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Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

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211–220 of 258 posts

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#211

Just gonna point this out since I noticed it a few weeks ago and notice is still there, Hetzner has paused selling new colocation service: https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/ So this is probably a joke site or a scam.

The site is a couple of years old and the domain it refers to is not the one linked here, it is probably an abandoned idea.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#212

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

We didn't have support, and we didn't need it, as the hardware was essentially EOL, probably would've been sold for like 20% of new price. We just chucked Selenium grid on them, locked them in the storage room, and if they died, they died (they didn't die a lot tho, which is surprising, as we had quite a few cheap sketchy in there as well)

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#213

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…

The funniest thing about huge enterprises is that they often have processes so convoluted and restrictive for everything, that getting stuff done by the book is basically impossible, so people get creative with the limitations and we often end up with the sketchiest solutions in existence.

I hope the words 'web server hosted in Excel VBA' illustrate the magnitude of horrors that can emerge in these situations.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#214
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I assume that datacenters UPSes are better [...]

I don't know about specific datacenter models, but in our colocation there are humans available 24/7. So the UPS might not start after failure, but there's a human to figure it out.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most people do so because everyone else does; it looks off if you don't see a copyright at the bottom of an otherwise professional site.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#217
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I assume that datacenters UPSes are better [...] I don't know about specific datacenter models, but in our colocation there are humans available 24/7. So the UPS might not start after failure, but there's a human to figure it out.

Most (all?) decent datacenters also have generators on site, and the intent is that the UPS will never run out of charge. So the fully-discharged case is an error and it might be intentional to require intervention to recover.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#218
It's an interesting idea, and it might even work for some people who have overpowered gaming laptops that can't run Windows 11 (thanks, Microsoft!). But man, people have no idea how powerful just a few cores of a modern AMD EPYC are. Try a Linode instance with a few dedicated cores and see if that's competitive with shipping your old alienware to a colo.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#219

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…

The funniest thing about huge enterprises is that they often have processes so convoluted and restrictive for everything, that getting stuff done by the book is basically impossible, so people get creative with the limitations and we often end up with the sketchiest solutions in existence. I hope the words 'web server hosted in Excel VBA' illustrate the magnitude of horrors that can emerge in these situations.

Raspberry pi on a network controlled power supply to rebroadcast udp broadcast traffic across subnets

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#220
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'd like to be able to do something similar, but the old batteries in these things seem like a point of catastrophic failure. How is that dealt with?
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