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Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
141–150 of 258 posts
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#142The 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…
It's ok if you can physically remove the battery. I'm pretty sure to have read multiple times that laptops thermals and battery engineering are optimized for daily use in open areas, not to safely run workloads 24/7 in a closet.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#143Suppose we set aside the concerns in this thread about the legitimacy of this.
How would this work when the old hardware inevitably needs to be serviced (mechanical hard drive failure, memory errors, dust buildup, etc)?
Would they have technicians on-site available to service whatever random laptop you send them? If your laptop dies do they ship it back to you so you can fix it and send it back?
Or what if you bork the OS by accident? Will their KVM solution allow you to upload an ISO and plug it in over some USB drive emulation?
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be really surprised if this was a scam. It doesn't have the smell of a scam at all. Who would target a very tech savvy audience just to get old laptops? Given that the "sign up" link goes to a survey form, my guess is this is just some idea someone had and they made this page to see if anyone actually wants it before they put any effort into making it happen.
Colo scams are pretty common. Some percentage of people will offer to send expensive laptops, and the scammers can discard the rest of "interested customers". It is inviable to colo old laptops, a regulatory nightmare - Hetzner would NEVER accept those in their datacenters. It is also absurd to think they are partnering with Hetzner to begin with. It makes no sense to believe they will even EXPORT laptops from Europe…
Just because it isn't a real product doesn't mean it is a scam.
As I said, it is most likely just collecting interest for a potential business idea.
You're being down-voted because it pretty clearly isn't a scam. It has none of the tell tail signs of a scam.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#145Say what you want about an old laptop, they sure are a lot faster than a $150/mo azure VM. And to be clear, I mean a _LOT_ faster.
All the big 3 cloud providers suck if you use them purely as VPS. I’ve tried AWS Lightsail (basically, slightly cheaper EC2) and it’s so much slower than what I’d expect from a similar spec VM from a normal hosting provider.
Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, Vultr are some of the better-known ones. Personally, I’m very happy with SSD Nodes. Paying $90/yr for a 4 vCPU¹ / 16 GB / 320 GB SSD, had some downtime exactly once in two years (they’ve had to switch their IPv4 space in Tokyo). Affiliate link: https://ale.sh/r/ssdnodes
[1]: Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (4) @ 2.199GHz – not great, I know, but to reiterate: that’s for $90 a year.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many people want to believe in this sort of thing for various reasons that I get fatigued at the very thought of trying to explain to people who believe in it earnestly that it is not a good idea. (e.g. commercial hosting services are really competitive; for a long time the cost of computing has been going down over time though I don't know if that is reversing because we've hit the end of the real Moore's law [1]…
Well, it exists, but it exists if you’re willing to buy server hardware on eBay, hustle to get old parts working together, negotiate a good deal on a cabinet, get space from ARIN and announce it and so on. There are probably 10-50x cost efficiencies vs. renting 5 year old CPU families on AWS at huge markup. A laptop isn’t the way to do that though. And your typical VC-fueled startup isn’t going to know how to do it e…
the one guy I know who has worked with colo at scale (unfortunately in the crypto space) is now an EM at Goog
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#147> “But it works on my machine…” Then we’ll ship your machine
Is finally possible!
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#148I 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.
would really like to see a writeup an some pictures about this !
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#149So there is no need for docker anymore.
Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
#150This 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.
The problem is that the website says they are still working out the logistics details. If the company has been around for 2 years they should have figured that out and updated the page by now.