive and I'm waiting on some parts to upgrade. Should be able to even hold the production environment in a pinch.

Ah, and obviously you put a claude/codex on it, so your actual work is just ... installing claude, and maybe a linux. The rest is done by the AI - setup, scripting etc.

As a colocated option... I see it work for some people. But it'd be a niche offering, when the whole value proposition is "make my own, with blackjack and hookers".

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#140

Post by whateverboat »

radu_floricica wrote: post #138

The advantage of a laptop is exactly that you can easily host it at home, and own everything. I have one - with an UPS also holding the router and fiber optic and an external HDD. I'm actually working right now to version 2.0 which is a beefed up version - still used laptop (found a great deal on a lenovo P1), but slightly more expensive and I'm waiting on some parts to upgrade. Should be able to even hold the produc…

Do you not get memory errors without ECC RAM?
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