for real dude i have 2 old laptops lying around and now they are not only going to be put to good use, but i now also know the basics of getting around and setting up a linux server :D edit: tbh i wrote this comment very early on without getting through most of the video; after getting about 2 more minutes into it my mind is currently exploding.
I just threw away an old laptop with broken screen and faulty battery after removing the hdd and Ram. Wish I could reset time and then perhaps I would have tried to make it into a home server. Thanks so much for doing this video
Most youtubers will install vim editor, just to edit their window manager config files (and that's the best they have ever done). Meanwhile, Brandon comes around spins up a server, installs docker, yatch and other service all in one video and never complains about using nano as his text editor. 🙌
@@JohnJohn-bv3mo it's a weekend you could be doing literally anything else. It's like saying it takes a weekend to learn knitting. But that doesn't mean everyone who wears clothes needs to learn to knit.
One of my younger siblings had a school-issued Android tablet (mid-range arm64 Samsung tablet) , and it ended up sitting in a drawer when no longer needed, I decided to root it, install an Alpine Linux chroot environment so I can use it as a headless Linux server. The battery life can last more than a full day for lightweight server tasks :-D
I've always wondered how people do this! I've heard of using an out-of-date laptop/desktop as a home server plenty of times, but every video on the subject I've found until yours always assumes you already know how to do a bunch of stuff, or know all the Terminal commands, or they just outright skip entire sections. This video has been the _most_ informative I've found on the subject, _and_ you go at a slow enough pace that I feel I could follow along without too much pausing and skipping around to re-play sections. And you explain each and every step in a very methodical, clear and concise way! So _THANK YOU SO MUCH_ for this!!! I have an old desktop just sitting gathering dust that will be _perfect_ for the job! 👍😁
@@Anonymous4045 Not at the moment. Turns out I had stripped the old machine of its GPU and the CPU doesn't have a built-in one, so until I can afford to buy a replacement it's going to have to continue gathering dust. Weird how I don't remember removing the GPU, and I have _no_ idea where it went. It's not in any of my other relics lying around the house.
With redhat distros such as fedora, they reccomened using podman instead of docker. Podman is a drag and drop replacement for docker but doesn't use a daemon meaning containers don't need to be ran as root unlike docker.
Good luck making it work with traefik for instance... Red hat guys are champions for rewriting things that work to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place 🙄
Brother ... that video gave me way more than I expected it would. I just wanted to watch it out of curiosity and ended up actually setting up a whole ass server. Great stuff man. Definitely will be coming back to watch more of your stuff.
Dude, I've been looking at so many different home server setups, and I even have my own rpi that I have pihole on and has been operating for years. However, I had so many issues just trying to get it running as a docker container. This actually not only showed me an extremely easy way to make that work through yacht, but has also helped me see I have some laptops that I can use to test things instead of trying to virtualize my desktop! Please keep on teaching, your content is easy to follow and is invaluable!
What a great video. So many TH-camrs will do a tutorial and will be copying and pasting stuff yet never tell you what it does or why you should do it. This one was spot on ! Thanks, this is the way to learn !
Fantastic vid! Funnily enough, just a few days ago I started looking into turning an older macbook into a personql server with fedora, but I never knew it had a browser dashboard like that! Great stuff as always
This is really inspiring content, I love how you touched on actually good examples of docker containers. Also I didn't know Fedora Server was so useful, I've dabbed around in Lubuntu on a light weight desktop PC, but seems like I should be using Fedora Server rather, just the cool HTML Dashboard is so much easier to use than trying to remember how to Putty in to my server everytime I wanted to do something. I don't use Linux a lot so have to re-learn it almost everytime.
another tip for laptop servers, use TLP or similar to limit the charge of the battery lower than 100%. Batteries don't like being charged all the way up all the time. Also it might be useful to enable full-blown hybernation (watch out for the swapfile/partition!) on critical battery level.
@Willdrick: i don't use Hibernation because it uses[/wastes] alot of Ram. i shut-down my laptop[/desktop-computer] when i'm done using it. (likewise i try to always-keep-an-eye-out on my laptop's battery and i don't let it go critical; at the very most i let it go to "low battery"-status[/alert/alert-mode] before i plug-in the AC-adapter to the laptop's power-port and then [the AC-adapter] to the wall).
@@MNbenMN what I meant by “let it go critical” is where Windows says [/pops-out an alert] “your battery is at critical level” and/or “your battery is at critical level. please plug-it-in to a adapter as-soon-as-possible”. Also: Considering that laptop-batteries are supposed to be utilized / intended to be utilized / designed to be utilized, I would have the laptop-battery unplugged/removed , and I would have the laptop connected to a Uninterruptible-Power-Supply if I am going to be using it as a server.
@@reoencarcelado5904 Yeah, i know meant letting the battery drop to the critically low level, but one of the points in the video was that the laptop battery can act as the UPS instead of spending major cash on a UPS. Modern laptop batteries aren't damaged by leaving the laptop plugged in all/most of the time as they often would be back in the day, anyway. I mean if I were building a server completely without limitations, it'd be a full rack setup with redundant hot swappable storage and UPS battery backup, but a laptop that's just sitting around unused can make a fine server for light utilization in a lot of cases.
