Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

So there is no need for docker anymore.

It's an interesting idea, and it might even work for some people who have overpowered gaming laptops that can't run Windows 11 (thanks, Microsoft!). But man, people have no idea how powerful just a few cores of a modern AMD EPYC are. Try a Linode instance with a few dedicated cores and see if that's competitive with shipping your old alienware to a colo.

What’s the point if I can just connect it to my router and not pay any money to anyone, expect some electricity price, which would be like ten times cheaper. My old laptop is capable of a gigabit connection and so my home internet. That’s plenty for anything I can imagine.

Redundancy, I hear you saying! What if you’d have no electricity for an hour? OK then. I’d have another laptop at some else place then, and have two powerful servers for like still one fifth of the price. Can you beat that?

I wonder how their KVM works...

Eeek, I can't imagine what this is like if it scales. What happens to the fire risk when theres 20,000 laptops with aging batteries all sitting together? I hope they take the batteries out, however many laptops use batteries to smooth out power fluctuations.

Laptops aren't designed to be servers - peg your laptop CPU and GPU at 100% and see how long it lasts, I've done this before and the answer is about "2 months", yep sure, this effort isn't targeting that workload, but how many bad apples does it take to start a fire? In their page they say "kubernetes server - no problem" kubernetes DOES keep the CPUs busy, not pegged, but busy enough so that they wont step down their frequency.

I admire the effort to reuse old tech, but boy oh boy would I not want to be a sysadmin here!

Hey, this is great. Many of my old laptops become my "servers", so I'd definitely pay for this.

One question I have, in case someone from CoLaptop is reading:

So, one time I had this White "Chiclet" MacBook and I had it powered on all the time, I didn't know at the time but that destroyed the battery and when I unplugged it/plugged it again (because I moved it to a different place after like 4 years) it just didn't power up, fortunately I was able to extract the HDD and its contents.

Now I have one old MacBook Air and one old MacBook Pro as "servers", and I regularly disconnect them from power (but keep them on), I do this for like a day every 3-4 weeks, and haven't had that issue, battery health is still good etc...

So, what do you recommend for this? Or is this something you'll do as part of the CoLo service?

I had this idea for dirt-cheap colo where it's just a warehouse that has warehouse racks for putting whatever you want on the rack. Rates based on linear feet, bandwidth, and power consumption. Power would be delivered with a 15-minute uptime guarantee, meaning you have at least 15 minutes to gracefully shut down in the event of loss of power.

Advantage is reasonably secure location and quality Internet connection. Target market is nerds who don't want all that crap in their closets.

This seems fishy...

I use www.vedos.cz vps hosting for 3$ a month. Prague (CZ - EU)

pages.dev, you can't be serious.

Wait, whats the point of this if I can have my old laptop running in my garage?

that's how my university did a linux cluster for exercises

7 euro a month and unlimited bandwidth? Seems unlikely.

Hmm, there's might something to this:

+ The usual limiting factor in data centers is power, so laptops could be more optimized for greater cycle efficiency per power than comparable old servers.

+ Laptops are generally compact and so achieve greater rack densities than individual co-lo servers. I'm thinking about 34 or 51 laptops could be stored in 9 or 10U either 2 or 3 rows deep by 17 wide.

+ Shipping a laptop to a co-lo data center is cheaper than a 1U server.

~ Reusing electronics saves e-waste and reduces unnecessary consumption, either old servers or old laptops.

- Laptops lack ECC RAM.

- Laptops typically don't use nearly as fast CPUs or RAM as contemporaneous servers.

- Laptops are limited in their storage options.

- Laptops lack remote, lights-out management of real servers.

- Repairing old failed laptop components is more difficult than old servers.

~ Old laptops tend not to have usable batteries, so there's unlikely to be much an inherently distributed battery backup capability.

- Old laptop batteries of various origins could be a li-ion NMC fire hazard at scale.

~ Reusing old stuff at any sort of scale would prefer standardization, and it's sometimes difficult to amass many of the same discontinued model.

Conclusion: Do it if it works for you. It's kinda cool.

They remove the battery! That was my first question.

I have an old Lenovo laptop that works fine with the battery completely removed--but I have to disconnect the power and reconnect it before the soft power-on switch will work. I wonder how they handle powering on finicky laptops with those "soft" power buttons.

Yea this is a stupid idea. Old laptops don't have good performance per watt compared to new servers once you factor in that they are many many times slower.

This is never a good idea.

A ton of old batteries in one place. The batteries themselves are probably not a concern, but if something happens to the facility, then you have a ton of problems.

Security of the facility is a concern if someone can get in and walk out with an armful of laptops.

Laptops don’t scale from a stacking stand point. Sure, close the lids and line them up. Then you’ll have a lot of failures. Older laptops are intended to cool through the keyboard and top vents by the screen.

sounds like a battery fire waiting to happen

Yeah for dev purposes perhaps. Production would be another story.

Vibe code SPAs, not this kind of nonsense.

uh yeah i mean we 'colo' at work because its cheaper than buying a windows server with multiple RDP licenses. We have some legacy stuff that must be run on site.... so we buy $200 laptops and people can remote in for years.

Is this how we bring "works on my machine" in production? /s

> Your old laptop packs more CPU power, RAM, and storage than their entry-level offerings

And, if you are lucky, it can compute PI to the fifth decimal, before the thermals kick in. But the battery life is wonderful. /s