this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Worth trying using a 15 years old notebook for self hosting? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I found an old notebook PC lying around and I'm wondering if it could be enough to run a few services like the arr suite, qbittorrent and pi-hole.

Here's a few specs: Cpu : Intel Celeron 1011 1.6ghz Ram : 1Gig Ethernet port

If you think it's not a total waste of time, what distro would you install?

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It’s doable but you should treat it more as a learning opportunity than a production system. Honestly, that’s old enough that a RPi might be able to run circle around it.

The Celeron 1011 is a 32bit processor, so Debian or Gentoo may be the only distributions that still support it and you will probably have to compile from source anything you want to run. A gig of ram was good for its time.

The Linux Unplugged crew from Jupiter Broadcasting are currently doing a 32bit challenge to see if such systems are still usable for day to day usage. It’s going to be interesting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks! I haven't thought of the 32 bit issue... I might give it a try anyway for the experience!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I tried with a Celeron 1 GHz. It was slower than a rpi and it sucked 65 watts at idle 🙈

But at least can give some experience, I prefer playing the sysadmin with real hardware than a VM

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's good to know ha ha! At least I can have some fun before investing further...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It is 100% a great idea to see how you feel about the concept of self-hosting with an old machine. If it’s really old (and I’m talking like anything from before about 2008-2010), perhaps consider snagging an old “tiny”/1L-class box from eBay for cheap. Dell, HP, and Lenovo units can be found for WAY under $100 all the time, and slightly more modern units can still be had at a reasonable price, depending on the model. They’re great platforms to play around with. Just shove a cheap SSD in there and play with it.

Source: an old m920q with an i5-8500T is running pfSense for my home network

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks. I might simply go for the raspberry pi solution as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

65 w at idle? Hahahah, holy smokes!

I have a PII laptop from 1998 sitting around, still runs, don't have the heart to pitch it. But now you've got me thinking... That's a lot of juice.

Maybe it would be a neat experiment in using it via Wake-on-LAN from something else. But if it can wake from something else, that something else likely has more oomph anyway!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't dare to charge that old battery up. Some of them can start a fire.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Thanks, it's removable

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've got Pi-hole and Syncthing running on an old netbook with an Atom CPU and 2 GB RAM. It's doing fine. Syncthing killed the little dual-core CPU while it was syncing all of the stuff I wanted, but now it idles along quietly on Debian. I doubt you're going to get much out of the machine, but it's perfectly fine for small, simple stuff like Pi-hole.

Distro-wise, I'd say Debian or similar if you want to set-and-forget (update once a week or month) or Arch/openSUSE Tumbleweed if you want it up-to-date (potentially more work needed).

Considering the hardware I'd also recommend whichever distro you go with without a GUI to keep the resource usage as low as possible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks, very helpful !

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Be aware that some old laptops had weird combined chipsets that Linux just can't use... I tried putting Linux Mint on a friend's laptop for their kids to use and the networking (wifi and cable) just wouldn't work... it was something that only Win98 / WinXP could use (from memory).

So just try anything in case you just need to ditch it - as someone else mentioned, treat it as a learning exercise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks! I had installed Mac OSX on it back in the day so I'm hopeful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Worst case, give it a go, learn the process even if it can't handle it, and you'll be able to do it easier when you have a capable machine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks, that is the idea!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You'll probably save money in the long run using a pi.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I did the math:

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Your math is wrong. If the Celeron runs 65W at idle then it is consuming at minimum 1.56kWh a day, at a price of €0.20 per kWh you're looking at a minimum operating cost of €113.88 a year.

You didn't factor in that days have 24 hours, not one hour.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Woops. You are correct.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

11 years? Nevermind use the laptop for sure haha

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I started out self hosting on a laptop maybe a little newer than yours. Pentium, 2gb RAM. I'm happier with my pi, but it's more than enough to get started on. Pretty sure pi-hole will run no problem, the others my struggle a little bit depending on your disk speed.

Your cpu will be a pretty limiting factor, but upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD could boost the performance quite a bit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

It depends on the size of your budget (if it exists at all). Your probably better off doing some e-waste dumpster diving. Shoot for something with a 3rd gen i3 / i5 or newer and at least 4gb of RAM.

That generation is when Intel added MPEG hardware encoder so it opens up a lot of options for self-hosting media servers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Upgrade ram to the max and set zram and everything will be good to go

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Maybe. You limiting factor is going to be power and thermals. I started on a broken laptop and moved to a minipc when I first started.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

No

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I would look into buying a mini PC and throwing a hypervisor on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'd like to go low cost at the beginning but thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

You can get one use for 80-100 USD and it will last you for years.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

you can probably even host your firewall in it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I run some of my services (until very recently including jellyfin) on my HP pavilion G6 from 2007. It still runs my wireguard, backup pihole, heimdall, etc. I run it on Linux mint (it was familiar) and cant do most things on screen (lags hard) but I can ssh or VNC in just fine

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thanks that's good to know! Any performance issues? Are you torrenting with it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I torrented and seeded many torrents (its still seeding right now) and it can do at least 2 (havent tried more) jellyfin streams at once as long as I disable server side transcoding to reserve resources. I had the full arr suite of apps running along with ombi (gonna move to jellyseer, but imo ombi used too much ram on my 4GB laptop to be something I kept running). Is it perfect? No, it has quirks that will come up now and again but can I really complain when getting now 16 years of use out of a laptop I never thought I'd touch again once I built my desktop?

Edit: oh be aware, if you're using old hardware, DO NOT use the newest versions of things like Linux mint, it possibly won't have drivers that works for really old hardware (like wifi card, Lan card, etc.) and it won't be easily apparent sometimes. I solved this with a friend who had the same laptop as me but couldn't get internet once installing mint. It turns out he used a newer version of mint that did not have a way to support his wifi card and installing and older version solved it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Ha! Funny that, I had issues with my WiFi card too! I could connect but wouldn't have the right certificates. I solved this by using an Ethernet cable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Alpine. But you are very low on the RAM. I will buy more RAM if I can (DDR2(?)).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

+1 I'm surprised nobody else mentioned it. Alpine seems to be able to run on anything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I tried this recently with a 10 year old laptop. Much better specs than that. 6GB RAM, ran W10 incredibly slowly due to HDD.

I couldn't even boot the Ubuntu USB installer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

6GB is more than enough for many desktop environments. Plus, a server wouldn't have any anyway. not booting the Ubuntu installer seems like a bug, or other non-resource problem. if you try with a newer installer, or some other distro, that computer can host many things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah, it should have been fine. Was latest Ubuntu as well. Maybe something iffy about the laptop hardware, some obscure thing that wasn't supported. In any case it's gone now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know about the whole 'arr suite but one BT client and PiHole should not be a problem. Provided you don't seed hundreds of torrents, but even that may work out ok-ish depending on the BT client – some of them like Transmission or rTorrent are more efficient than qBitTorrent or Deluge.

Edit: oh and distro, any distro provided you disable unnecessary services. And I'm assuming you plan to use it in CLI mode only.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks! Yes that's the idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Edit: I did manage to install Puppy Linux onto it, but I was severely limited by the CPU which is 32bits. I'm trying another old laptop next! Thanks everyone!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What kind of limitation did you run into? Lack of packages or speed?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Old distro and lack of packages

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

No, just get a raspberry pi instead

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
VNC Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #390 for this sub, first seen 31st Dec 2023, 16:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Total waste of time. Get the newest Pi or equivalent