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:

  1. Is this a good idea?
  2. Should I run the server over a VPN, or even go Tor-only, for personal safety reasons?
  3. 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!!!

  • dan@upvote.au
    1·
    2 days ago

    Depending on the electricity price where you live, a VPS with 8GB RAM might be cheaper than running the laptop. Just something to keep in mind. GreenCloudVPS have some for $45 annually: https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale (I’m not affiliated with them)

    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)?

    For remote access, I’d recommend Tailscale. It mostly “just works”.

    • bizarroland@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days 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.

      • paaviloinen@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Although with tweaking you might get long periods on idle and idle power draw could be way below 10 watts and average of <20 watts is not unheard of. Depends on what C-states your hardware supports and you should find out that with powertop and other tools.

      • dan@upvote.au
        3·
        2 days 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.

      • dan@upvote.au
        2·
        1 day ago

        You’ll need to use a VPN that supports port forwarding. You could use a cheap VPS instead.