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Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

tamas.dev

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Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#51

Post by GrinningFool »

roland35 wrote: post #15

My raspberry pi 4 has been running as a home server and gitlab runner under my tv stand for a few months now and works great! I just need to set up a backup scheme at some point since the whole thing runs on an sd card. It seems easier than ever to repurpose old hardware for home servers with docker and all the great projects out there!

> I just need to set up a backup scheme at some point since the whole thing runs on an sd card.

OT: In my experience "set up a backup at some point" all too quickly becomes "shit, I _knew_ I needed a backup".

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#52

Post by severine »

roland35 wrote: post #32
m-p-3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main gripe about the Raspberry Pi is the SD card unreliability. I know you can boot from USB now but I wish there was a way to integrate an SSD directly on the board (something in the m.2 2242 form.factor) to make it more resilient and also faster. I'll probably go with a small NUC or something like that instead, especially if there's some AMD Ryzen systems coming out in that form factor.

Yeah I agree about sd card reliability concerns. The funny thing is that I've used as cards as data storage inside gun launched munitions (Howitzers!) And they survived 10,000 G of acceleration, but too many writes is a problem! I use a mounted usb drive for logging and storage so hopefully that helps the sd card stay fresh.

> The funny thing is that I've used sd cards as data storage inside gun launched munitions (Howitzers!) And they survived 10,000 G of acceleration

In the name of countless fellow HNers, tell us more right now!

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#53

Post by ufmace »

josefresco wrote: post #13
nfriedly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I end up with old hardware that I don't want to fix or re-purpose, I tend to put it on an ebay auction for $0.99 + shipping (or whatever), and hope that someone else can get some additional life out of it.

Good idea, although I'm not wild about selling a Chromebook I can't access but previously had signed into my Google accounts to some stranger.

You should be able to de-authorize it from any working Google login on another device - the security page shows all of your other Google sessions, and you can kill any of them. It even nags you to kill ones that haven't been used in over a month or so. Seems to be even more effective than logging out on the device, though that's probably a good idea too if you can.

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#54

Post by atomi »

toast0 wrote: post #33
m-p-3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main gripe about the Raspberry Pi is the SD card unreliability. I know you can boot from USB now but I wish there was a way to integrate an SSD directly on the board (something in the m.2 2242 form.factor) to make it more resilient and also faster. I'll probably go with a small NUC or something like that instead, especially if there's some AMD Ryzen systems coming out in that form factor.

> especially if there's some AMD Ryzen systems The Asus PN50 with Ryzen 4000U series APUs is starting to become available in the US and other countries. Zen2, laptop chips. Tiny computers: 1.93" x 4.50" x 4.50" (or 4.9cm x 11.5cm x 11.5cm). I don't have experience with these, but they were on my list before I decided to go a little bigger and get the desktop APUs in the same series whenever they start shipping to the…

I don't want to start an argument, but for what it's worth RISC is a bit more energy efficient and the Pi is quite a bit cheaper.

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#55

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Animats wrote: post #23

I use Asus EeePC subnotebooks for that. They're about US$30-$50 on eBay, and there are models with 64-bit CPUs. I run the CPU and disk test, wipe the disk, and install XUbuntu. A few script mods make the device stay on when the lid is closed, but the screen turns off. It's more convenient than packaging up a Raspberry PI. You get keyboard, screen, disk, power supply, and battery, plus some USB ports, in one compact u…

Don't forget the extra USB ports and SD card slot. Some Chromebooks and the older RPis have only two USB ports.

If you run NetBSD, you will not have to disable anything for the device to stay on when the lid is closed.

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#56

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Uberphallus wrote: post #30
teejmya wrote: post #3

"[...]especially knowing it can run on batteries for 10 hours (allegedly), without having a UPS." In my experience of trying the same, this is a swollen Li-Ion battery waiting to happen.

There are kernel modules to float charge at 80% (or any %) and not stress the battery.

Is there a generic way to do it now, or is it still hardware-specific? (Last time I looked I was on a thinkpad and using tp_smapi)

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#57

Post by ac29 »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #21

One reason to do this is because, fan-less intel Celeron Chromebooks are the most accessible x86 Single Board Computer(SBC) currently available. If you have a x86 specific workflow, then there are not much choices out there at such low power/price scale e.g. I used one for running a Chromium puppeteer task, as Chromium was nearly unusable in similar or better specced ARM SBCs running Linux. But that's a one-off examp…

One thing to keep in mind: support for running generic Linux on anything past Braswell (so, 2016 or so) in a Chromebook is pretty much impossible - the replacement firmware doesnt exist, or has major issues like not supporting suspend/resume. Most Apollo Lake and newer Chromebooks support running Debian in a VM inside ChromeOS though - there is quite a bit you can do this way.

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#58

Post by NortySpock »

ianhowson wrote: post #45
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the hell is a X200 is similarly priced to a RPi?! In my neck o the woods(Austria) a X200 series is around 150-200 Euros. Add 16GB of Ram and an SSD an you're looking at at least 250 Euros instead of just 40 for a PI.

My beef with the Pi is that it's not just EUR40 for the device; you also need to add on: - power supply - quality SD card - heatsinks - a case and then deal with - non-x86 - thermal issues - SD cards - the CPU is too tiny to do anything useful anyway Sorry to hear that X2x0 is expensive where you live. I find that the small additional investment over the RPi is worthwhile.

Curious what workloads you're intending to run on the RPI that you find the CPU is tiny.

Granted, the RPi2 had a slow CPU, but I am finding the RPi4 is snappy enough for "serve a website out of a docker container" workloads. I am hitting SD card I/O limits faster than I hit CPU limits.

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#59

Post by NortySpock »

alistairSH wrote: post #12

Do most of these Chromebooks have the SSD soldered onto the SoC? Or, are they replaceable? My use case would be similar to this, but also to serve as a lightweight local backup server (never accessed, unless laptop and iCloud backups fail). One 500gb SSD would be sufficient for my use.

You could put the SSD in an external USB enclosure, I've had luck with that strategy for "spinning rust" external drives.

Re: Repurposing my old Chromebook to a low power home server

#60

Post by toast0 »

atomi wrote: post #54
toast0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially if there's some AMD Ryzen systems The Asus PN50 with Ryzen 4000U series APUs is starting to become available in the US and other countries. Zen2, laptop chips. Tiny computers: 1.93" x 4.50" x 4.50" (or 4.9cm x 11.5cm x 11.5cm). I don't have experience with these, but they were on my list before I decided to go a little bigger and get the desktop APUs in the same series whenever they start shipping to the…

I don't want to start an argument, but for what it's worth RISC is a bit more energy efficient and the Pi is quite a bit cheaper.

Sure, RISC is more energy efficient, that's why AMD and Intel are microops behind an x86 decoder :p

A ryzen is a lot more capable than a Pi, and sometimes that's worth the material and power cost. Mostly, I was just pointing out that there are some systems out there to buy if you want though.

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