Worth trying using a 15 years old notebook for self hosting?
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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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
That's good to know ha ha! At least I can have some fun before investing further...
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
Thanks. I might simply go for the raspberry pi solution as well.
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!