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Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

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Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#181

Post by gosub100 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #87
dylan604 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Putting a UPS in a rack is a prosumer/corporate IT thing, it’s not done in real datacenters. They typically have their own UPS in another room and multiple power lanes. And it’s going to be much more reliable than a laptop battery.

A laptop battery would be a huge liability if it caught fire.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#182

Post by whazor »

ForHackernews wrote: post #164
Havoc wrote: post #159

Ran an old laptop as home server for years. It’s OKish as a starting point into selfhosted world but overall not ideal. The battery is a fire risk and the entire thermal design isn’t really geared towards 24/7 operation. Not really something I’d co locate unless it was a DC physically near me so that stopping by is easy

I assume this startup yanks all the batteries and runs them in a rack with a UPS.

The FAQ says: > We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery

But powering down battery is not enough against the fire risk. Servers get hot 24/7 and might still overheat the battery.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#183

Post by evanjrowley »

Finding laptops that can support multiple hard drives is becoming more challenging every year. The 15"-17" workstation class Dell Precision, Lenovo P*, HP Zbook, and Framework 16 laptops are well suited to this purpose. Some of them even came with Xeon CPUs and ECC RAM support.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#184

Post by snowwrestler »

Let’s start a company that does this with old phones. If they’re recent waterproof models you could invert them in cold water and rack them pretty densely while managing heat easily. An ice water Beowulf cluster of iPhone 15s would be a lot of compute in one Yeti cooler.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#185

Post by icepush »

dylan604 wrote: post #96
oceanplexian wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting a UPS in a rack is a prosumer/corporate IT thing, it’s not done in real datacenters. They typically have their own UPS in another room and multiple power lanes. And it’s going to be much more reliable than a laptop battery.

I didn't really think that any of what I wrote would be taken seriously to the point of needing a retort. I mentioned blade servers and knew rack unit measurements which as context clues would have suggested I was familiar with actual data center equipment.

I read the reply to your comment not as much as an answer to your statement but a general warning to anyone who might be reading.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#186

Post by kube-system »

gzread wrote: post #157
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of places that colocate normal Raspberry Pi. https://lowendbox.com/blog/little-machines-in-big-datacenter... I am sure that some of them either already colocate Pico ones too, or are willing to do so if asked.

The Pi Pico doesn't have networking capabilities, so that would be silly. You're probably thinking of the Pi Zero.

There is a Pico W

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#187

Post by torginus »

eemil wrote: post #175

Maybe I'm in the minority... but this seems like an extremely compelling offering for certain use-cases. Not for enterprises, but for individuals and small businesses. My off-site backup is a thinkpad x230 with a 1 TB HDD. It's currently at my friends house, and I access it with tailscale. 7 eur/month to colocate this in a datacenter with stable (and fast) Internet + power seems like a pretty good deal. I can underst…

I mean we literally did this in one of my previous places. We took all the old laptops that were to be junked by IT, and used them as a selenium test farm. We saved like $100k per month on the AWS bill at the cost of basically electricity.

If all the machines were running Windows, the difference would've been even more drastic.

What I dont get is that we have these autoscaling technologies that allow software to be fault tolerant to hardware failure, yet companies still insist on buying expensive server grade HW for everything.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#188

Post by torginus »

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…

I mean the idea has merit in of itself, but I think this should be more of an on-prem thing, just repurposing old laptops junked by IT as servers.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#189

Post by zoobab »

perrygeo wrote: post #45

Old laptops as low cost servers? Absolutely, build a homelab in your own basement, rent a cheap VPS, set up wireguard and viola - instant data center for tens of dollars per month. It's not production grade but you'll learn a ton. But colocation? Strip away the learning component and add production uptime requirements - why would you even consider using crusty old laptops for this? If you have production grade needs,…

"build a homelab in your own basement, rent a cheap VPS, set up wireguard and viola"

Put an openwrt router in front of your fat server, and for each query it sends a WOL packet to the box, and add some delay to an ethernet bridge.

That was the fat server is mostly sleeping, and only woken up when needed.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#190

Post by kube-system »

yonatan8070 wrote: post #143

Suppose 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 t…

Collocation data centers have “remote hands” technicians for these types of tasks.
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