They're usually just less powerful, I believe that's a myth. I'd love some more info on that though, if there are any experts. Very difficult to research
@@elecbaguette they are, because power efficiency is important on laptops, so that the will battery last longer. My laptop uses around 6-10 watts while idling. Desktop PCs have higher idle consumption.
@@BeamDeam but he's not entirely wrong. Often they're just undervolted and underclocked desktop parts. Like you could just do the same to a desktop. I bet you couldn't get it as low wattage from the wall though.
@@MrBearyMcBearface yea. I just wanted to point out that laptops are especially designed to be power efficient, while on a computer it isn't really that important to be that power efficient, because PCs need to be connected to wall plug anyways. PCs have the advantage, that you can connect way more thing like hard drive to it, which is really useful, when used as a server.
If you install the Container Management tools for Fedora Server, you get Podman. Podman is a drop-in replacement for Docker and is more closely aligned with Kubernetes.
@@wtfisgoingon535 have not tried it yet, but upon reading some sources, if your bios supports reading from pcie storage you might be good to boot. my hardware reads the 'asmedia' chipset from the mini pcie before boot so it might be possible
Recently started watching your videos. Some of the things that took me over 2 days to solve, you mentioned them in 10 seconds 😅 Wish I had seen these videos earlier. Extremely informative videos for beginners like me. Thank you for the efforts you put in.
I actually daily drive a ThinkPad x240 but I decided to buy a thinkcentre m700 (minipc w i3 6300T+8GB) and I got it for £60 Very happy with my purchase, a decent Lenovo 'think' system completely outdoes the competition in quality Vs price
I clicked on this because I did a similar thing. I have a cheap HP laptop ($100 used) with an AMD Bristol Ridge A12-9800 processor that's running Nextcloud. It works great for that purpose. I have 7 TB of storage on it (2 TB internal, 5 TB external) and have my whole GOG game library and a couple terabytes of video and audio stored on it. Overall for less than $250 total it's an excellent server.
I've got a Lenovo T420 that I got off ebay for £30 due to its screen being broken. It serves as an mpd box and a video streaming server for my tv, among other things. I use a raspberry pi3 as an always-on control box on my home network -- it has a simple python http server that allows me to wake and sleep it and basic mpc control via my phone.
nice video. I like the use of docker images. one thing to note, if you are leaving your laptop running 24/7 for a long time, it might be better to remove the battery, and just use the ac charger for power. These batteries some times explode or leak chemicals that can damage your laptop if they are on constant charging mode.
Actually, that depends. Very old laptops were draining power only through the battery, even on AC, but that is for very very old laptops. You probably won't use such a laptop today for anything. The thing is - if you can use a laptop without the battery, then there is no need to remove it, because the power line bypasses the battery if charging is not necessary, anyways. And if you cannot use the laptop if you remove the battery - then you... cannot use the laptop without it, but those are exactly the laptops, that you would want to avoid using. Overall, while there is certainly some small risk with anything, containing any kind of battery, that risk is not significant for most users / devices. And from my experience - older devices had better, higher quality batteries. The batteries in modern devices are much less in quality and much more prone to defects.
@@moetocafe That's intersting. Thank you for the information. I didn't know that. But isn't having them inside the laptop in humid and hot areas can contribute to the battery's safety? or do you still think it's relatively safe inside the laptop case? I have 3 laptops running inside a cabinet with not ideal heat conditions. So it felt very wrong to me to leave the batteries inside hahaha
@@taher1517 how hot is it? and is there anything flamable around, that could potentially start a fire? If the cabinet is fireproof - no worries. Otherwise, there is some risk, although probably not very high. By the way most batteries don't explode or catch fire out of a sudden. Very few batteries go bad and when they do, the first stage is they start to swеll. So, if you can make regular visual inspection on the batteries, you're good, I guess.
@@kalilsiqueira8980 If you want to access the server via SSH, select SSH server. You can install the OpenSSH server later, BTW. Make sure to deselect Desktop Env and Gnome if you do not need a Desktop environment.
13:28 I use the FTP client built into `nemo` because it can edit files directly on the server without needing to save a local copy. It uses the fact that in Linux almost everything has a local filesystem path and edits the files from there. (This avoids the explicit reupload requirement and lets me see the results seconds after hitting Ctrl+S in the software I use to edit the files)
Only do this if you have full documentation for the Embedded Controller. The EC is erratic, you can never be sure that it won't randomly shut off the wifi-radio, or throttle the CPU down to minimum MHz right when you need full performance.
In my homelab I have 2 atom notebooks installed and they work flawlessly for my current needs. They consume so little power in comparison to the rest of my setup. They arent speed demons. The fastest transfer speed I was able to get was 10 mbps. Im a Debian guy. One of them is working as a Samba NAS where I store the files I need most of the time. The other is working as a torrentbox with mini dlna enabled so I can watch movies and series I downloaded in my 2 tvs or cellphone. I removed the screen of this one because it was broken and that way I can use a paper tray organizer as a rack.
I had a 25+ year old alarm clock that needed replacing. I looked at what was available, and it was all shit compared to a simple outdated laptop. So I took my old MacBook pro from 2009, installed Arch and turned it into the most advanced alarm clock imaginable.
Agreed, the internal battery, whether it is degraded too much or not, you can replace it if it did so, serves a perfect UPS. Most UPS that runs a desktop PC runs 10 minutes max. But this one even runs a few hours since we would mostly turn off the screen.
