I have like 3 spare laptops, and another spare computer. I'm not running anything right now because this router doesn't support port forwarding no matter what I try (it's a firmware issue apparently), but they're always there for me when I need them.
You could maybe rent a cheap VPS and use that as a reverse proxy. Using Tailscale to create a VPN tunnel so you don't need port forwarding
Any way to use other firmware? My shitty ISP is giving private IP address, so I just use tailscale instead.
That's the whole thing. I was on CGNAT, and decided to pay $10 monthly to fix it and get a public ip. But NOW I find out the fucking router doesn't even work. It's apparently this exact model that has the issue. And only this one. I don't know if I could replace the firmware.
I used to but the fan eventually broke. It works if I flip it upsidedown so the vents face upwards but the CPU is still hitting 90 degrees idle 💀
My (very) old Vaio from 2013 just had a disk change with an SSD and is now a fantastic domain controller.
Old laptops have little resell value. They work well as low powered hobby servers though.
My first server box was a laptop that was ten years old at the time.
Thinkpad T430, i7 gen 1,16gb home server
Many years ago I used old desktop PCs. But nowadays VPS have become so cheap that it's just not worth the hastle, in my opinion.
Ongoing they still seem to cost more than a slightly more powerful system would in a year.
Yes I did, but nowadays I have nothing to host things on. Alpine Linux is excellent to host Minecraft servers and the like.
I have an 8 core i7 Alienware 17r3 with 32GB RAM I use to host a pen-test lab. It's outdated and only runs Win10, but with Xubuntu 20.04 and VirtualBox, it makes a nice little vm server I can power up and down with plenty of resources.
Looked into selling my old gaming laptop just recently, and it just doesn't seem like its worth selling them, if they are any older than 5 years, and not top spec. Making a server/node/test machine, might be the best option. Still not comfortable with the laptop battery as ups thing.
I have one that runs my bookwyrm, owncast, calibreweb, and matrix (WIP) instances.
Gotta love self-hosting federation c:
For a while I was using a 10 year old Mac Pro G5 as a home server. Conveniently it also doubled as a space heater in the winter.
I thought about it, but the additional display, made me think about power saving, how to shut off screen, while keeping the headless service loaded? ... premature optimization?
At work we had lots of old laptops, poor battery life, small hard drives, etc. I cleaned them up and installed pfsense on them and gave them to colleagues as home firewall/kid web filters. Others we popped xp on them and set up mame / emulator to give to their kids.
I took my first foray into media hosting by running subsonic on an old emachines laptop! ain't nothing wrong!
Got a laptop with a busted up screen running Plex and it's pretty awesome! We don't need screens where we're going!
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