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 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.
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.
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.