Self-hosting with an old laptop

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨hellfire103@lemmy.ca⁩ to ⁨selfhosting@slrpnk.net⁩

I have a piece of hardware which I do not intend to use as a desktop machine ever again.

It’s a cheap and shitty HP laptop from 2019. AMD A6 processor, 8GB of RAM, 1TB spinning hard disk, and a DVD drive that hasn’t worked in over a year.

Since I have hardware from 2007 that is nicer to use than this machine, I was thinking of turning it into a server.

I’d probably either install Proxmox, Alpine, HardenedBSD, or OpenBSD, and spin up a couple of lightweight services. I’d also spin up an HTTP server and move one of my blogs to this machine.

Since I’m currently using a VPS with far, far lower specs than this laptop, it should all be fine. However, I have some questions:

Is this a good idea?
Should I run the server over a VPN, or even go Tor-only, for personal safety reasons?
Since I’ll usually be within walking distance of the server, should I disable SSH altogether?

Also, if anyone here has a crazy setup or some redneck networking, I’d love to hear about it.

Thank you!!!

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Strayce@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Old laptop as a server is viable and not unheard of. They’re generally low power consumption, and have a built-in KVM and UPS.

Depends on your VPN provider and use case. I’d recommend against Tor-only if you want normal people to ever see anything you blog. You’ll need static IP and/or dynamic DNS if you want it to be reachable with any kind of reliability. Doing it over VPN requires your provider to support port forwarding, which not all do.

Again, depends on your use case. It’s generally a good idea to disable unused services. Worst case it goes down while you’re on holidays or something and you can’t get it back up for a while. Can you live with that?
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CameronDev@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yes, lots of people do this. Good idea to remove the battery if possible, or you’ll have a spicy balloon eventually.

VPN (or cloudflare tunnel) is not a bad idea, but its not essential either, my server is publically exposed, and it largely isnt a problem. I only expose port 443 and some specific random high ports though. I wouldnt expose 22 to the internet.

Keep SSH, just dont expose to the internet, its always nice to have multiple ways into a box, incase one is hung or something.
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dan@upvote.au ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Should I run the server over a VPN

Do you mean for you to access it remotely, or do you mean to expose it publicly via the VPN (so that you can have publicly-exposed services while hiding your home IP)?

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- bizarroland@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  If your laptop draws an average of 25 watts and you’re paying 25 cents usd per kilowatt hour for electricity, then you’re looking at $54.75 a year to run your laptop.
  
  Most places in America you’re only paying closer to like 13 cents a kilowatt hour and very few laptops would be running a continuous 25 watts with your typical server setup, although, undoubtedly it would spike to 65 watts or so from time to time.
  
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  - dan@upvote.au ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Where I live in California, electricity can be over US$0.60/kWh during peak summer time. Thankfully I have solar panels that offset most of the cost. I’m from Australia which also has high electricity prices.
    
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