I have a piece of hardware which I do not intend to use as a desktop machine ever again.

It’s a cheap and shitty HP laptop from 2019. AMD A6 processor, 8GB of RAM, 1TB spinning hard disk, and a DVD drive that hasn’t worked in over a year.

Since I have hardware from 2007 that is nicer to use than this machine, I was thinking of turning it into a server.

I’d probably either install Proxmox, Alpine, HardenedBSD, or OpenBSD, and spin up a couple of lightweight services. I’d also spin up an HTTP server and move one of my blogs to this machine.

Since I’m currently using a VPS with far, far lower specs than this laptop, it should all be fine. However, I have some questions:

  1. Is this a good idea?
  2. Should I run the server over a VPN, or even go Tor-only, for personal safety reasons?
  3. Since I’ll usually be within walking distance of the server, should I disable SSH altogether?

Also, if anyone here has a crazy setup or some redneck networking, I’d love to hear about it.

Thank you!!!

  • StrayceEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    1. Old laptop as a server is viable and not unheard of. They’re generally low power consumption, and have a built-in KVM and UPS.

    2. Depends on your VPN provider and use case. I’d recommend against Tor-only if you want normal people to ever see anything you blog. You’ll need static IP and/or dynamic DNS if you want it to be reachable with any kind of reliability. Doing it over VPN requires your provider to support port forwarding, which not all do.

    3. Again, depends on your use case. It’s generally a good idea to disable unused services. Worst case it goes down while you’re on holidays or something and you can’t get it back up for a while. Can you live with that? It might also be a good idea to leave SSH on but access restricted to LAN only. That way you don’t have to get up from your main rig to tweak stuff on it, and can follow tutorials in a browser while SSH’ed in to the server.