I managed to get an old Desktop in a tiny tower 300w PSU 1 Core intel but 32GB ram and Its one job is running an Minecraft modded server "all the mods 8" up till now I've been file tranfuring via USB key because I could not get the FTP working. but this video showed me what I was missing, after hours of web searching a random video "recommended" pops up and solves it.. Thank you so much for your effort in making your video as clear as it is. some go sooo fast or skip half the steps. so TYVM PS: I have now subbed :)
I'd even take this a step further - I repaired a laptop and had leftover bits (Thinkpad T420) but it had no functional keyboard or screen (just a dock and the base, memory, HDD, etc.). So I set it up as a headless server but it's off most of the time - I wake it with a WoL packet and use it to perform compression and other tasks (it has a twin-core i5), I then suspend it by sending an MQTT packet that triggers a script to suspend the system. This method lets me maintain use of power powered systems most of the time (Pis) and only firing it up when a task is in need of more beef. It also reduces power consumption to only one kidney per month being sold to the power company.
I've installed a truenas server on an old PC at my home, but apart from media consumption there isn't much that I can do with it, and I've been thinking to maybe install an Ubuntu server hoping that would give me much more flexibility, but this looks like a more approachable option. Great video btw.
True, but it is still in the initial phase of it's release and at the end of the day, its purpose is to serve as a storage server rather than a traditional server from where I can run a website locally or something. As shown in the video, having a fedora server would allow me to do much more but at the same time, I can run plex.
It kinda depends on what means old to you. If you are having a notebook that's very very old it could be that the batteries are used up and won't hold long enough to survive a possible outage. Screens for servers are more optional and usually used to act in case the connection to the server is not possible. It also depends on how hard the tasks are, in the case that you only need some simple services it would be cheaper to go with a raspberry pi with a battery. But using a notebook as server can reduce waste.
Love this. I have a pretty powerful gaming desktop that just is not getting used anymore. Tempted to set this up and run plex from it. Or my local server for web development
Until recently, I used my old Thinkpad W520 as a virtualization server. It has 16GB ram, i7 2760QM CPU and 2x 500 GB SSDs in RAID1. Beacuse the screen was turned off 99.9% of the time, it used approx. 20 - 25W power.
Wow I have not tried Fedora's server version yet but that web interface looks really great. Open source is an amazing thing. Though one thing with this is that in order for this to work the system needs an HTTP server with this complete website. If you are like me and loves to do everything by terminal, this might not be what you need. Running all HTTP, SSH, FTP and many more services is not my primary choice. The more services you run, the less secure your system is and the more you need to worry about. I just use Arch Linux for my home server, wich works so well for me because I have many systems with it, such that most things go basically the same on every machine. It's a DIY system so that anything that breaks sometimes has also to be fixed by you. Running Arch specifically for a server only would probably not be the best choice though. I would otherwise either choose a very stable distro or possibly BSD system.
Thanks for the content Brandon. And I do think you should rebrand. Also, more advice you didn't ask for... You should try out a new keyboard layout. Workman, Dvorak, Colemak are great options. I use Colemak DH. There for sure is less stain sticking to the home row much more. Been loving Pop!_OS and Gentoo. All thanks to your help.
I did that :D Just that mac is very hot. ~60-70°C OS: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) x86_64 Host: MacBook5,1 1.0 CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 (2) @ 1.995GHz
Great video! It inspired me to buy an old thinkbook and finally set up the server I've been thinking about. One small note though - Yacht doesn't seem to play nicely with rootless docker, so people new to servers may want to hold off on making the switch from rootfull to rootless.
doing docker server tutorials is great, i did like the look of tipi server dashboard, only issue with that is the developer has to add the app container support
Personally, I believe Intel NUC clients will make better Linux servers as they are smaller and are easier to run headless compared to a laptop. I remember running Proxmox on an old laptop of mine that constantly created gigantic logs because of the screen. If NUCs aren't your go-to, then a small form factor Optiplex with an i5 will definitely suffice, as they are power efficient too.
I have an Atom based dual core that I picked up at a garage sale. The battery is toast, but I slapped windows 7 Ultimate retail, and it's faster than I imagined it would be. I've ran several flavors of Linux, but none were stable enough, and would randomly overheat and malfunction. It's a VERY clean machine, not a spec of dust on it. I'm preparing to migrate the current install to an SSD. See, I have retail TechNet keys that I purchased back in 2001 that range from server keys, you name it, up until windows 7. Even office, and visio keys, all are unlimited activation, and for each version of Windows from 3.11, 9x series, Me, NT, screw all this typing, I've got a headache. Needless to say, I paid a LOT of money for them, and never have broken their EULA. Paid for years. Then, they dropped TechNet, and we have Tik Tok'ers being testers.
WOW. Could not believe someone was using old laptop as a server like me. I still use ASUS Eee PC T101MT and the only thing I did is replaced HDD with SSD so it feels more responsive. But it still holds up pretty well for my needs - Home Assistant, transmission, Plex, Pi-hole and Portainer to orchestrate all of the above. All runs smooth as butter on latest Manjaro. Was thinking of buying something more powerful, but don't see anything that I would use to use that compute power.
