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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
Suppose l create an email service for myself and my family, can it be done using this machine ?
You can run email server on a raspberry-pi … Had that for years
I don’t know what a raspberry Pi is… That’s an old laptop of very low specs…
Thanks, but l use noai duckduckgo :)))
As do I
but let-me-duck-that-for-you isn’t a thing (yet)Thanks 😊😊.
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.
Not a problem, but an old machine lying idle since years.
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 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.
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.
Isn’t it too little for films ?
It really depends. I’d suspect if it cannot play a video, then it wouldn’t be able to serve it either. People are doing a lot more than this on Raspberry Pis.
pretty much anything can serve files… would probably need to be on a wired lan connection, not slow wifi, and there obviously wouldn’t be any real-time transcoding available as there are no hardware encoders on that chip. it does have decoders to playback mpeg2, wmv9 and h264, though. i’ve used a llano chip for a playback device hooked up to my tv for years–while also running a dietpi in a vm (serves as that tv’s internet source and pihole)
Mine is a laptop of very low specs :
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).
