Selfhosting on old MSI laptop

Submitted ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨dan00@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Hello preppers! As I prepare further and further for the digital and traditional collapse of society (/s), I finally got to the point of building my selfhosted server.

At the moment I have a single bay Synology nas but it will soon find a new home (🗑️). I was thinking that instead of buying new tech I can be a conscious human being and recycle my old laptop.

My old MSI PE60 2QD with i7 5th Gen, its a very capable machine and having the battery, I think, is better for a sudden loss of power. I replaced it because the hinge and screen broke but I never thrown it away.

I wanted to wipe it and install some linux distro for selfhosting with, I think, Tailscale for access it remotely. I use it to store file, photos, music …normal cloud stuff.

Before wasting hours troubleshooting, I’m sure there are brilliant people here that can give me tips or a link to a simple guide to follow. (Please don’t make me ask the bots).

I’m sure this thread is already open somewhere and I’ll be happy to follow that and delete this, if so.

Thank you lemmings.

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Comments

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486@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If you plan on running the laptop all the time on wall power, make sure to limit the battery charge to 80 % or less, otherwise the battery will die pretty quickly.

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- NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Or remove the battery if you can, to spare it from pillowing. I know it has the benefits of being a “psuedo-UPS”, but unless you also have your modem/router on a UPS, it’s pointless (internet goes out; you can’t access the laptop anyway).
  
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qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

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oshu@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If you are going to store important data I would get a new drive. Either replace the internal or attach an external.

Also make backups.

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- dan00@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’m going to attach some used hard disks and ssds, I have many spare ones. I wanted to set up a RAID2 or 3, so even if some disks dies it’s not the end of the world.
  
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    RAID isn’t backup, or even redundancy, it’s for creating large storage pools. It’s at the mercy of the controller and all the hardware. In fact, the more disks you have, the more likely you are to be impacted by a failure.
    
    In a typical RAID 5, if one drive fails, the entire array is at risk until the drive can be replaced, and resilvered. During resilvering (rebuilding the drive with all the data it should have, parity, etc), the entire array is at even more risk because of the load on the other disks.
    
    With dual parity and hot spare (less data storage total), you get a little more security since the parity is doubled and the hot spare will be automatically resilvered if a drive fails, but that’s not without similar risks during that process.
    
    You still need backup.
    
    Here’s a real-world example of RAID risks. I have a 5-drive NAS with 5 1TB drives, which gives me roughly 4TB of usable space (1TB parity). It runs software RAID using ZFS (a highly resilient file system, that can build arrays using varying disk sizes, and has some self-healing capability). I’ve had a drive go bad, replacing took 30 hours to rebuild. During that time, the entire array is “degraded”, meaning no parity protecting the data. If another drive were to have failed during this read/write intensive period, I would have lost ALL the data.
    
    To protect against this, I have 2 other large drives which this data is replicated to. And then I use a cloud storage for backup (storj.io).
    
    This is a modified version of the 3-2-1 method that works for my risk assessment.
    
    Without offsite backup, you’re always at risk of local issues - fire, flood, etc. Or even just a massive power spike (though that’s not much of a risk, especially if you use a UPS).
    
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sxan@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What is your question? I see you describing your approach, and think reusing an old laptop for this is perfect (built-in UPS, yay!), but it’s not clear what you’re seeking advice about.

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- HelloRoot@lemy.lol ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  More like build-in UPS that will do the forbidden caprisun and set your house on fire after a year.
  
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Never had this happen, and I’ve carried laptops since the mid 90’s, and they’ve always been plugged in most of the time.
    
    Get to office, plug on, get home, plug in and sit overnight in the charger with no use.
    
    I’ve seen a few expanded batteries, but that’s across the hundreds of laptops in my support circle. It’s very rare.
    
    Every laptop I’ve had in the last 5 years has battery protection built in anyway. I’m running 2 laptops from 2019 that have it.
    
    Though you do make a good point, something to figure out if your laptop does this. And to keep an eye on the batteries anyway (like check battery health quarterly), and replace if it gets down significantly (I replace mine at 70% health).
    
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  - lka1988@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Not if you get a laptop that supports battery charge limiting. Like a Thinkpad.
    
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  - Dirk@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Spicy Pillow!
    
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- dan00@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Not really a question, just if anyone knows a good trusted guide I can follow to do this or if you have tips and tricks.
  
  As much as i like to mess around with computer and electronics, i don’t have time for this. I need something that i set up quickly and works well, that’s it.
  
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gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
From what I gather, most people use a simple Linux distro like Ubuntu or Debian with a large community knowledge base. Then run the pieces you want through Docker. It’s pretty simple once you learn how.

Your laptop will be perfectly capable.

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