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Comments
Laptop in a rack is pretty uncommon, and now asking for Wi-Fi, good luck with that. Don't get caught and fired for handing access to an unauthorized third party.
With wifi, it is pretty common to determine the actual location of the laptop by common security apps in corporate issued laptop.
Did you mean to respond to my message?
We can possibly help you with this. We could do your own Wi-Fi network, or a wired connection. We also offer VPN tunneling and other routing options that might help your mission. Feel free to reach out.
We're located in Houston!
I wouldn't recommend colocating a laptop. If it is constantly connected to power and online, there is risk of the battery expanding and then going kaboom.
You can get a MacOS vps from GreenCloud I believe.
https://cloudxmac.com/
WOW $400/m budget why dont you just lease a mac there is many providers today offering it
any budget mac server?
I do see it's fairly old (from May) and probably already have a solution for it but it was bumped today. I glanced over and felt like I should comment.
Is there some issue with having your parents, family, or a trusted friend hosting it for you? I mean, with a $400/month budget, I'm sure they would be more than happy to do it for you if you got them a fast internet connection that they don't have to pay for. Even if they want you to pay for the electricity you use (could easily setup something to monitor), you would still end up paying less. Plus, you're going for discretion so what's more descrete than having a residential ip and wifi location if it's ever used to determine it? I also highly doubt they would be against rebooting the machine (unsure why you can't do that remotely) or replug the usb every so often. Even if they were, I'm sure giving them some extra money to take like 5 minutes of their time would make them happy.
On second thought, I guess you never did mention where you are from, just where you wanted a colo so maybe the family/friends thing isn't an option for you. I'dunno, if I was living the nomad life, that's what I would do.
The work laptop is portable. He's supposed to take it with him. This is generally a fraud situation, or Chinese spies.
User long gone.
Yeah, I agree, 99% sure fraud but figured I would still comment the family/friends route because maybe it's in the 1% that it could actually be legit. Like, I could totally see someone living the "van life" and want to save on cellular internet or not clog it up when you're trying to use the machine (thinking of os/office/etc. updates coming through). Though, I'd personally would chat with my work about it first as they might be able to just issue you a VDI. Like, I would have setup something similar (at my place though) when I stayed like a month in the middle of nowhere to cleanout a house but still wanted to work my normal hours during the day. I chatted with my work about the situation and how the only real internet option was tethering to my phone. They instantly told me they were going to issue me a VDI right away so I could leave the company laptop at home.
While OP not present, wanted to discuss display/local connected aspect of the Dedicated servers/Laptop that runs on RDP. For example, Dedicated servers comes with VGA port [my home lab has Dell R520, HP 360e Gen 8), possibly new dedicated comes with Display port/HDMI [I am not sure]. If Dedi/Laptop set on remote location with Desktop options, If anyone in data center connect display port or laptop monitor, they could able to see desktop screen, is it not?, if I am already logged in, they could use it via local keyboard/mouse too, is it not?
Might be amateur question, For my case, I am only person using it, local/remote, but co-locating this needs some sort of security, but how to prevent datacenter seeing screens, or using mouse/keyboard etc while doing RDP on metal/dedi?
If they use RDP to connect to it, connecting a monitor locally will only show the Lock Screen.
Thanks, that makes sense, audio output muted as well? I remember once I used RDP, there was remote audio.
Not on macOS.
You type
sudoover SSH, the session freezes up, and a popup appears on desktop + VNC.Well that sucks for such a use case then
Audio will play on the remote client that is connected to it.
In my country, there are many data centers offering hosting for mini servers, which are often used to set up Minecraft servers or other services. These mini servers, equipped with AMD 8845H processors (8 cores and 16 threads), are incredibly affordable after subsidies. For around 2,400 RMB (approximately 300 USD), you can get one with 24GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a 2.5Gbps network port.
People carry 2 laptops nowadays when traveling, one for work and one for personal. If you can host your work laptop in a data center, you can leave the work laptop behind and just RDP into it from personal laptop. My work laptop has a GPU and weights almost 3kg so I can totally understand the OPs intention. Friends/family with dynamic IPs behind a locked router/modem is unreliable and clunky, even assuming they know how to portforward stuff.
During COVID lockdown we put two servers in boss's basement with port forwarding.
The port forwarding disappears every time Verizon updates the home router firmware (every 2~3 months), and then we had to do a conference call screen sharing to re-insert the port forwarding.
Eventually we made a systemd service on the servers to ssh -R to a Raspberry in our closet.
We can then connect to the Raspberry and then get to the servers.
I do something similar except using wireguard to make the outbound connection and RDP in via the VPN interface. Put guacamole over it and I'm able to RDP from anything with a web browser including chromebooks and tablets. Still, the issue is that sometimes the laptop needs a hard reboot in the middle of the night and your friends/family is asleep.
Our machines were Supermicro 3U servers running Ubuntu 18.
It won't need reboots in months.
We only had to call the boss for a hard reset for 1 time during more than three years.
See the paper on what we did with these machines.
When the servers were brought back, we spent 4 hours cleaning the accumulated dust inside the two machines.
We even found tiny bugs under the motherboard.
What's the use case that the mac needs to be connected through wifi?
Good story . Need to watch "Mr. Robot" once again .
Sounds like your boss should be on IPV6 wall of shame.
@tropicalnomad
We offer Macmini for lease, maybe this is a better choice for you
https://www.solidseovps.com/macdedicatedserver.php
Verizon FiOS does have IPv6, but it's dynamic address and incoming connections are blocked by firewall.
We could insert firewall rules to allow incoming connections, but these rules would disappear when Verizon updates router firmware.
That's when you put it in bridge mode and use your own router.
Laptops and workstation components are not designed for 24 /7 usages, they can fail. If your laptop worked 24/7 , does not mean others would work too.
Hence my comment on needing to hard reset the laptop and validating the OPs use-case of having it run in a data center where someone can physically press the power button 24/7 instead of friends/family's closet.
also, people do often use their laptops as workstations. companies give them a dock and monitor and they just leave their laptops at the desk, with the option of traveling with it.