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?
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
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!
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.
Found the spec sheet on that processor for anyone who’s interested.
Thanks! I haven't thought of the 32 bit issue... I might give it a try anyway for the experience!
If you get tired of that, you can probably turn it into a virtual fish tank and Johnny Castaway machine. (1GHz atom, 1gb RAM, XP)
I’m sorry but why would you do this
Novelty only.
Keeping real fish is tedious and time consuming.
Other than "because I could", I have no answer
I wouldn't dare to charge that old battery up. Some of them can start a fire.
Thanks, it's removable
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.
Thanks, very helpful !
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.
Thanks! I had installed Mac OSX on it back in the day so I'm hopeful.
Go for a vintage correct OS for a challenge, try Haiku!
Hey, Haiku is a "modern" OS too :)
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.
Thanks, that is the idea!
You'll probably save money in the long run using a pi.
I did the math:
DietPi (it runs on PCs)
What advantages would this give over plain Debian or similar? I'm a total noob, so I'd love something that might help me get a little more out of my little netbook 'server'.
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.
No
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.
you can probably even host your firewall in it
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.
Upgrade ram to the max and set zram and everything will be good to go
I would look into buying a mini PC and throwing a hypervisor on it.
I'd like to go low cost at the beginning but thanks!
You can get one use for 80-100 USD and it will last you for years.
I self host using Debian on a 2010 macbook pro with a core 2 duo in it. It works well.
Puppy Linux!
Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Gentoo, Peppermint...
Some others like damn small linux or nano Linux or Linux lite.
Crunch bang plus plus retro af
They really didn't fast for old computers, most of them didn't support x32 already, they eating many resources of ram and processor... In real world they didn't light as declared.
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
Thanks that's good to know! Any performance issues? Are you torrenting with it?
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
It sounds too slow. Save yourself time and sanity.
Alpine. But you are very low on the RAM. I will buy more RAM if I can (DDR2(?)).
+1 I'm surprised nobody else mentioned it. Alpine seems to be able to run on anything.
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.
Thanks! Yes that's the idea.
Any distro. Energy consumption may be higher. Apart from that all good (I guess)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
What kind of limitation did you run into? Lack of packages or speed?
Old distro and lack of packages
No, just get a raspberry pi instead
Total waste of time. Get the newest Pi or equivalent