Coincidentally, I found your channel from one of your older videos about using a laptop as a server and have been subscribed ever since. I used an old gaming laptop to make my server using UNRAID, and it's been great! All of the perks you mentioned really do matter. On a side note, I have the Acer version of your HP 10" there, and recently upgraded it to run the barebones version of Linux Mint (XFCE I think?)
A laptop is a great idea, but it needs some sort of battery management. Maybe something like raspberry pi can help. Each lithium ion battery has a fixed number of lifetime hours it can be charged after which battery performance degrades. If the laptop is not being constantly charged, then the laptop could work as a great server.
“2 or 300 dollars in the used market” I’m using a HP laptop with a 11th gen i5 ( I’ve used it for a year)8GB ram and 256SSD and it cost me $330. And I love it.
I like fedora server but for jellyfin its like 20x faster to install windows server 2022 and just double click install jellyfin and choose folders for your media! Done no fuss no containers no extra stuff to be done it just works with 2 clicks
Brandon, the only guy I know that installs nano on his systems when it's not there by default... I have been liking Lunarvim a lot. It throws me through a loop when I hope from system to system and have to fall back to nano. It rides the bench, but it's always there when you need it to come in clutch.
Excellent video, Brandon, though it needs updating for Fedora 40, especially the piece on how to close the lid part. Fedora has changed where the logind.conf file is found.
Love Fedora!...have been using it since 2003!...and have never looked back!...I have dabbled in other distros on my old Dell Optiplex?..but my main gear is the Dell XPS 15 inch and my lenovo ThinkPad...one runs Fedora...the other? Pop-OS!....
Had two thinkpad laptops working as servers. T440 and X240. For both ssd's died after a year of usage. Probably because of heavy load by postgresql. Just sharing my experience.
🔥🔥 This is great - you’re a really good educator!!! How can you access your server from the web? (E.g. access your videos from a hotel/ host your own website)
I'd like to know if there's any potential danger with running a laptop as a server? I currently have a MacBook Pro 2011 15" running TrueNAS. I was afraid that the battery would expand, so I took it out, however I'm still afraid that the charger would catch fire one day because no laptop charger was supposed to be running 24/24. How do you run your server, and how do you view these issues? Thanks!
On later laptops there usually is a separate key to bring up the boot menu. On ASUS ROG laptops it's pressing ESC while powering on the laptop. On MSI laptops F11 is the key for that.
Hey! I have that first hp mini running lubuntu since her beggining and it works better that any tablet from the same era! For mail and light text editing is awesome. It may be a piece of garbage but it's my lovely piece of garbage! 🤣😅😏😃😁😁 Nice video tough. 😏👌😁
if its really old but low power it might be good enough for a router or firewall function. that's usually completely headless so any cpu can run it.... please use darkmode and darkreader... makes text so much more crips
Please post more of these videos. You inspired me and got me thinking of what I can do at home.
for real dude i have 2 old laptops lying around and now they are not only going to be put to good use, but i now also know the basics of getting around and setting up a linux server :D
edit: tbh i wrote this comment very early on without getting through most of the video; after getting about 2 more minutes into it my mind is currently exploding.
This makes me so happy
I just threw away an old laptop with broken screen and faulty battery after removing the hdd and Ram. Wish I could reset time and then perhaps I would have tried to make it into a home server. Thanks so much for doing this video
@@TechHutdude you are the best
Most youtubers will install vim editor, just to edit their window manager config files (and that's the best they have ever done). Meanwhile, Brandon comes around spins up a server, installs docker, yatch and other service all in one video and never complains about using nano as his text editor. 🙌
Sunk cost fallacy (vim users I mean)
I love nano 🥲
But just think about how quick they can edit their config files!
@@JacobKinsley it takes a weekend to learn?
@@JohnJohn-bv3mo it's a weekend you could be doing literally anything else. It's like saying it takes a weekend to learn knitting. But that doesn't mean everyone who wears clothes needs to learn to knit.
This is the video I've been looking for to turn my perfectly good laptop into a server. Thank you!
One of my younger siblings had a school-issued Android tablet (mid-range arm64 Samsung tablet) , and it ended up sitting in a drawer when no longer needed, I decided to root it, install an Alpine Linux chroot environment so I can use it as a headless Linux server. The battery life can last more than a full day for lightweight server tasks :-D
I've always wondered how people do this! I've heard of using an out-of-date laptop/desktop as a home server plenty of times, but every video on the subject I've found until yours always assumes you already know how to do a bunch of stuff, or know all the Terminal commands, or they just outright skip entire sections. This video has been the _most_ informative I've found on the subject, _and_ you go at a slow enough pace that I feel I could follow along without too much pausing and skipping around to re-play sections. And you explain each and every step in a very methodical, clear and concise way! So _THANK YOU SO MUCH_ for this!!! I have an old desktop just sitting gathering dust that will be _perfect_ for the job! 👍😁
Did you end up setting it up?
@@Anonymous4045 Not at the moment. Turns out I had stripped the old machine of its GPU and the CPU doesn't have a built-in one, so until I can afford to buy a replacement it's going to have to continue gathering dust. Weird how I don't remember removing the GPU, and I have _no_ idea where it went. It's not in any of my other relics lying around the house.
With redhat distros such as fedora, they reccomened using podman instead of docker. Podman is a drag and drop replacement for docker but doesn't use a daemon meaning containers don't need to be ran as root unlike docker.
