I have a 10 year old laptop of very low specs. I had given a detailed description of the specs and made a post regarding the use to which it can be put, and more or less everyone pointed to self hosting.
Now, if the machine is powerful enough, why not put it to some productive use ??
And so l'm exploring an unknown territory.
Self hosting on a laptop is a great entry into this hobby.
You could start with just putting a Linux distribution of your choice on it, add Docker, and start playing around with Linuxserver containers.
Be warned, once you pop, you can't stop. (Looks at my three node Proxmox cluster with Ceph and a 10gb fibre connected 30TB nas)
Creating your own ‘homelab’ is really fun! I don’t what kind of specs you have, and where your interests lies, but I had a ton of fun with proxmox and Proxmox community scripts.
I was one of the people pointing you to self hosting so I would start with Linux upskilling
https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/how-this-works/
Then I would look into learning how to use Docker, followed by how to make docker compose files.
so what's the question ??
why not put it to productive use ?
Well if there is a need/purpose, by all means, go ahead!
what is self hosting ?
cut-n-paste from wikipedia : Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service, as well as own servers for e-mail, IM, NTP and so on, using a private server, instead of using a service outside of the administrator's own control. Self-hosting allows users to have more control over their data, privacy, and computing infrastructure, as well as potentially saving costs and improving skills.
I had given a detailed description of the specs and made a post regarding the use to which it can be put
Not exactly, but fair enough. You got plenty of answers on that post; this will not happen again. Go read a wikipedia article.
Do you have a problem you need to solve? If you just want to run the computer because you have it but you don’t need it then it’s just a poorly designed space heater.
Your laptop has 500gb of storage. Start by trying to use it as a NAS. A simple SMB share or SFTP share would be good enough.
You can offload unimportant data to it save storage on your phone or other machines.
You can share this storage with your household, make it like a photos backup. But at this stage all the backups will need to be made manually. Once you get the hang of basic networking. You could consider hosting immicjy, which is like a google photos alternative with native apps for automatic backups.
As someone else suggest, jellyfin is also a good idea. Your laptop does not need to be good enough to transcode the films/shows, if they are in simple formats which your TV, phone or other clients can decode. 500gb can hold a lot of films.
Other services like hosting an email is not easy. It it not dependent on you machine only, but also on your ISP. Most ISPs in India do not allow port-forwarding.
Just learn the basics about networking, maybe about docker or podman. YouTube has tons of resources, like DBTech.
For me, the best place to start was with services that replace cloud products. Setting up Immich for photo storage, Jellyfin for movies and shows, or navidrome for music.
your old laptop has a 45 watt a4-3330mx processor. it's slow. very slow. it uses a lot of power for that slowness. use it to learn on, but once you're ready to 'deploy' an always-on service, i would highly recommend something a little newer and more energy efficient. especially if you live in a part of the world with high electricity costs.
the intel n100 processor in popular minipc draw a max of just 6 watts while also being 6-8x faster than the 3300mx
I started selfhosting recently ! Yunohost makes it really easy, especially if you want to have several applications on your server that may or may not be on the same domain. But you can always go classic with Debian (any other linux distro could do, but Debian's stability makes it ideal. Yunohost is also based on Debian).
From my experience, you can easily repurpose any old computer as long as it boot.
when i sort old computer. i divide them into three categories following the potential computer power.
put proxmox on it and discover the you are now a server admin ! Congratulations.
Replace the hdd by a ssd for more perceived speed.
Second Tier -> less than 6gb of ram -> it will be a bare metal server. Plenty of fun to have. You will restrict yourself to command line. No graphical UI (mouse and screen are not a necessity) Try to connect by ssh as a first challenge or try to do the linuxchallenge. Know that you will fail a lot, but when it work it will be very very rewarding. Put servers on it ! like adblock or anything from here -> https://selfh.st/
Last tier -> 2gb of ram or less. Very old computer, it is more of a heating element than a computer. Well it will be a router. Try to put opnsense or opnwrt and learn about networking. To add ethernets ports usb-ethernet adapter from tplink or other work well.
This tier list is from someone that have the luxury of owning multiples of thoses old computer, is quite passionate and work it the field. Your mileage may and will vary. Your need are your own, so try, fail, learn, experience, progress at your own rythm and succeed. Have fun and take care. Report if you have any success of some self-hosting lemmy board ;) You will be cheered upon and given passionate advice. Fail and post your failure and you will have the same reaction ;)
There's one project I'd highly recomnend - take a look at MASH - Mother of All Self Hosting ansible playbook.
While I haven't used this one in particular, they have a separate playbook for hosting Matrix I'm using, and it has been the smoothest experience with selfhosting anything ever I had.
The playbook is super robust, I never had it fail without it being immediately clear why and how to fix it, including for example "you didn't update for a while, this cfg parameter changed/got renamed, do this to fix it."
In case of Matrix, it was literally just "change 4 config values in vars.cfg, and add your server ip to hosts inventory, and run " just setup-all"", and it worked.
The MASH one has a lot of services you might need, and from what I've seen the setup process of adding a new service is often just adding i.e "jellyfin-enable: true" to your cfg.
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