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There's ton on old-ish laptops that are simply thrown away or dust away which you can get for cheap. I have an old core2 duo that's not been used for years due to busted gpu but otherwise functional. Makes no sense to repair it.
It appears to not be a mac and my assumption is there are architectural and software differences between PCs and MACs that affect battery performance/explosions, but perhaps I am naive?
Rare. Very rare. I had Macbook Pros and i think any generation of the Air since 2013 - my current Air now has nearly 150 cycles down and still runs perfectly fine.
If anything the battery is pretty good on Apple compared to other things...
At 25 euro to host a laptop vs $40 for a midi-tower PC (joesdatacenter.com) I'd probably use a PC, full of hard drives, and have a significant storage server as well as a cpu box. Raspberry pi hosting in the $5/month range has been tried though most hosts have given up on it.
@willie I wonder why Raspberry Pi colo hasn't flourished... Low performance for the price? Perhaps lacking motherboards that would make the whole thing modular, something like the online c1 cloud...
The rpi boards are unreliable crap, too many cables all over the place, etc. Hetzner had some similar Hardkernel servers and gave up on them. I think you need a specially designed multi-server box like the online C1 for this to work, and Online may have even given up on the C1 (they still run their fleet of them in FR, but they haven't deployed at their new NL site). NUC may be a better form factor for low-end colo.
Then again, NUCs arent actually cheap. (a fact I resent from time to time when I consider getting one)
True. Wonder if there could be some cheap barebones NUC-sized enclosures. Some of the NUCs are expensive because they're quite powerful, fwiw. There have been some cheap ones too.
Is there some other reasonably standardized form factor that would be good for small colo? Keep in mind that one reason to want to colo a tiny, low-powered box is to use special hardware in it that a VPS or commodity dedi wouldn't provide (example: a smart card authentication token inside). So there should be enough space inside the box to allow for some user-installed stuff.
I guess technically you could simply provide measurements the case needs to adhere to. Ie. Cube atx case with max 30cm height/width/depth or something. But I dont know of any actually standardised case options like that that arent servers.
Or 0.5U rack servers. But those arent cheap either.
I have used laptop as server in locations where a well build server with UPS would be a overkill
Fact is laptops are good servers as they have low power consumption with inbuilt UPS (Battery) with mostly well built hardware
+1, have had one "colo'd" at home for years 24x7 when I gave up on high power/high heat PC's and servers for personal use at home.
Now I only run laptops and thin clients for any CPU intensive home-based computing need.
RAID1 (when you choose one that can accommodate 2 hard drives)
Lots of the smaller ones have 1 drive and an SD slot, so you can RAID or maybe replicate/mirror/automatically back up frequently.
Some of the other items need a fairly powerful laptop. I'd mostly want to do this with an older and slower one.
RAID between SD card and HDD? That's a new one.
Anyway, @William , if you ever need something like this again and Bulgaria would work as location, let me know.
For me it was worth it to get the speed/compute power I needed due to the # of VM's I wanted to run/play with .... especially for Plex.
It was worth the $200 I spent on ebay/craigslist to get good laptops.
I see. I guess I should check what $200 gets you on those places. It occurs to me you might be able to find a unit with a busted display for almost nothing.
I personally feel like I'm doing ok without any high powered computers at home. All my heavy computing these days is on a remote dedi. Ymmv of course.
The practicality here was really just repurposing old equipment for use as a server.
Why a laptop if u can just plant 4 NUCs in the same space.. they are powerfull too, and way smaller
Gbit mininmum
I have numerous dedi and colo across a few dc's for "real" work, but (in my case) I always have had a need for 24/7 computing running @ home. Nothing @ home for 3rd parties of course, but always need to test/try/configure something ... especially, as it turns out, old laptops.
In terms of price, some of the old thin clients can be had for $25 or less. Those come in very handy as well (especially as pfSense firewalls, Zoneminder surveillance DVR's, and fileshares).
I have a lot of mini ITX things in this cases which are the smallest you get before NUC/custom and thin-mini-ITC (which has no Audio ports and fits in half a U while this mini ITX case fits in about 1.5U).