Good luck making it work with traefik for instance... Red hat guys are champions for rewriting things that work to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place 🙄
Brother ... that video gave me way more than I expected it would.
I just wanted to watch it out of curiosity and ended up actually setting up a whole ass server.
Great stuff man.
Definitely will be coming back to watch more of your stuff.
Dude, I've been looking at so many different home server setups, and I even have my own rpi that I have pihole on and has been operating for years. However, I had so many issues just trying to get it running as a docker container. This actually not only showed me an extremely easy way to make that work through yacht, but has also helped me see I have some laptops that I can use to test things instead of trying to virtualize my desktop! Please keep on teaching, your content is easy to follow and is invaluable!
CasaOS makes it very easy to run Pi-hole and other things in Docker on the Pi.
What a great video. So many TH-camrs will do a tutorial and will be copying and pasting stuff yet never tell you what it does or why you should do it. This one was spot on ! Thanks, this is the way to learn !
Fantastic vid! Funnily enough, just a few days ago I started looking into turning an older macbook into a personql server with fedora, but I never knew it had a browser dashboard like that! Great stuff as always
I love how this is straight to the point. Thank you so much for this kind of videos
That browser dashboard was a huge selling point for me, thank you for the great video as always.
This is really inspiring content, I love how you touched on actually good examples of docker containers. Also I didn't know Fedora Server was so useful, I've dabbed around in Lubuntu on a light weight desktop PC, but seems like I should be using Fedora Server rather, just the cool HTML Dashboard is so much easier to use than trying to remember how to Putty in to my server everytime I wanted to do something. I don't use Linux a lot so have to re-learn it almost everytime.
Yes! This looks so much more approachable than anything I've seen before. Maybe I'll stop putting off doing this as a personal project now
another tip for laptop servers, use TLP or similar to limit the charge of the battery lower than 100%. Batteries don't like being charged all the way up all the time. Also it might be useful to enable full-blown hybernation (watch out for the swapfile/partition!) on critical battery level.
Laptop batteries overcharging hasn’t been a problem in over two decades, you don’t need to do anything.
@Willdrick:
i don't use Hibernation because it uses[/wastes] alot of Ram.
i shut-down my laptop[/desktop-computer] when i'm done using it. (likewise i try to always-keep-an-eye-out on my laptop's battery and i don't let it go critical; at the very most i let it go to "low battery"-status[/alert/alert-mode] before i plug-in the AC-adapter to the laptop's power-port and then [the AC-adapter] to the wall).
@@reoencarcelado5904 How would you "not let it go critical" if it were being used as an unattended server and the power utility had an outage?
@@MNbenMN what I meant by “let it go critical” is where Windows says [/pops-out an alert] “your battery is at critical level” and/or “your battery is at critical level. please plug-it-in to a adapter as-soon-as-possible”.
Also: Considering that laptop-batteries are supposed to be utilized / intended to be utilized / designed to be utilized,
I would have the laptop-battery unplugged/removed , and I would have the laptop connected to a Uninterruptible-Power-Supply if I am going to be using it as a server.
@@reoencarcelado5904 Yeah, i know meant letting the battery drop to the critically low level, but one of the points in the video was that the laptop battery can act as the UPS instead of spending major cash on a UPS. Modern laptop batteries aren't damaged by leaving the laptop plugged in all/most of the time as they often would be back in the day, anyway. I mean if I were building a server completely without limitations, it'd be a full rack setup with redundant hot swappable storage and UPS battery backup, but a laptop that's just sitting around unused can make a fine server for light utilization in a lot of cases.
Man, what a video. Really, this was amazing for someone like me who was no idea how powerful could be self-hosting
You forgot to mention that laptops are much more power efficient than desktops from the same time period.
They're usually just less powerful, I believe that's a myth. I'd love some more info on that though, if there are any experts. Very difficult to research
@@elecbaguette think before speaking
@@elecbaguette they are, because power efficiency is important on laptops, so that the will battery last longer. My laptop uses around 6-10 watts while idling. Desktop PCs have higher idle consumption.
@@BeamDeam but he's not entirely wrong. Often they're just undervolted and underclocked desktop parts. Like you could just do the same to a desktop. I bet you couldn't get it as low wattage from the wall though.
@@MrBearyMcBearface yea. I just wanted to point out that laptops are especially designed to be power efficient, while on a computer it isn't really that important to be that power efficient, because PCs need to be connected to wall plug anyways.
PCs have the advantage, that you can connect way more thing like hard drive to it, which is really useful, when used as a server.
If you install the Container Management tools for Fedora Server, you get Podman. Podman is a drop-in replacement for Docker and is more closely aligned with Kubernetes.
nice vid, running my docker apps on an old hp14 i3-4000m. removed the wifi card and used a mini-pcie to 2 port sata currently for my storage needs.
2 sata from mini pcie is cool
Same trick here ^^ Can you boot with the nvme or like me its locked by hp ?
@@wtfisgoingon535 have not tried it yet, but upon reading some sources, if your bios supports reading from pcie storage you might be good to boot. my hardware reads the 'asmedia' chipset from the mini pcie before boot so it might be possible
Recently started watching your videos. Some of the things that took me over 2 days to solve, you mentioned them in 10 seconds 😅 Wish I had seen these videos earlier. Extremely informative videos for beginners like me. Thank you for the efforts you put in.
