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!!!
If you can find a way to limit the battery to 60%, then you have a safe and cheap UPS.
Even better idea. Although if your power goes out, usually your internet goes as well, which somewhat diminishes the UPS value.
I put my cable modem and Wi-Fi router on their own UPS. If the power goes down, I still have internet for half a day.
That makes sense, although if its a severe power outage the other end might go out if they dont have a working UPS.
I’ve got a home battery, so its kinda like a bad UPS. Will run all day, but the switchover isnt seamless, so it hard-shuts down. Never lost any data though, so happy to keep risking it.
It gives you enough time to shut down properly and avoid data loss, which is what a UPS is supposed to do.
If you configure your power settings right, it’ll run on battery then shutdown or s2d safely.