Chaser@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
If you want to start cheap, I can recommend you to use an old notebook. In my opinion it’s the perfect home server for beginners.
- It’s cheap (most people have an unused laying around anyway)
- If it’s old enough to still have a dvd drive, you can replace it with a second sata ssd. There are cheap frames for this available.
- it has a battery, so it can shutdown if there is a power outage
- It’s slim. You can just throw it on your closet and forget about it
Most services don’t need much. So it’s just fine if your “server” is like 10 years old. My first notebook server had 2 cores and 4 GB ram and it run Proxmox with like 10 lxc containers just fine.
MTZ@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Awesome suggestion! Thank you.
dmention7@midwest.social 1 hour ago
The only thing to watch out for using a laptop that is plugged in 24x7 is the battery. Battery management systems are generally pretty good, but Li-ion batteries can fail catastrophically. As long as you make a point to check on it periodically it’s probably fine.
I’m using an old laptop as a local interface for my network setup, since its in my basement, and I actually pulled the battery out entirely since I have a beefy UPS powering everything. Paranoid, maybe, but a Li-ion battery sitting on top of my equipment rack could do a ton of damage if it were to fail someday.