I actually daily drive a ThinkPad x240 but I decided to buy a thinkcentre m700 (minipc w i3 6300T+8GB) and I got it for £60
Very happy with my purchase, a decent Lenovo 'think' system completely outdoes the competition in quality Vs price
I clicked on this because I did a similar thing. I have a cheap HP laptop ($100 used) with an AMD Bristol Ridge A12-9800 processor that's running Nextcloud. It works great for that purpose. I have 7 TB of storage on it (2 TB internal, 5 TB external) and have my whole GOG game library and a couple terabytes of video and audio stored on it. Overall for less than $250 total it's an excellent server.
Cockpit, the web interface you were using to manage the server, also has a dashboard for managing containers, cockpit-podman
With all the soft soft tutorials that exist on YT, yours just created that "light bulb illumination" mont in my head. Thanks for taking the
I've got a Lenovo T420 that I got off ebay for £30 due to its screen being broken. It serves as an mpd box and a video streaming server for my tv, among other things. I use a raspberry pi3 as an always-on control box on my home network -- it has a simple python http server that allows me to wake and sleep it and basic mpc control via my phone.
I would love to see more video's on this! Maybe like a little mini series or something. Thanks, I'll be setting this up on my old laptop.
Acabo de terminar de instalarlo paso a paso como lo explicaste! Muchísimas gracias, funciona perfecto! 👌
nice video. I like the use of docker images.
one thing to note, if you are leaving your laptop running 24/7 for a long time, it might be better to remove the battery, and just use the ac charger for power. These batteries some times explode or leak chemicals that can damage your laptop if they are on constant charging mode.
Actually, that depends.
Very old laptops were draining power only through the battery, even on AC, but that is for very very old laptops. You probably won't use such a laptop today for anything.
The thing is - if you can use a laptop without the battery, then there is no need to remove it, because the power line bypasses the battery if charging is not necessary, anyways.
And if you cannot use the laptop if you remove the battery - then you... cannot use the laptop without it, but those are exactly the laptops, that you would want to avoid using.
Overall, while there is certainly some small risk with anything, containing any kind of battery, that risk is not significant for most users / devices.
And from my experience - older devices had better, higher quality batteries. The batteries in modern devices are much less in quality and much more prone to defects.
@@moetocafe That's intersting. Thank you for the information. I didn't know that.
But isn't having them inside the laptop in humid and hot areas can contribute to the battery's safety? or do you still think it's relatively safe inside the laptop case?
I have 3 laptops running inside a cabinet with not ideal heat conditions. So it felt very wrong to me to leave the batteries inside hahaha
@@taher1517 how hot is it? and is there anything flamable around, that could potentially start a fire?
If the cabinet is fireproof - no worries.
Otherwise, there is some risk, although probably not very high.
By the way most batteries don't explode or catch fire out of a sudden. Very few batteries go bad and when they do, the first stage is they start to swеll. So, if you can make regular visual inspection on the batteries, you're good, I guess.
Holy moly, this video is gold
The dashboard is Cockpit. You can install it on almost any distro.
Ex for deb: sudo apt install cockpit
That's it.
One question: when installing Debian server to do the same thing Brandon did here, i choose web server or SSH server?
@@kalilsiqueira8980 If you want to access the server via SSH, select SSH server. You can install the OpenSSH server later, BTW.
Make sure to deselect Desktop Env and Gnome if you do not need a Desktop environment.
13:28 I use the FTP client built into `nemo` because it can edit files directly on the server without needing to save a local copy. It uses the fact that in Linux almost everything has a local filesystem path and edits the files from there. (This avoids the explicit reupload requirement and lets me see the results seconds after hitting Ctrl+S in the software I use to edit the files)
Dude the way you share information is AMAZING! Thank you for sharing.
Only do this if you have full documentation for the Embedded Controller. The EC is erratic, you can never be sure that it won't randomly shut off the wifi-radio, or throttle the CPU down to minimum MHz right when you need full performance.
Holy shit! This was extremely educative. Thanks Brandon!
In my homelab I have 2 atom notebooks installed and they work flawlessly for my current needs. They consume so little power in comparison to the rest of my setup. They arent speed demons. The fastest transfer speed I was able to get was 10 mbps. Im a Debian guy. One of them is working as a Samba NAS where I store the files I need most of the time. The other is working as a torrentbox with mini dlna enabled so I can watch movies and series I downloaded in my 2 tvs or cellphone. I removed the screen of this one because it was broken and that way I can use a paper tray organizer as a rack.
Really very interesting video. Hoping for more follow-up videos on home server topic.
I had a 25+ year old alarm clock that needed replacing. I looked at what was available, and it was all shit compared to a simple outdated laptop. So I took my old MacBook pro from 2009, installed Arch and turned it into the most advanced alarm clock imaginable.
how ?
A thousand thanks for the amazing 3 part Jellyfin guide and this follow-up guide!
That hp mini was my first laptop... I have so many memories of it crashing on windows 7, I'm glad I put Linux on it!
windows 7 always crashed with integrated graphics and an i3 from like 6 years ago
Agreed, the internal battery, whether it is degraded too much or not, you can replace it if it did so, serves a perfect UPS. Most UPS that runs a desktop PC runs 10 minutes max. But this one even runs a few hours since we would mostly turn off the screen.
