Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

argentum47

A friend of mine sent it to me and it seems like an interesting option now that hardware pricing has gone insane?

malux85

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!

opengrass

pages.dev, you can't be serious.

sixothree

Say what you want about an old laptop, they sure are a lot faster than a $150/mo azure VM. And to be clear, I mean a _LOT_ faster.

donohoe

Great idea but is this real? Its a page hosted on CLoudFlare's "pages.dev" service. Their method of contact is a Google Form which does have an email address on this domain "CoLaptop [dot] com", but that as a web address does not work. I'm not sure they have their act together.

schlecht_

This seems fishy...

optimus_banana

lots of proxmox clusters in basements run on old laptops. my pile of t480s beats any cloud vm (except when my ISP goes down).

cat-turner

I presently use an extra laptop to compute and run for batch jobs. Easy, fast.

tiku

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

pinkmuffinere

> Your old laptop packs more CPU power, RAM, and storage than their entry-level offerings - and with us, you'll pay just €7/month for professional hosting This is basically the same price as the cheapest options on Hetzner: https://snipboard.io/C9epWo.jpg . Sure my old laptop does have more RAM and a bigger SSD, but I bet it's also less reliable than Hetzner's servers, and is likely to suddenly die some day. So is the tradeoff really worth it? It's hard for me to believe that this is a genuine improvement for most things. The only definite winning case I can think of is if I have a process I want to run, but I don't care if it just suddenly stops working. But when would that ever be the case? and to save a couple dollars per month? Edit: Maybe this is what github is doing :P

lizardking

This is the most vibe-coded looking website possible

danesparza

Does anybody know if they also accept mac minis? Or is the keyboard/display a fundamental requirement to their offering?

corvad

This seems very sketchy. Give us your laptop and we promise we won't keep it... > © 2024 CoLaptop. All rights reserved. Website copyright is out of date by two years... And the website has been online since then. https://crt.sh/?q=colaptop.pages.dev > Thank you for your interest. Please submit the form below and we'll get back to you within 2 working days. > - Team @ CoLaptop.com Also colaptop.com is not even registered anymore. If I had to guess the pages.dev site stayed up but the domain and email are nowhere.

JVIDEL

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

burnt-resistor

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.

ctippett

Collocating a bunch of lithium-ion heat pillows all in one place, what could go wrong!

calvinmorrison

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.

cactusplant7374

7 euro a month and unlimited bandwidth? Seems unlikely.

tracker1

Not sure if this is legit... I could see it working well enough if they require the laptop to support at least say thunderbolt3/usb4 then they can use a single connection interface to a management/dock interface that includes a network connection (1gb/2.5gb) The trouble is a lot of laptops won't power-on with the screen closed and have heavy sleep/suspend behaviors in general. Not to mention general airflow in whatever shelving system is used with the laptops, assuming 2-4 laptops per shelf, per 1u. Not to mention, one would probably want/need some means of ensuring appropriate driver support, or an appropriate Linux or other setup for said hardware. While I can see it working, depending on shipping costs can definitely see some problematic bits.

yabones

The folks that run the colo I keep our servers in would beat me to death with a shoe if I did either of these things: - Mount something in a rack not firmly attached to brackets or a shelf - Install anything with a battery larger than you'd find in a RAID card Not to mention all the other ways this is sub-par in terms of airflow, density, serviceability, out-of-band management, etc. I get the allure of it, but I wouldn't really want my gear anywhere near a bunch of laptops stuck in a cabinet.