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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

#221

Post by lijok »

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…

which is exactly why this being different departments makes no sense

one infra team - provides the entire platform

any other approach and you’re dicking around

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#222

Post by jhickok »

1minusp wrote: post #220
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'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?

If it's an offsite backup, you would deal with it like you would any DR site-- either plan for yet another backup, or presume that it's unlikely that both the primary and replica would go down simultaneously and accept the risk.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#223

Post by KellyCriterion »

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…

where is the difference in paying 7 USD per month to get some gigabytes at whatever online hoster?

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#224

Post by kube-system »

amluto wrote: post #217
chrisandchris wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, some people treat UPSes as "backup power" but that's not really what they're intended for. Their intended purpose is to bridge the gap during interruptions... either to an alternative power source, or to a powered-off state.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#225

Post by gunapologist99 »

1minusp wrote: post #220
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'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?

Remove the batteries. Datacenters have redundant power and UPS.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#226

Post by gunapologist99 »

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

Seems like they'd have to find another 5 year old Thinkpad.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#228

Post by traderj0e »

prmoustache wrote: post #44
ctippett wrote: post #24

Collocating a bunch of lithium-ion heat pillows all in one place, what could go wrong!

Most laptops work perfectly fine with the battery removed and for those who cannot replacing it with a large capacitor is usually a solution.

I thought a lot of laptops don't work without the battery, especially the increasingly common unibody types.

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#229

Post by exiguus »

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…

In 2026 it should be: Give us your smartphone and we promise ...

Re: Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

#230

Post by latable »

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…

I would agree with you about autoscaling if ECC was enabled in every consumer computer :'/
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