Very informative , you speak clearly and calm which is easier to understand , you've given me a weekend project thanks...
I managed to get an old Desktop in a tiny tower 300w PSU 1 Core intel but 32GB ram and Its one job is running an Minecraft modded server "all the mods 8" up till now I've been file tranfuring via USB key because I could not get the FTP working. but this video showed me what I was missing, after hours of web searching a random video "recommended" pops up and solves it.. Thank you so much for your effort in making your video as clear as it is. some go sooo fast or skip half the steps. so TYVM
PS: I have now subbed :)
Thank you!!! I've been dying to try doing this for so long!
couldn't agree more. laptops are great linux servers. i'm running a celeron n2815 as low power server, with clear linux. it works really well.
Been a long time user of Ubuntu server as that's just what I started with. But damn Fedora server looks wonderful - I already use Fedora workstation
I'd even take this a step further - I repaired a laptop and had leftover bits (Thinkpad T420) but it had no functional keyboard or screen (just a dock and the base, memory, HDD, etc.). So I set it up as a headless server but it's off most of the time - I wake it with a WoL packet and use it to perform compression and other tasks (it has a twin-core i5), I then suspend it by sending an MQTT packet that triggers a script to suspend the system. This method lets me maintain use of power powered systems most of the time (Pis) and only firing it up when a task is in need of more beef. It also reduces power consumption to only one kidney per month being sold to the power company.
I've installed a truenas server on an old PC at my home, but apart from media consumption there isn't much that I can do with it, and I've been thinking to maybe install an Ubuntu server hoping that would give me much more flexibility, but this looks like a more approachable option. Great video btw.
Truenas scale allows to run docker containers and VMs
True, but it is still in the initial phase of it's release and at the end of the day, its purpose is to serve as a storage server rather than a traditional server from where I can run a website locally or something. As shown in the video, having a fedora server would allow me to do much more but at the same time, I can run plex.
I love it! Fedora Server looks awesome. Using a laptop is a great idea for a home server. Great video. Let's Go Brandon!!!
Awesome! Very concise overview of the general process.
It kinda depends on what means old to you.
If you are having a notebook that's very very old it could be that the batteries are used up and won't hold long enough to survive a possible outage.
Screens for servers are more optional and usually used to act in case the connection to the server is not possible.
It also depends on how hard the tasks are, in the case that you only need some simple services it would be cheaper to go with a raspberry pi with a battery.
But using a notebook as server can reduce waste.
Love this. I have a pretty powerful gaming desktop that just is not getting used anymore. Tempted to set this up and run plex from it. Or my local server for web development
Until recently, I used my old Thinkpad W520 as a virtualization server. It has 16GB ram, i7 2760QM CPU and 2x 500 GB SSDs in RAID1. Beacuse the screen was turned off 99.9% of the time, it used approx. 20 - 25W power.
Why the past tense?
Wow I have not tried Fedora's server version yet but that web interface looks really great. Open source is an amazing thing. Though one thing with this is that in order for this to work the system needs an HTTP server with this complete website. If you are like me and loves to do everything by terminal, this might not be what you need.
Running all HTTP, SSH, FTP and many more services is not my primary choice. The more services you run, the less secure your system is and the more you need to worry about.
I just use Arch Linux for my home server, wich works so well for me because I have many systems with it, such that most things go basically the same on every machine.
It's a DIY system so that anything that breaks sometimes has also to be fixed by you. Running Arch specifically for a server only would probably not be the best choice though.
I would otherwise either choose a very stable distro or possibly BSD system.
Mini PCs and laptops are all I have ever used. No complaints.
Thanks for the content Brandon. And I do think you should rebrand.
Also, more advice you didn't ask for... You should try out a new keyboard layout. Workman, Dvorak, Colemak are great options. I use Colemak DH. There for sure is less stain sticking to the home row much more. Been loving Pop!_OS and Gentoo. All thanks to your help.
thanks for the very well-timed upload!
Great video. Inexpensive laptop, great server setup instructions. Love it! Thanks.
I did that :D
Just that mac is very hot. ~60-70°C
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) x86_64
Host: MacBook5,1 1.0
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 (2) @ 1.995GHz
60-70 for the cpu is pretty good, is it the cpu that gets that hot or the entire thing?
@@Anonymous4045 this temp is on idle, and yes, it's cpu temp ;) that macbook runs only pihole, jellyfin and transmission. :)
Very cool, thank you for this!
Underrated channel. Awesome work Brandon! 👍🏾
The best tutorial I've seen! Thanks a lot!
As always writing a comment to support the channel
"That's a nice watch you got there, want me to turn it into a web server?" 🤣
That sponsored mouse. Over here in Asia it's called the iClever MD172. The mold looks similar to the MX Master.
Really interesting! Hopefully more videos like this one in the future :)
Make sure you setup safe shutdown when the server detects its running on battery power.
Great video! It inspired me to buy an old thinkbook and finally set up the server I've been thinking about.
