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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

#201

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

torginus wrote: post #187
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 f…

Enterprise hardware has companies that your company can call to get support when things go sideways, if they're using a rack full of 5 year old Thinkpads then they're on their own if something breaks

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#202

Post by StableAlkyne »

gzread wrote: post #156
kube-system wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > © 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 Website copyright is out of date by two years...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 That's exactly what it should be then. A copyright notice lists the year of publication. Not the current year. > A proper copyright notice consists of three elements: a © symbol, the year of publication, and the copyright owner’s name. https://co…

Yep. If you write ``` © Your Name ``` As many sites do, it may actually invalidate your copyright. You have to put all of the years when you made copyrightable edits to the page. A range like 2010-2025 is only allowed if every single year in that range is included.

This sounds like pseudolegal folklore (in the US at least). Do you have any actual examples where this affected a case?

In the US, you get copyright on your work automatically, with or without a label.

The only thing a label does in the US is defend against "innocent infringement" defenses. But even that defense doesn't absolve the other party from liability; you just can't recover as much.

There is no reason you can't have `(C) 200X-$currentYear Acme Inc` or whatever.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#203

Post by amluto »

iso1631 wrote: post #197
torginus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Been through this recently in a fairly large enterprise We have some in house software which runs in k8s. Total throughput peaks at about 1mbit a second of control traffic - it's controlling some other devices which are on dedicated hardware. Total of 24GB of ram. The software team say it needs to run across 3 different servers for resilience purposes. The VM team want to use neutronix as their VM platform, so they c…

One of my favorite bits of hardware is a UPS. I’ve played with several over the years, from fancy server-grade rack-mount APC stuff to inexpensive edge stuff. Without exception, downtime is increased by use of a UPS. I used to plug a server with redundant PSUs into the UPS and the wall so it could ride out UPS glitches.

Even today, a UPS that turns itself back on after power goes out long enough to drain the battery and is then restored is somewhat exotic. Amusingly, even the new UniFi UPSes, which are clearly meant to be shoved in a closet somewhere, supposedly turn off and stay off when the battery drains according to forum posts. There are no official docs, of course.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#204

Post by kube-system »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #201
torginus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Enterprise hardware has companies that your company can call to get support when things go sideways, if they're using a rack full of 5 year old Thinkpads then they're on their own if something breaks

There's a ton of out-of-support enterprise gear racked up in data centers. It can be done if you have a plan to handle failures.

But that's still a lot easier than managing laptops, which are unwieldily in a DC for a lot of other reasons.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#205

Post by me-vs-cat »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #202
gzread wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If you write ``` © Your Name ``` As many sites do, it may actually invalidate your copyright. You have to put all of the years when you made copyrightable edits to the page. A range like 2010-2025 is only allowed if every single year in that range is included.

This sounds like pseudolegal folklore (in the US at least). Do you have any actual examples where this affected a case? In the US, you get copyright on your work automatically, with or without a label. The only thing a label does in the US is defend against "innocent infringement" defenses. But even that defense doesn't absolve the other party from liability; you just can't recover as much. There is no reason you can…

You're right that the notice is effectively useless for such web pages. And if it doesn't matter, then why bother to put anything?

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#206

Post by wongarsu »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #106
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

> You could fit ~15 MBPs 15 MBP x €7 = €105 for 9RU with power and network . Not in a million years.

Hetzner rents you 42RU for €199 plus power and network. If we assume they can fill the entire rack, that's 4 9RU units for about €50 plus power and network.

If we assume an average power draw of 20W per laptop, that's 300W for each 15 laptop unit, or about €57/month in Hetzner's Finish DC (including aircon)

Not sure about network. A 1Gbit uplink with 10TB traffic (and €1/TB after that) is provided. Upgrading that to 10Gbit is probably similar to the €51/month cost for the same uplink for dedicated servers, so another €15 for each 15 laptop unit. Plus around €2/month/IP, but you can probably bring your own if you find a cheaper subnet to buy

So yeah, you are right that the math does not work out. But it is pretty close to break even. I think you can break even on this if you find a more space efficient way to cram them into the rack and don't pay yourself any salary

https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#207

Post by kube-system »

amluto wrote: post #203
iso1631 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been through this recently in a fairly large enterprise We have some in house software which runs in k8s. Total throughput peaks at about 1mbit a second of control traffic - it's controlling some other devices which are on dedicated hardware. Total of 24GB of ram. The software team say it needs to run across 3 different servers for resilience purposes. The VM team want to use neutronix as their VM platform, so they c…

One of my favorite bits of hardware is a UPS. I’ve played with several over the years, from fancy server-grade rack-mount APC stuff to inexpensive edge stuff. Without exception, downtime is increased by use of a UPS. I used to plug a server with redundant PSUs into the UPS and the wall so it could ride out UPS glitches. Even today, a UPS that turns itself back on after power goes out long enough to drain the battery…

Sounds like crappy UPSes. Even the cheap old used eBay Eaton UPSes I have in my homelab have a setting for "Auto restart" and the factory default setting is "enabled".

But even rackmount UPSes are more of an "edge" sort of solution. A data center UPS takes up at least a room.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#208

Post by kube-system »

gosub100 wrote: post #181
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.

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

And yet most homes and offices are full of them. Laptop batteries don't usually catch fire. At the colos I am familiar with (which have pretty strict rules, generally), you can have equipment with batteries as long as you regularly inspect them.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#209

Post by amluto »

kube-system wrote: post #207
amluto wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite bits of hardware is a UPS. I’ve played with several over the years, from fancy server-grade rack-mount APC stuff to inexpensive edge stuff. Without exception, downtime is increased by use of a UPS. I used to plug a server with redundant PSUs into the UPS and the wall so it could ride out UPS glitches. Even today, a UPS that turns itself back on after power goes out long enough to drain the battery…

Sounds like crappy UPSes. Even the cheap old used eBay Eaton UPSes I have in my homelab have a setting for "Auto restart" and the factory default setting is "enabled". But even rackmount UPSes are more of an "edge" sort of solution. A data center UPS takes up at least a room.

I assume that datacenters UPSes are better, but I’ve never used one except as a consumer of its output.

But I’ve had problems with UPSes that advertise auto-restart but don’t actually ship with it enabled. And that fancy APC unit was sold by fancy Dell sales people and supported directly by real humans at APC, and it would still regularly get mad, start beeping, and turn off its output despite its battery being fully charged and the upstream power being just fine (and APC’s techs were never able to figure it out either).

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#210

Post by kube-system »

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…

A lot of residential ISPs are hostile to hosting servers in various ways.
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