They run on 12V and despite noting no PSU there is one included.
https://www.amazon.de/Inter-Tech-88881212-Case-ITX-SY-500/dp/B00WZ2UW4U/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1483883285&sr=8-11&keywords=mini+itx+gehäuse
The space above the I/O shield can be used with some mainboards and a PCIe riser to fit a single card, check dat shit:
https://prnt.li/f/3d74998db089b2dfa1197359b2b3fbff-aaz3ziet3o.jpg
mdadm works on anything....
This thing has only one slot but has some M.2 slot or so (need to look), not caring too much either.
"Old" really is out of way here though, it's still an i7-4720HQ (which benches at more than a normal i7-2600) and 16GB RAM go a far way too, single 2,5" fits 4TB HDD+ or 4TB SSD+.
That laptop was ~1kEUR around a year ago.
NUCs are $$$, they start at like 200EUR. There are cheap same form factor things with eg. Celerons (N3150 and so on) but they are not even 1/4th of this thing in CPU power...
no? Besides, with USB 3.0 this is rather pointless as it fits a 1Gbit NIC fine, but as dongle then which is bit ugly/an issue for stability in cases.
LattePanda http://www.lattepanda.com/product-details/?pid=3
https://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=175_177
Seems interesting, but i don't know of good case or 1U rack mount.
PS: Come to think of it, there are cheaper ASUS, ASRock etc. ITX boards with onboard CPU.
I'm not going to be the one buying the hardware, just offering colo to people who have old Laptops that they may no longer need and cannot realistically sell.
Actually, considering most laptops run much cooler than regular PCs/Servers, and they have built in UPS (battery), the colo price may potentially be cheaper as you would have less overhead, perhaps eliminating the need to provide a UPS, and much less A/C. It also makes 'remote hand's potentially easier (if the screen works) as you the 'console' is again, built in.
The biggest problem I see is handling things like reboots and providing KVM. Laptops don't have IPMI and KVM over IP would mean a ton of cabling, and given the battery, a traditional APC reboot switch won't work either. Any other way to reboot a laptop remotely?
In theory you could offer the colo very cheap (10-15 EUR /month?) and then charge extra for all the BS like reboots and stuff.
RPi doesnt really make sense to colo due to all the cabling and other infra required. Its much more cost effective to get a VM.
If somebody knows where we could buy cheap and small KVM over IP switches to upgrade this setup then this whole idea of laptop colo becomes really interesting. Provided you can fit the laptop + KVM switch in 1u.
I have a bunch of Avocent and Dell KVM over IP switches. 16 ports, expandable to 128. Got like 5 in my storage room just sitting there. The Avocent ones work well (better than the dells) but I can't find cheap SIP modules. The Dell ones work but are kind of laggy, and I have around 100 unused SIP (PS2) modules. I don't mind selling!
It's the reboot functionality that makes or breaks this. Maybe take out the batteries and have them on some on/off power supply? Then again, most laptop BIOSes are so locked down they cant even boot on power loss...
@teamacc
I did not think of the situation when you have to forcefully reboot the machine. You are right.
@randvegeta
See above. Without having this solved it is not that interesting anymore. I might train the first chimpanzee to do remote hands ;-)
If you look at how hetzner's doing it, youll see some shit: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PLyQcpXDci4/maxresdefault.jpg
Looks like daisy-chaining a r45-style connector cable through a row of PCs with a usb (probably for pc power monitoring), with a simple 2-wire cable going into the pc.
"send in your laptops for colocation. We do need you to solder 2 wires to the on/off switch before sending it in though"
@randvegeta Theoretically, you could hack together an arduino, a relay (between the power cord and the laptop), and the Ethernet shield. With some code and a control server, you could probably reboot it. /jks
This is a commercial system popular in DE, known as Webresetter - https://www.ico.de/webresetter
It plugs into the RST header on the mainboard and does not need soldering.
The USB is not for power monitoring, it can send CTRL+ALT+DEL and other commands via the Robot, tech wise a keyboard emulator but i don't see it in my lsusb, might work different.
Soldering will be required if you're using laptops though, which was my point originally. Nice find on the actual product.