One small note though - Yacht doesn't seem to play nicely with rootless docker, so people new to servers may want to hold off on making the switch from rootfull to rootless.
doing docker server tutorials is great, i did like the look of tipi server dashboard, only issue with that is the developer has to add the app container support
Personally, I believe Intel NUC clients will make better Linux servers as they are smaller and are easier to run headless compared to a laptop. I remember running Proxmox on an old laptop of mine that constantly created gigantic logs because of the screen. If NUCs aren't your go-to, then a small form factor Optiplex with an i5 will definitely suffice, as they are power efficient too.
I have an Atom based dual core that I picked up at a garage sale. The battery is toast, but I slapped windows 7 Ultimate retail, and it's faster than I imagined it would be. I've ran several flavors of Linux, but none were stable enough, and would randomly overheat and malfunction. It's a VERY clean machine, not a spec of dust on it. I'm preparing to migrate the current install to an SSD. See, I have retail TechNet keys that I purchased back in 2001 that range from server keys, you name it, up until windows 7. Even office, and visio keys, all are unlimited activation, and for each version of Windows from 3.11, 9x series, Me, NT, screw all this typing, I've got a headache. Needless to say, I paid a LOT of money for them, and never have broken their EULA. Paid for years. Then, they dropped TechNet, and we have Tik Tok'ers being testers.
Could not have come at a batter time, I was just thinking of making my old pavillion into a home server.
WOW. Could not believe someone was using old laptop as a server like me. I still use ASUS Eee PC T101MT and the only thing I did is replaced HDD with SSD so it feels more responsive. But it still holds up pretty well for my needs - Home Assistant, transmission, Plex, Pi-hole and Portainer to orchestrate all of the above. All runs smooth as butter on latest Manjaro. Was thinking of buying something more powerful, but don't see anything that I would use to use that compute power.
This was soo cool to watch. Thanks!
Coincidentally, I found your channel from one of your older videos about using a laptop as a server and have been subscribed ever since. I used an old gaming laptop to make my server using UNRAID, and it's been great! All of the perks you mentioned really do matter.
On a side note, I have the Acer version of your HP 10" there, and recently upgraded it to run the barebones version of Linux Mint (XFCE I think?)
Great Tutorial. Very detailed and easy to to follow
A laptop is a great idea, but it needs some sort of battery management. Maybe something like raspberry pi can help. Each lithium ion battery has a fixed number of lifetime hours it can be charged after which battery performance degrades. If the laptop is not being constantly charged, then the laptop could work as a great server.
This is awesome, thanks TechHut.
did this lately with a laptop that has a broken keyboard works quite well
Can you add external hard drives for it?
“2 or 300 dollars in the used market”
I’m using a HP laptop with a 11th gen i5 ( I’ve used it for a year)8GB ram and 256SSD and it cost me $330. And I love it.
I like fedora server but for jellyfin its like 20x faster to install windows server 2022 and just double click install jellyfin and choose folders for your media! Done no fuss no containers no extra stuff to be done it just works with 2 clicks
Excellent video. If the laptops are of significant age, perhaps upgrade the mechanical HDD to an SSD and get better battery life and response times.
Wouldn't old thin clients usually be cheaper and more energy efficient?
That hp mini brings me back it was the first laptop i ever owned and I remember using a crypto miner on it and bricking it lol
Brandon, the only guy I know that installs nano on his systems when it's not there by default...
I have been liking Lunarvim a lot. It throws me through a loop when I hope from system to system and have to fall back to nano. It rides the bench, but it's always there when you need it to come in clutch.
If you are in Fedora why not to use Podman, it works exactly the same like Docker and its a more "Red Hat" native container engine.
Awesome 🎉🎉🎉. Thanks for great sharing!
I had that very same (s)TinkPad! Not bad, not good either, but not bad.
Awesome video going to give this a try with macvlans setup.
Excellent video, Brandon, though it needs updating for Fedora 40, especially the piece on how to close the lid part. Fedora has changed where the logind.conf file is found.
Love Fedora!...have been using it since 2003!...and have never looked back!...I have dabbled in other distros on my old Dell Optiplex?..but my main gear is the Dell XPS 15 inch and my lenovo ThinkPad...one runs Fedora...the other? Pop-OS!....
Great overview. Thanks!
Great video, very informative. Now, Cockpit vs Webmin 😁
Had two thinkpad laptops working as servers. T440 and X240. For both ssd's died after a year of usage. Probably because of heavy load by postgresql. Just sharing my experience.
🔥🔥 This is great - you’re a really good educator!!! How can you access your server from the web? (E.g. access your videos from a hotel/ host your own website)
Wow that does look user friendly
dude this video is awesome!!
I'd like to know if there's any potential danger with running a laptop as a server? I currently have a MacBook Pro 2011 15" running TrueNAS. I was afraid that the battery would expand, so I took it out, however I'm still afraid that the charger would catch fire one day because no laptop charger was supposed to be running 24/24. How do you run your server, and how do you view these issues? Thanks!
On later laptops there usually is a separate key to bring up the boot menu. On ASUS ROG laptops it's pressing ESC while powering on the laptop. On MSI laptops F11 is the key for that.
Hey! I have that first hp mini running lubuntu since her beggining and it works better that any tablet from the same era! For mail and light text editing is awesome. It may be a piece of garbage but it's my lovely piece of garbage! 🤣😅😏😃😁😁
Nice video tough. 😏👌😁
if its really old but low power it might be good enough for a router or firewall function. that's usually completely headless so any cpu can run it.... please use darkmode and darkreader... makes text so much more crips