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!!!
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.